Purple Pony Art Blog

So, back in September I was fortunate enough to attend a local Parrot Palooza as a vendor. It was a wild time and I even met local celebirdies, such as Max the Moluccan.

Originally the show was supposed to be in a community hall, but they switched it to the new VCA vet hospital down the road from us. Somehow I didn't factor in that I would be in a room of screaming parrots for seven hours. It was like "SCREAM SCREAM SCREAM SIREN SCREAM I love you SCREAM SCREAM SCREAM BARK BARK hello", but once people arrived, talking balanced out the noise. All the parrots there were club member parrots--no outside birds allowed. There were so many! Cockatiels, conures of all kinds, cockatoos, one blue and gold macaw, an African grey, a few caiques, several different types of Amazons, a parrotlet, two Quakers, and a grey parrot who someone told me the name of, but that I didn't recognize. I'm so happy with how the portraits of Birdzilla and Yoshi turned out.

I can use a small amount of my work week for professional development, so instead of listening to webinars, I decided to work on Peaches this past week. Digital art is totally work related. The graphic designers had to learn a package called Rebelle for some technical illustrations, so I'm just keeping up with the Joneses. The trouble is that it's been so long since I used Clip Studio Paint that I had to relearn some of the basic stuff.

So, this hot mess is Peaches is the latest progress picture and I'm thinking vertical is going to work better than horizontal. I don't want the name obscured too much and it will look better with the vertical orientation of the ladder and Peaches.

Happy June!

So, after this post, I'll be caught up on Peaches! I was able to work some more this week and work in a peach and try to decide how big all the elements are going to be.

One of the great things about Clip Studio Paint is that the updates are f-r-e-e! There was an update last week and it was a nice surprise.

Here's my original digital picture of Peaches using a reference photo. I blocked in the colours and was quite pleased with how easy it was to draw lines.

I may make a different drawing of Peaches though. The thing about digital drawing is that I don't recognize it as my style or my hand making the marks, which probably accounts for some of the dissonance between screen and chair.

One of the reasons I wanted to do an art trade with my friend was that I'm so lousy at digital art. I haven't touched Clip Studio Paint since an earlier post with a budgie. I'm old enough where I should have mad skills, but I don't. Putting together a digital drawing isn't very intuitive to me and I struggle with making it "look right" compared to traditional artwork. Practice makes perfect right? I started the drawing in Clip Studio Paint, but just wasn't feeling "it". The problem turned out to be that while I had some great reference photos of Peaches, I just didn't have a sketch to make me excited about it. That turned out to be pretty important because my digital painting skills suck so much. Having that vision of the end picture really helps :-D

I decided to go with a fruit label type design that will have peaches and Peaches. Click for much larger.

I'm teaching myself a new (to me) piece of software called Clip Studio Paint. For years I have seen people rave about this very affordable program and I'm joining that crowd. It's so easy to get up and running and make a decent looking picture. Here's my first real picture that I did in an afternoon. It's by no means a masterpiece, but it was enough to get up to speed on all the basic features and get a little confidence.

Today was World Cardmaking Day and I made a stack of thank you cards. These are always handy to have!

I sell mostly cards at Christmas craft sales (and hardly any Christmas cards, in case you were wondering!). Over the summer I brainstormed making Christmas ornaments. Actually, I brainstorm about this every year, but usually at Christmas time, and then I forget by next Christmas :-D

In August I sat down and prototyped a cardinal Christmas ornament. It required a lot of steps, but I made 50 of them to give out to co-workers, where they were warmly received. A lot of us take for granted the amount of thought and design that goes into product development. The end result looks effortless, but I can sure you the road to that effortless look is a lot of wadded up paper balls, torn in half prototypes and sighs. However, making the cardinal ornament led the way to a lot of success for the chickadee ornament. I made 12, sold 9, kept one for myself and two as gifts. Here's what they look like:

Each one is handmade, although I had a little technological help! Here's a rundown:

• I drew and coloured the chickadee, then scanned and reduced it on the computer


• I designed a blue circle fill in CorelDraw and the greeting on the back


• I die cut the circles and affixed them together


• Then I die cut and hand brushed the pine branches with embossing paste, white paint and a glitter brush. I really need to figure out how to make this step better!


• I printed out the cardinals on a laser printer and cut one out by hand. For the cardinals, I printed them on cardstock and made a mask so that my Pazzles could do the job - but the glossy paper would not have worked well in the Pazzles


• I ended up making the ribbons by hand because I could not find small ribbons the right size


• Then I assembled the whole deal and strung it on a gold thread

Whew! I plan on making more next year, along with the cardinals and maybe a third winter bird - we'll see how productive I am!

I made a little Facebook page for my bird! It updates on Sundays and Wednesdays. As you can imagine, I have a lot of photos of the chaos cockatiel :-) Click the picture to visit and like.

I love being able to spend more time on my photos with Lightroom - in 2012 that would not have been a reality at all. I just chose to edit the best while now I can edit hundreds at once :-)

One of the things that surprised me about California was how many pigeons there were - everywhere! More pigeons than gulls. They were often too fast to get a good picture.

Here's an old drawing from 2011 from a series that was part of a homework assigned and I forgot to scan and upload. We had to make 100 3 minute sketches and take nine or ten best/favourites to further develop into line drawings with Sharpie markers.

The Two Muffins by calzephyr on DeviantArt