Storytelling Time: It's A Ducks' World.

This time, lovely readers, a small story from my neighborhood. I've mentioned it to several friends on BC and on Twitter. Short story: our neighborhood is invaded by...ducks.

Not kidding here.

When we first moved to where we live now, there was a lot of water and open space. And ducks. Oh. and frogs too, but they disappeared after a year. Man. They made a lot of noise. We still have quite a lot of open space and water, but slowly they are filling it all up with building and I've a feeling that it only be a matter of time before the ducks will move to a different location.Quite a shame. Okay, back to the ducks.

We have the normal ducks, a couple of swans and the standard white geese. Nothing really out of the oridinary. The only thing that I noticed was that there were a lot of them and they slowly started to invade the neighborhood. I often have see them waddle around or sitting in our front yard, just chilling. They are pretty used to people and it's quite interesting to stare out of the window and stare straight into the eyes of a duck...

So I got slowly used to having the ducks all over the place, when my eyes suddenly spotted a few different ones. Let me introduce you to...The Afro Ducks.

The fur is for real. I seriously think they are up to something. At first I thought they had like baby duck fur and they would lose it eventually. Nope, they still have it and there are three of them. Just three. They are always together and they stare at you. Especially the black one, he starts mumbling stuff when you pass him by.

The other one that caught my eye is a giant goose, I call him or her the King Goose. Obviously. if it's a girl it would a Queen, but no way that I'm going to find out if it's a he or a she. There are two of them and the one you see on the picture, well that's the smaller one. Yes my friends, there is a bigger one.

 

He usually stands like that amongst the other ducks. This one time a neighbor was throwing around bread and every duck waddled and jumped into the water to get to the bread. Well not this one, he used the bridge to waddle to the bread. Lazy.

Then we have Ducky. This is my sister's favorite. It is the white one on the picture below. I have to say that this little duck is quite strange. He is kinda skinny and has the ability to just pop up out of nowhere. He's also a bit of a loner. Every now and then, he has his posse around him though.

They seriously posed for me or they were waiting for me to throw them some bread. Of course it's the posing, because you can tell by the looks of them that they love to be in the picture...hehe.

Holland is a small country...so anything is pretty exciting ;). But really, these ducks are quite interesting. Then again I can see a weird story in almost everything hah! I've a feeling that you will be seeing some duck sketches from me in the near future.

Random illustrations for you guys! I was trying to get a bit more abstract feeling to the leaves and flowers. More of an impression that they are there without extra details. Hope you like it!

I wish my hair would stay that fashionably big. Instead it goes *POOF* like a poodle, well usually it goes like this haha.

Till next time everyone.

PC fights, flying papers & lost pencils

So yeah, the last few weeks...

Where did I put it?!

Yes this sentence seemed to be the slogan of the last few weeks. I had major problems with my laptop and besides that....I also had some trouble with my drawing material...more specific, my pencils. I seemed to misplace each and everyone of them! I think I ran around the house dozens of times, because once again, I misplaced stuff. You might start to wonder, why I didn't grab another one...well the thing is that I have a few favorite pencils and I have a pencil case where I keep them, so if I lose the pencil case...I lose them all =_=''...

There are a few pencils that simply work great every time you use them or at least in my mind my drawings come out more fluently (oh the limits I place upon myself....). I have several made of Chinese newspaper, no specific brand and these work simply perfect. I think everyone has their own favorite brand/type off pencils. But I misplaced mine...aah the horror! I turned everything upside down. I ran up and down the stairs, I even searched in the garden, even though I knew for sure that I didn't went there, but I just had too look and to stripe 'the garden' from my mental 'where to look' list. It was a typical ‘tear the place apart’ scene, flying papers, feathers, pillows, you know the works. And then finally, I find it in a place that simply placed question marks above my head. I mean, how can it end up between the couch? I mean I work in my room at my desk or at the diner table...not the couch! Honestly, how does it come that when you lose something you find it in the strangest of places?! You have no memory of it whatsoever…it really feels like I have a blank spot in my mind…if this is the case then my mind is full of gapes…because I tend to misplace quite a lot these days ^_^’.

But back to my favorite brand. That is Sakura. I have the Pigma Sensei set for drawing Manga.

you see...my enemy...my laptop...

I love these!!! They are really great! Slide easily over the paper and doesn’t stop when you use it over pencil lines and more importantly it doesn’t fade when you erase the pencil lines (do you guys hear a commercial tune?). I also have two Pigma Micron fine liners, size 02 & 08. Also very good and great for details. These are the pens/fine liners I use at the moment. What are the brands you guys use?

But about drawing I have made several sketches again as you can see. I’m really in a sketching phase right now, because I need to divide my time between lots of things now, so I don’t have a lot of time to work it all out. But I do need to get all these images out of my head haha and I will work them out eventually though, don’t worry! So my drawings will consist mostly of pencils or fine liners, perhaps a touch of color here and there as reference.
You know what's fun to draw? Chibi Geisha's. Have a look at a few sketches below, they are so cute ^_^!

I'm thinking of giving her an umbrella...

I love cherry blossoms. The soft pink/white colors of the petals are beautiful!

I like the first one ^_^

I think, I will turn these geisha's into cards. They would look great for invitations if you have a themed (birthday) party!

Well that's it for now. Stay tuned for more updates!

Talk to you guys later!

One Wedding card...coming up!

Hey guys!

Aarghh...I thought that I already posted this blog...turns out that something went horrible, horrible wrong...I forgot to plug in my adapter for my laptop hehe....sooo suddenly all I saw was darkness and I could almost hear a sad tune on the background....byebyee nicely made blog...

@ Hevn: very sorry! The idea was to upload this new blog when I replied all comments, soo then you would have seen the final result. Haha I bet my comment didn't make much sense did it? *Hmm where's TJ's blog then? I was supposed to see the final result -_-'...* To all other readers, who don't know her blog...please check it out! She writes really cool!

How are you all doing? Sorry it has been a while since my last post…had big fights with my PC and my thesis took up a lot of time. And usually at the end of the day I was too exhausted to do anything else. Very annoying and the thing is that these fights or sudden workloads usually happen when I want to do a lot of other things...fun things....Don’t you guys hate it when that happens? Anyway, everything seems to be fine now (little bro fixed it ^_^) and I placed on my wishing list to buy a new PC/laptop. Yeah…that can take a while though...

So what’s new? Well, besides troubles with my PC (I’m giving it a stern look right now, can’t do anything more though…what if it gets offended and stops working again!?) I finished my card!! Woohoo! It’s finished and given away!! Yes the wedding was last Friday and I made a small picture show for you guys so you can see how it eventually turned out. But first a bit about the wedding day itself. It really was a beautiful, they both looked very handsome in their suits and I have to say...it was like a normal wedding, only instead of a bride and a groom, you had two grooms hehe. And it was a day filled with happiness and love from everyone who came. I was really happy for them! And funny thing! I already saw the suit of one groom, because I met them a week before the wedding and they just bought his suit. It was dark grey, so I decided to give him in the illustration a dark grey suit, it only make sense right?! Well, I didn't know the color of the other suit and I couldn't come up with a reason why I it would be nessecary for me to know the color of his suit...I would only make him suspicios. So to avoid all of that, I gave him a dark blue suit. And you know what! He wore a dark blue suit and his hair in the same way I drew him!! I felt so in touch with my psychic abilities haha ;) *floats on a cloud*

But lets have a look at the pictures! First I made the card with a wedding cake, two glasses champagne and a champagne bottle. But still I didn’t get the right vibe from the drawing. Wanna see?

Well, yeah, not sure if you can see what I mean, but something wasn't right. I made several sketches and in the end I decided to leave the cake out of the drawing. I think it was just a bit too much. So I was left with the couple, champagne glasses and a champagne bottle and finally I was happy with the final sketch, so I drew the lines with a waterproof marker and gave the first watercolor wash.
Then I gave the drawing a second wash. Just to intensify the colors a bit. You know I always have the idea that a drawing looks childish or...I don't know...not quite right when I color them. Perhaps it's because I like rough sketching more than colored pieces, at least not colored by myself...there are many other illustartors/artists who are magicians with coloring. But okay, I was quite happy with the watercolor, I just wanted to give a touch of color. When it all dried up, I gave it a touch of gold here and there and then I assembeld the card. See the final result *drums*....

Tadaaaa! Well? What do you think? I have these really cool gellyroll pens 'Gold Shadow' from Sakura. I used this to give it a subtle touch. The inside of the card I wrote an inscription for them and not a whole story with how happy I was for them...I wrote that in a seperate letter hehe. But the inside looked like this:

The two rings you see as a watermark is from the back. There I drew two intertwining rings and colored it in with a gellyroll pen. These pens ink very fluent and the end result was pretty cool! Around the rings I wrote their names and the date of their wedding. The back looked like this:
















Soo do you like it so far? here you can see the card in its full glory.....


After this I wrote a separate letter, inserted some goodies for them and placed it all in a fancy envelope and tied a ribbon around it...and yeah I forgot to make a picture of the final FINAL result....please forgive me ^_^"....

I hope you like it. I will tell you about my other projects in my next blog, which will be posted tomorrow, I hope...

Write you later!