The lovely Harpercollins publishers asked me to provide some new and updated beehive illustrations for their "Types of Hive" page in the Collin's Beekeeper's Bible.
I used the original illustrations from the book as reference for the first four hives, which were to remain the same, and added two new types, which replaced the out-of-date designs. Only two needed updating but to keep the page consistent, all six needed to be redone. It was a pleasure! I loved painting the woodgrain effect.
Happy "pride" month!
At the sudden loss of an extremely beloved kitty companion, I found myself with the urge to draw him in his favourite cosy, peaceful sleeping positions. He was a beautiful brown tabby, but for variety when it came to painting I included orange and grey tabby colours.
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the first sketches of kitties in cosy slumber
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I recently came across scans of some unfinished cat sketches on my hard-drive from a sketchbook dated 2013(!) I still liked them and decided they ought to be finished. I first needed to excavate the sketchbook from the bottom of a storage cupboard in my parents' house, but luckily the sketches were found.
(insert photo of sketchbook)
On the same page was a finished brown tabby, and the two sketches looked like they needed to match (although it wasn't a difficult decision due to my biased love of brown tabbies). After painting, I rescanned all three together to bring them up to the same scan quality (the scans from 2013 look poor now in comparison to my current scans - likely a mixture of the scanner technology improving over the years, and possibly some slightly improved editing skills! (hopefully).
I still like the paintings from 2013, and along with some new cat illustrations would love to make some prints and stickers with them.
Here is a collection of most of them, including two of the new tabbies:
