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Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! I hope that wherever you may be you have plenty to be thankful for.

Congratulations to Priscilla Alpaugh, for winning a signed copy of The Story I’ll Tell. Thanks to everyone who entered the drawing.

Happy Illustration Friday!

Please enjoy the wonderful illustration above by Tamara Domuzin, our Pick of the Week for last week’s topic of ANIMAL. Thanks to everyone who participated with drawings, paintings, sculptures, and more. We love seeing it all!

You can see a gallery of ALL the entries here.

And of course, you can now participate in this week’s topic:

CITY

Here’s how:

Step 1: Illustrate your interpretation of the current week’s topic (always viewable on the homepage).

Step 2: Post your image onto your blog / flickr / facebook, etc.

Step 3: Come back to Illustration Friday and submit your illustration (see big “Submit your illustration” button on the homepage).

Step 4: Your illustration will then be added to the public Gallery where it will be viewable along with everyone else’s from the IF community!

Also be sure to follow us on Facebook and Twitter and subscribe to our weekly email newsletter to keep up with our exciting community updates!

HAPPY ILLUSTRATING!

Hello, dear readers! Today I have a mishmash of a post to share with you, so I hope you’ll bear with me. (Ha.)

I have been on a bit of a quest lately to loosen up my technique. If you also struggle with this, know that you are not alone. It takes an enormous amount of practice to get the “quick and effortless” look instead of the “catastrophic disaster” look, so we watercolorists often get very tight and controlled in order to compensate. Of course, there are many different ways to work with watercolor and some artists do the “controlled” thing extremely well, but if you’re looking to loosen up, here are a few techniques I’ve stolen from other artists over the years that I’ve found helpful:

• Using brushes that are much larger than I find comfortable
• Minimizing the number of washes. The entire background of this image was one big, wet wash, not twenty-seven separate washes detailing every single leaf and bush
• Using a lot more water and paint than seems reasonable; enough that I often end up having rivulets of liquid draining off the paper
• Getting to know the paint. Many colors lighten in value or lose saturation when they dry, so it needs to be even darker than you think when you paint it on
• Waiting for a wet-on-wet wash to completely dry before moving on to add details
• Varying textures. I used some dry brush technique in the trees to simulate pine needles
• Painting lots of really bad paintings that will never, ever see the light of day. I plan to burn these so that no one can accidentally find them when I die
• Working as fast as I possibly can
• Occasionally closing my eyes. (Just kidding! Or not…?)

I hope those help someone out there just as they helped me!

In other news, copies of The Story I’ll Tell are here, so I can also do that second giveaway that I promised you several weeks ago.

The post office didn't do the best job ever on this one

Fortunately, the books are unscathed!

Leave a comment below if you’d like a chance to win a signed book! I’ll announce the winner next Wednesday.

In the late eighteenth century, against a troubled background of violent change on the continent and rising challenges to the Establishment at home, botanists were discovering strange creatures that defied the categories of ‘animal, vegetable, and mineral’.

The post Animal, vegetable or mineral? [quiz] appeared first on OUPblog.

This crazy cute little guy was submitted by Michael Robertson for the Illustration Friday topic PET.

To all the mothers out there of every species, have a wonderful day!

The post Happy Mother’s Day! appeared first on .

Este bichito nació de un ejercicio que estoy haciendo. Dibujé todas la letras del alfabeto y a partir de sus formas básicas ilustré personajes. Este es el primero y está basado en la letra A. Eventualmente tendré una familia completa de bichitos raros.

This creature was born from an exercise that I´m doing. I drew all the letters in the alphabet and from their basic forms illustrated characters. This one is the first and it´s based on the letter A. Eventually I´ll have a complete family of weird creatures.

This is a drawing for a project I´ve been working on.

Este es un dibujo para un proyecto en el que he estado trabajando.