Some much delayed sketchbook drawings

Happy Thursday everyone! My internet was sabotaged last week (someone opened the box at the front of the house and pulled the cable out, for some bizarre reason) and it unfortunately only came on again right before I was about to go visiting friends for the weekend. I am not normally one for vigilante justice but if anyone else attempts to disconnect me from facebook, blogger, twitter and iplayer by cutting off my digital umbilical chord they WILL experience the discomfort of having my foot firmly embedded in their face. However, I am now back in London after a refreshing few days and ready to share with you the things that have been happening in my sketchbook of late.

First, you may remember my entry for the Nobrow competition and the little orchid flower people in it. Below are the preparatory sketches of the flowers, I did quite a few and then picked the best three. If you compare them to the real flowers, you can see that I had to change very little to create the characters, all they needed were some eyes and human poses; the rest was there already. The flowers are respectively: Man orchid, Pyramidal orchid, Burnt orchid, Frog orchid, Bird's Nest orchid and Fragrant orchid. Apparently these are all native British flowers, but I don't think I have seen any of them before in the flesh. Perhaps when I have the time I will go on a trip to track some down. Any nature lovers know where I might find some?

The burnt orchid man has been coloured in with watercolour, but I didn't like the effect as it disguised a lot of my pencil shading. However, I feel the need for some colour on them and may work with the wee flower people again on a series of drawings or perhaps a short story.

There has been a definite barn owl trend in my sketchbook recently. This is mostly because I read that owls start their courtship displays and begin pairing around this time of year, and the fact that they also have heart-shaped faces makes them a perfect candidate for Valentine's or romantically themed work. I very almost released a Valentine's card, but decided that first I should really do some improvements and build the profile of my etsy shop before hurriedly releasing a lot of very seasonal work that I can't sell during the rest of the year, thus wasting time, money and resources. I will learn from my mistakes, even if it is less fun. And at least I have some very pretty owl pictures to show for it!

And last but not least, some totally random doodles. The hamster one looks totally out of place among all these birds, I guess I fancied drawing something cute and furry. I am really hankering after a pet rodent of some kind, so I suppose the desire manifested itself on paper rather than in my flat. This is probably a good thing as it costs less, smells less and takes up considerably less space and time. However, I still really want a pet. Damn my sensibleness (and yes, that is a word because the built-in spell checker didn't underline it in red. Hah!)

Oh and I almost forgot, I've been adding my portfolio and lot of new photos to my flickr page this week, so do pop along and have a look-see. See you at the next update this weekend. Keep well until then, and thanks for reading this (absurdly long) post!