My star mandalas are sometimes called “sunfaces”. I love drawing and painting them in watercolor. Each one is hand drawn without a computer. Some people regard the mandala as an art form that grows from the center out. I started drawing this series around 2015. Those times were super hard and drawing got me through that very rough period. I’m working on a publication to put the sunfaces together so people can read them as one idea.
Here are cards I’ve been designing with original pen and ink drawings colored in watercolor
Some are funny and some are in Spanish.
There will be more but I wanted to post these as they were so much fun to do. All my cards and paintings are available at Art Connection Art Gallery in Ajijic . The cards are also available at my
Red Bubble site.
We’ve all seen this. It’s not really a fight but more of a stand-off. The big guy walks around with a shadow of his former self on his back. See his alter ego white cat with the green eyes and reverse calico markings on his back. Just in case you didn’t guess, he’s just a gentle soul because he also has a butterfly on his head. Fun. This one will definitely appear in my small picture book series. Number 1 on friendship is complete, number 2 in process…it’s about lunch. what? yup. Just fun stuff.
These two fantasy fish are pen and ink line art drawings done the old fashioned way .,..with a crowquill pen and Higgins black drawing ink. Of course, they are mirrored images of themselves in photoshop.
I digitally colored them today as the original felt a little plain in just black and white. This is an untraditional color palette for fish in the sea but I think it’s exciting. Well, why not have some fun. The picture it will be next to is of a soft grey/blue/turquoise palette and they hopefully will work together well. Maybe my fish are a little on the whacky side? They would like that.
I originally just wanted to add some bubbles as they are supposed to be saying HI to each other and then look what happened. I think the eyeballs are better placed in the original, so I may go back and change it again. I got carried away coloring. I thought they needed eyebrows too. Ha. Here’s the original black and white. This is a page from my little picture book BFF Best Friends Forever, which I have been working on for a few weeks.
This lovely kitty is very confident in herself. She is sporting huge tattoos of various orchids all over her body. In a more real world, the tattoos would be smaller and molded to her body shape. I have tattoo brushes and I want to do another version with them and it would be a fun piece to experiment with them. Since I have drawn in scratchboard for 30 years, I think the style would be like a walk down memory lane for me.
She’s different on all levels too because she is basically a blue girl. I did some remodeling on the sketch by fine tuning the edges. Since it was drawn as a pen and ink and then scanned, it needed to have the background removed so it could be a png file so it could be used printed over many different colors. I took advantage of this necessity to add a few more details since I was at it. I think it would be adorable on childrens’ clothing.
The font is a brush font and I thought it would look like a fun companion to the drawing. I did another illustration like this kitty a while ago and I want to redo it with scratchboard/tattoo brushes. I need to find her on my hard drive. Locating art on the hard drive is the hardest thing for me. I have promised to reform my ways to a better filing system. When I switched from a mac to pc, that’s when all the trouble began as that’s when I abandoned using bridge. onward. Here’s the little blue cat on teepublic.
Painting Mexico 
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