Masha du Toit

There’s something satisfying in drawing a teapot 🙂  Another illustration for my book: done.

Another drawing of characters from my book: Miss Mouse against a backdrop of burnt protea bushes.   Miss Mouse was not planned.  She just appeared and took over in her gentle but insistent way.

There are worse things than spending a rainy winters morning drawing while listening to an audiobook.  I had fun with this drawing too, although it was more difficult choosing the colours for this witch. She is more civilized than Antjie Donder, and needed colder colours.

I cant wait to see these drawings printed.  I’m planning to sell digital prints of both the black and white and colour versions at the Grahamstown exhibition.  One more week before we leave so I’ll have to get moving if I want to get these printed in time!

Here are some details.  The crows were supposed to be the indigenous “Wit Bors Kraai”  we get here in South Africa. But apart from not having white breasts, these birds are not nearly bulky enough to be the indigenous kind.   I think these crows come from Europe, like their mistress.

I did manage to work in some roses into the drawing.  The drawing is based on a story called “Thorn Rose”, so the roses are quite important.  Roses and thorns are important, I should say!

I finally got round to adding colour to my Antjie Donder drawing.  I wanted to use a method similar to a colour lino-cut print; layers of colour overlapping, with the gaps in one colour revealing the colour beneath.

I put a “multiply” blending mode on the linework layer to knock out the white areas but keep the black line.  Then  I created 10 solid colour layers under it, and used layer masks to hide each layer.  Then, I painted with white and black on the layer masks until the whole image was filled with colour.  Some of the top layers are partly translucent.  I discovered a useful keyboard short-cut: “X” while using the brush swops foreground and background colours.  This is great when working on the layer masks because it means you can switch between black and white while you paint.

Here is the (possibly) final coloured version:

Some details:

More

Oof.  I’ve finished my Antjie Donder drawing.  It’s too large to fit onto my scanner, so I had to stitch it together in Photoshop.  I love detail when drawing, but fiddling with digital details just gives me the horries.

I got some suggestions for what to put into Antjie’s pocket in my last post.  It turns out that she keeps a candle, some pencils, and what is probably a little bottle of Kloktoring in her pocket.

This drawing has been in my head for years.  The imagined drawing generated a story, a doll and finally, the drawing itself.