Prelim sketch for Vietnamese New Year 2020

A preliminary sketch for what will hopefully become “Năm 2020 chuột theo Đông hồ”, or “Year 2020 of the Rat after [the style of] Đông hồ.” Extremely intense colored pencils and ink (gray and then black) on Pentalic traveler sketch dot grid paper.

(Vietnamese New Year celebrations, or Tết, don’t officially end until tomorrow, and even so many still carry on with the festivities through the end of this week.)

This is a rat with her pups. Or: chuột kèm con, rat with children. Chuột actually covers both mice and rats, and kèm can also mean to guard over in addition to accompanying.

Very humble but feels good to have done. This is effectively a very small thumbnail, about 2 inches square. I’m going to be working a little bit bigger, I think, on tan toned sketch paper. If I knew how to make this a proper woodblock-printed piece I would.

A Good Blue Jay

Blue jay perching in cold weather. Colored pencils (Polychromos, Luminance) on Strathmore 400 sketch.

The Jay only uses two pencils: dark indigo and white. I intended this to be only a value study of the bird alone, but I needed a bit of background to ground them, so I added that in color. It all ties in so nicely.

Look at that good belly floof!

Sketching in Bujo (Bullet Journal)

Sketching in my bullet journal with watercolor brush pens (these are non-archival ink dyes rather than pigmented archival watercolor markers).

These are very rough.

An example:

Five vultures on a branch.

Text: «”Gái Già” old ladies»

This is something of a multilingual pun. Some English dialects use “old bird” as slang for “old woman”, which corresponds to the Vietnamese wordplay “gái già” (old women is a rough translation that can’t capture the alliteration and tone play). And vultures sometimes remind me of older women in shawls chatting and gossiping, possibly while knitting in the park.

I will be doing, as illness allows, more than just art of animals, birds, and flowers; those are more or less a comfort zone for me, and I plan on doing more adiposes, buildings, and landscapes.