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Digital watercolor. Love the Great Lakes and Great Lakes freighters. Ref: VIc Pagel 1959 Jones Island, Milwaukee

Upstairs Kitty

Strange creatures of their respective planets meet on a new fruitful planet to create a peaceful community.

"I really don't like to gripe, But there's a monster in pink stripes, And he's lifting our house up to the sky. It's like what Mama always said, That we would all reach such great heights, But I suspect that's not quite what she meant."

"When this guy was chosen as a host he felt like such a winner. But what he didn't know is these things would eat him up for dinner."

Fun dino on a bike. Go get em Rex.

Practice practice practice

The clutter on my drawing table.. I tend to use pencils the most, with pens a close second and sometimes brushes. This is the neat look---when everything is put away in its box. More often than not, they are a bit more scattered on the surface. Micron pen drawing.

Casey the Puppet. This painting captures the essence of a puppet lots of older Canadians will remember. A strange genderless creature with a dog puppet companion. A puppet with an outspoken personality that I remember as a kid wondering how it got away with saying what it did. The painting has a Canadian stamp to commemorate the puppet's roots.

I tend to use line art a lot and did this in Procreate to practice breaking free. It was gonna be a T-Rex per my son’s request but it evolved into a squirrel-like creature. Still made the T-Rex too later.

"I take a step outside and I breathe the air, and I slam the door, and I'm on my way. I won't lay no blame, I won't call you names. 'Cause I've made my break and I won't look back; I've turned my back on those endless games." Although I'm a bit late, May 1st was Decision Day (congrats to everyone in the class of 2021!), and I'm proud to say I'll be a Blue Demon this fall (a very sciencey one at that).

"Chameleon, you're free again, my child." I think using song lyrics may be slightly cheating...but it is quoted text... I feel like I haven't made a 'purposeful' piece in a bit, so this drawing felt even better to make. There have been multiple ups and downs lately. Frustration, self-hate, and anxiety can take many forms, and eventually I lose sight of what they started as. I heard this song for the first time a few months ago and it's really been stuck in my head recently for various reasons. I don't know, sometimes music provides an escape that even art can't.

My last finished painting of 2020. A morning in the woodlands of Ystradfawr Nature Reserve near my home. This is the final result of one of my colour sketches - Spring on the Line. It sold to lady in a care home who's lost her mobility. I hope it gives her a bit of the great outdoors when she's sitting in her room.

Watercolor This was drastically different from my usual stuff and lots of fun. I’m thinking of painting a few more cards to match in the same style but featuring different scenes. We shall see what pops out of my brush

Ember and her tiny friend are on a mission to find a cure for a curse

A drawing that turned out better than I expected. Two hour seated pose. Pencil, Charcoal Pencil, Pastel Pencils on some weird pad of paper I found in my closet.

Transmundane Tuesday : a beetle, wearing a sweater, dancing. A prompt from Carson Ellis.

Zoomed in shot of "Pattern Interrupt". 2020. Size: 32" x 40" / Micron pens on archival museum board. This piece was all drawn freehand - no rulers or measuring tools were used to create this artwork.

I'm doing a series of illustrations (one a week) combining my love of designer chairs and cats. This weeks chair is the famous Panton. The cat is called Anton ::)

Digital drawing of a Golden eagle portrit with tail feathers

Artwork on "the other side" - playing with the bleed-through from the watercolor and intuitiviely allowing the shapes to arise. Created using watercolor, coffee, ink, graphic pens and unipen

#Swollen is the word for #inktober #day17. Because the city I live in is swollen from cars, buildings, humans, rats, pigeons, dirt and trash I considered the word to be proper for the problem of urbanization. Even if it's a natural transformation, it comes with a lot of issues. I see it as a concrete and steel monster eating the nature that stands in its way. © Maria!Bălan, 2018

I had a wonderful time creating this commision for a Kansas City Personalities wall mural installed in a downtown KC apartment building. The wall measures roughly 12’ x 20’. These were all hand drawn graphite and charcoal drawings that I scanned into my mac and delivered digitally. The file was then enlarged and applied to the wall surface.

This is part of an ongoing series. This time we pass through The Great Exhibition and meet the different characters there to view art or just to socialise and hang out.

My favorite way to eliminate the often paralyzing fear of "ruining" "good" paper is to just paint on any and all junk mail that comes into my house. Higher end catalogs are great for this, they don't use slick, thin paper (and even that gets used in collage or as a desk cover for other projects) and they're already bound for you. Just add marks! Carry it with you. Scan the pages you like. Cut it up later for making other art. It's "just" junk mail, so there is literally no pressure. I have HUNDREDS of these type of things and I run across them all the time, forgotten, in some old backpack or purse or drawer and it's a treasure to look through them again, and add new marks, paints and words.

Wear a mask. Stay inside!

Here's the sketch for my Draw Your Fear submission. Drawn with a Pilot Custom Urushi fountain pen using deAtramentis Document Ink Black. Check out https://www.doodleaddicts.com/drawing-challenges/draw-your-fear/ tomorrow to see it in full color!

If it wasn't enough that Ernest Shacletons ship Endurance was crushed by the ice in Antarctika’s, some kind of weird Space Weather phenomenon appeared into the sky(drawing tip:if your drawing looks flat and dull , try to transforming it something different ).

Here is a sneak peaks of my submission to the Home Sweet Home Challenge. I loved this challenge because it forced me to do something I never would have, which gave me happy surprises as I worked through it.

Did you ever have a page in your sketchbook that was so bad and so embarrassing that you tore it out and chucked it? This was one of those pages that made me cringed every time I came to it. So today I said to myself, "ENOUGH!" and ripped it out of my moleskine. But something wouldn't let me throw it in the can. Now, I'm not one of those artists that can't bring himself to throw away any of his stuff because each and every piece, good or bad holds some kind of sentimentality or sense of importance. This particular page was a result of a crappy angst filled day and stuff poured out of me. For some reason, it felt like I was throwing away some piece of my soul. There were parts that were overworked and others that were painfully too personal. So I decided to cut it up and put it back together in no particular order, however it seemed best. As I was pasting the pieces down it occurred to me that this had a comic book feel so I scanned the final and added the black borders in photoshop which I really dug. I like that it is cryptic and jumbled up like my brain can so often be. This reminded me of the awesome @johnhendrix who said something in his book, Drawing Is Magic that stuck with me. He said, "Don't worry about doing anything wrong. If you're hoping your sketchbook turns into a glossy display of only your best drawings, you are not carrying a sketchbook, you are carrying a portfolio." In other words, explore, take chances, loosen up and have fun. Try your best to go at it like an uninhibited child. In so doing, you will stretch as an artist by avoiding repetition and predictability. We all know how to do what we already know. To sum up, I created a bad page, and whether or not I was able to fix it, it expanded me. So, follow your pencil, pen, or whatever and let them take you to places you never imagined when you started. Then, maybe you will end up staring happily at the final and with childlike wonder, say, "man, where did that come from?"