Tag: chickens

NTMC book update – Images & cover

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Big update today, as I’ve now got the first 50 images edited and laid out. Notwithstanding some major issues with scanning, photographing and editing some quite nuanced watercolour work, I feel like I’m finally getting somewhere!

What’s in a name?

One major update however has been the front cover – as I’ve decided not to name the book after the instagram account (@nevertoomanychickens) but rather after the purpose of the project – To draw the chickens of instagram.

And so, I give you…

Chickens of Instagram (volume 1)

I ended up in a bit of quantum entanglement on this one.. will people know it’s the instagram project if I change it? But will it make any sense as a title? (especially as I’ve had notebooks, stickers and all sorts on etsy for ages using the same title, and with different fonts..)

But I finally settled because well, it does what it says on the tin. And with the “volumes” approach – it will keep me going with the project which was to keep drawing.. the chickens of Instagram.

VOTING

So the next question, obviously, is who is going to be on the cover?!!!

To decide this, I am open to comments, messages and voting on the channel of your choice – you can:

• Comment on instagram

• DM on instagram

• Comment on here

• Send me any other kind of electronic communication of your choice.

I’ll publish the result as the front cover.. when it’s gone to print! 😅

NTMC – Book update & cover font voting

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This week I have started work on the initial book layout!

Front cover

The Henpire have been voting on the cover font!

The choice was between two of the fonts I use all the time; Brizel, which I use for @hinstow projects as well as @nevertoomanychickens

And Jinky which I’ve used for a few projects, and a couple of times on the Insta feed of @nevertoomanychickens

And the winner is….

BRIZEL!

Here’s roughly what it’s looking like on the front cover…

Up next, more on internal pages and more font voting!

Follow @nevertoomanychickens to check out the project, or sign up to my somewhat sporadic newsletter to get involved with the voting!

NTMC – the book! (part 1)

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Well it’s finally time, and I’m going to start putting together the first volume of “Never Too Many Chickens” – a book based on the Instagram art project I’ve been running for the last 2 years.

This started in Feb 2020, right before the first UK lockdown, where for some reason I decided it would be a fun challenge to draw the various Chickens on Instagram, with their own accounts or featured on their owners (..parent’s..?) account.

The premise was that anyone with an account could nominate their own chicken, provide their name and I’d add them to my list.

List became very long very quickly. I also found it went out of date fairly often, so I had to keep re-asking for recommendations and permissions!

I’ll do a full project run down at some point in the future, but for now, here are some pics of my initial set up – as I take hi-res images of the originals, plus a short video because Fun!

Here I’m using the IPEVO V4K high definition usb camera, which I have attached to my MacbookPro. This is an upgrade to the basic iPhone photos I’ve been taking for the Instagram account, so should hopefully produce something usable for publishing.

Watercolour & drawing process

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Today I’m sharing my approach to watercolour and ink drawing which I use for my instagram project, @NeverTooManyChickens.

All of these are original drawings, using ink pens and gouache (watercolour) on watercolour paper. For instagram, I usually do further editing of the main image in Photoshop to make the colours look more like they do in real life, rather than what the iPhone camera captures.

Materials

A quick summary of materials, before I walk through my process and my “whys”:

The models

I’m lucky that instagram is full of chickens and chicken parents who nominate their critters to be drawn!

Look at this beauty..

Pencil (for once)

My first step is to draw a rough pencil outline, and then ink over the top. This is the only project I have where I actually use pencil first rather than going straight to ink. This is because, frankly, I’m not terribly good at drawing real chickens from life – hence I started the project to get better at it!

Winsor & Newton graphite pencils

For this I’m using a standard 2B graphite pencil from Winsor & Newton. If you’re working in pencil you probably have, or should get, some kind of box set as it’s more cost-effective. This studio collection from Winsor & Newton is standard and reliable, but there are a lot of options out there.

Inking

Once I’m happy with the rough shape and features, I then create a line drawing. Here I’m using Derwent Line Makers and using a standard plastic eraser. My pencil is quite light, and as I’m using pigment pens and erasing carefully, it doesn’t damage the ink work.

Painting

From there I just attempt to match the colours as well as I can. I have some key go-to colours from the Holbein Artists Gouache set that I have set up in my Daisy Palette.

Because it’s watercolour, I can let it dry out on the palette, keep it covered, and reuse it each time I need to work.

These are small drawings, so they use very little paint.

Using this little paint, with this much accuracy means it’s almost more like inking the image than traditional painting.

For Boudica, you can see that I had to go outside of my core colour base and add blue and green! Not your usual chicken colours!

For my brush, I’m using this Jacksons synthetic – Onyx size 6. Does the job, and is kind to animals.

Final work

Here’s the final artwork just snapped with my iPhone.

And here you go – the final drawing, post-editing, added to Instagram.

To see more of these, head over to Instagram and follow @NeverTooManyChickens.

Or sign up to my newsletter to get regular updates on all my projects.

Inktober 2019

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In October 2019 I took part in the instagram drawing challenge of Inktober. I’ve done it a couple of times before, but generally found that I don’t have enough time to dedicate to coming up with really good responses to the prompts.

This year, I committed a lot of upfront time to researching the semantics of each word, and trying to come up with really creative solutions. As I was happy with the outcome, and received a lot of messages asking about my process, I decided to publish a book of the drawings, along with pages from my sketchbook and photos of my materials and the approach I took.

A limited edition of books is now available on my Etsy store.



Enamel pins – Chicken

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As an experiment, I recently turned one of my cartoon characters into a physical badge or pin. This was new for me, as most of my work stays resolutely 2D, with the exception of that series of eggshells back in 2014. So I guess it’s only appropriate that the character I chose to transmogrify was a chicken.

I’ve been drawing chicken characters for a while. They first showed up in a series of single panels cartoons which I was doing to entertain myself on Instagram. 

Which incidentally was where I first discovered Made by Cooper. (website here).

I took one of my digital drawings with a bit more detail and submitted it to Cooper to be made into a pin.

I think they did a really nice job with the artwork, but it makes me realise how much cleaner my line work has to be if I want to make more enamel badges in future.

Although it took a very long time to receive – compared to my 2017 amazon level expectations.. I think you’ll agree the final results are pretty darned spectacular.

I’ve also been very excited, since putting them on to Etsy, to discover a fan base for all things chicken in lovely Mexico. It was definitely a surprise to wake up to a load of orders in Mexico City!

I’ve had great fund packing them up and thinking of presentation concepts such as these little hand drawn cards.