In Years When He Grows Catkins Under His Ear Frills, Sweetpea Can Sometimes End Up With Acorns There

In years when he grows catkins under his ear frills, Sweetpea can sometimes end up with acorns there too! They get pretty uncomfortable at full size, but he’s too proud of them to care. He’ll spend the whole of Autumn showing them off to anyone who will look and admiring them in puddles, then plant them out with great care.

Lately I ordered some nice pen accessories, including a cartridge converter for my Rotring pen and some coloured cartridges for my cheapo £5 cartridge pens, so I drew Nettle and Spider while I was messing around testing them. I’ve never done spot colour with ink and water, it looks pretty nice I think. Having said that, I’m not a fan of this ink. It’s a weird colour called Bilberry that can’t decide if it’s blue, purple or black. (I tweaked it in photoshop to make it more purple.) They do one called Imperial Purple that might have been a better bet. Ah well, next time.

A while ago I wanted to do a comparison of some of the school uniforms my different characters wear, I can’t quite remember why. Nettle goes to a dreadful comprehensive school not unlike the one I went to, and wears a pretty casual uniform not unlike the one I wore. It might be the only time she ever wears trousers. (At my school only about 3 girls opted for a skirt.) Jessie goes to a slightly more upmarket school but I’m not sure any schools in the UK actually have a uniform like that, in the sense of one without a blazer but with an unusual skirt colour. Possibly there’s a blazer that Jessie prefers not to wear. I think the boys wear grey trousers rather than red. Patience lives in the present day and so has a very fancy-looking uniform, because for some reason UK schools all want fancy uniforms again? I very rarely see secondary school children in jumpers anymore, and more girls seem to opt for skirts again.

Inktober 2018 : Day 5 - cartridge pen

Lena’s prophetic trances are involuntary, and come on without warning. Her friends have seen it before, but it doesn’t stop being frightening.

I think I’ve mentioned before that I’m fairly often guilty of designing characters with important colour schemes and then always drawing them in black and white, so here are some colour pictures of the Vrega. There are a lot of minor differences between them and the humans, but the only obvious one is that they’re greyish-purple in colour. (I suppose if you stood a load of humans and vrega together it would also be obvious that the vrega are bigger, but Violet is the only human on the ship.) Violet is too tall in that first one, let’s pretend she’s standing on tip-toe.

I’ve been getting a little bored of the stamps I use when I package Etsy orders, so I’ve made myself some address labels! The larger ones are for the customer’s address and the little ones are for the return address. (I did have to edit the top one slightly from how it appears here to give myself more space though.) I was tempted to make more, but I’ll stick with these two for the time being. I have a bad habit of being over-enthusiastic when I make things and ending up with too many to use! My shop: https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/sarahfogg