Some of the art isn't "Good Omens"...but most of it is. Plus, dragonfly!

 One morning this week when I went into the yard with the Hounds, I spotted this dragonfly just hanging on the utility pole:

It stayed very still for the ten minutes or that it took me to find the good camera and snap the pics.  Taking a wee nap, perhaps.  After the Lawn Guy turned up to mow, it flew off.

Otherwise, not much happened other than drawing.  We've had horrid air quality here for several days due to wildfire smoke blowing in from Oregon and California, trapped in an inversion layer.  The pollution index went into the "danger" zone (basically, don't go outside at all, even for healthy people) for a couple of days.  So I stayed inside and drew stuff!

Pretty much as I always do, except for dog walks.  The dogs did not get walked.

This window with a wisteria vine was one of our weekly Zoom sketch meeting practice pieces.  I added some colored pencil to it after drawing it in ink.

Here's another practice piece.  I overdid the details, but it was fun, and rather meditative to draw.

I did a little better on this one, which is ink pen and ink brush pen (I have a lot of brush pens in various shades of gray).  Delightful building.  No idea where/what it is -- Tina just finds these pictures on the Web and collects them for us.

But of course, you know by now that I also drew the main characters from Good Omens again, because they're attractive and I like them a whole lot, and there are several historical scenes with fun stuff in them to try depicting in colored pencils.  These scenes are excellent for learning how to use the pencils in various new and fun ways.

Here is a portrait of the angel, Aziraphale, before adding a dark background:

The reference photo came from a nighttime scene, and certainly this drawing needed a nice dark background to set off the portrait.  I experimented with several color combinations, and came up with Dark Indigo and Walnut Brown as a good dark mix.  I worked a LOT of those two colored pencils over the background, working in one direction for the first color, and then laying the second on top in a different direction, which helps blend the two.  Then I added solvent to blend even more, and then added more color, and more solvent, until it got nighttime dark.  Looks quite smooth, too. 

That was hard work (lots of pressing the pencils hard into the paper), so next I took a little break by doing a quick and fairly easy drawing that is just a copy of one of the show's promo posters.  The fun challenge for this piece was the sky -- I had not tried clouds before.  I used two blue shades plus ivory for the clouds, and used a lot of solvent to blend them.  After that dried, I went back and added light blue/light gray to the inside of most clouds, and put more ivory and white into most of the blue areas, and then blended those using a burnishing tool (a colorless blending pencil).  Finally, I erased a few areas down to the white of the paper.  I like the results.

My biggest project of the week was a portrait of the demon Crowley from one of the historical scenes.  It's set in an ancient Roman tavern, with plenty of interesting objects, clothing, and textures to draw.

There was a little oil lamp with a flame:

He's wearing a silver wreath:

He has a pin in the form of a snake to hold the toga:

I love trying to draw details that are really small -- this eye is 1/4" across!  It's amazing what you can do with an extremely sharp pencil.

Here is the finished piece.  Another dark background, though not as dark as the nighttime one above.  For this one I used Walnut Brown with areas of lighter browns (mostly Burnt Umber and Raw Umber).  The cloak was a challenge with all the folds, and it was an odd color.  First (as you can see in the first pic above), I did a value study of the cloak using gray shades.  Then I used Mauve as the first layer, lightly, before adding Indigo and a dark gray on top, more heavily.  

I couldn't use the solvent to do as much blending as usual on this piece, as it requires ventilation, and I couldn't open the windows due to the smoke haze.  So this is blended mostly with simple pressure, and multiple layers, and the colorless blending pencil.

That was my favorite piece to work on this past week, and I'm pretty happy with it all in all.

So that's it from here.  They are saying the smoke will clear off today -- my fingers are duly crossed. Have a great week, and stay safe out there!