Artful Box Unboxing | Art Subscription Box | June – August 2021
Watch our video on YouTube! 🔥 June – August 2021
Box Contents
—————————————————— BOXES 📦🎨 Each quarter (every 3 months), you will receive one lovingly packed box filled with materials and inspiration. Each Artful box contains a magazine with detailed tutorials + interviews with practising artists. You receive your box and can join their online community, each day they host a daily drawing challenge on Instagram and subscribers will be emailed an exclusive video tutorial once a month! 🖋🖌
Artful Box Unboxing | Art Subscription Box | March – May 2021
Watch our video on YouTube! 🔥 March – May 2021
Box Contents
—————————————————— BOXES 📦🎨 Each quarter (every 3 months), you will receive one lovingly packed box filled with materials and inspiration. Each Artful box contains a magazine with detailed tutorials + interviews with practising artists. You receive your box and can join their online community, each day they host a daily drawing challenge on Instagram and subscribers will be emailed an exclusive video tutorial once a month! 🖋🖌
Most people are probably familiar with the orange coloured hoopoe with the amazing crown of feathers. I thought I’d find out if there were any other types of hoopoe and discovered the green wood hoopoe. I loved the rich greens and blues in the plumage, so plumped for this as my subject.
I used some of the inks from my Artful Box along with the chinagraph pencil and fineliner pen. Thanks to a very constructive suggestion on my post Illustration inspired by Artful Box: lighthouse, I had subsequently purchased some blue masking fluid and blocked out some areas including the white parts of the tail feathers. This worked really well, and I’m glad I didn’t risk painting around the negative space, because as sure as eggs is eggs, I would have made a mistake! I would highly recommend this product: Set of three Frisk Masking Fluid Brushes with 60ml Blue Masking Fluid (affiliate link). This is the one I purchased and the brushes are very good quality too.
I took a bit of time to map out the proportions of the bird before painting. My favourite part was using the fineliner to define the plumage and tree branches.
Here is a larger image:
Green Wood Hoopoe
You can see my unboxing of the December 2020 – February 2021 Artful Box here:
ARTFUL BOX UNBOXING | December 2020 – February 2021 | Ink | Art Supplies | Rhubarb & Burble | 📦🎨🖋🖌
What do you think? Please comment below.
Louisa
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Time was short today after I had a three-hour meeting this morning and then spent some time organising files on my laptop (just the tip of the iceberg!)
I wasn’t ready to attempt an actual animal yet, but I loved the structure of the ibex horn, so sketched this one. This was drawn with F and 8B pencils.
An ibex’s horns appear at birth and continue to grow through the rest of their life. Sometimes older ibex have horns which have spiralled a couple of times. The Asiatic or Siberian ibex tend to have the more prominent ridges on the frontal surface like these.
This illustration was inspired by the Artful box theme: Lighthouse from Wednesday 6th January 2021. The photo I used as my source was an Unsplash photo I found via a Google search. It is Cape Nelson Lighthouse, Portland, Australia by Joshua Hibbert and you can see it among his collection of photos.
I was keen to use the fountain pen ink and bleach technique again and this night sky had lots of stars! The bleach is hard to control and often bleeds into the ink more than I would like. To achieve as small a point as I could, I cut off all but a couple of hairs from a fine paintbrush, but it’s still tricky. If anybody has found a more precise way of dotting the bleach on, I would be grateful if you could let me know in the comments below.
I enjoyed creating the gradient in the sky and using the Indian ink to create the black rocks in the foreground. I used a chinagraph pencil to create some light and shade on the rocks.
The light and shade on the main part of the lighthouse was really hard to achieve because the previous colour would dry down and then leave a hard line, so I had to make it really wet in order for the colours to blend a little.
I didn’t really want to use the fineliner, but it gave me a crisp line especially down the lighthouse and on the railings near the top.
Overall I’m pretty happy with it, but I need to work on my arcs, as they aren’t all in the same plane.
This illustration was inspired by the Artful Box theme A pocket with personality from Saturday 26th December 2020. I sketched the design with a pencil and drew the black lines using a fineliner. The watercolours are acrylic inks and the smoke is indian ink. I know that the phrase pocket rocket can have sexual connotations, but this interpretation is along the lines of a small feisty girl. My first thought was Minnie Mouse for some reason(!), as well as a pocket being a literal rocket!
I am disappointed with the scan actually, because the pinstripe pocket and Minnie’s dress were coloured with a very light wash of pink. Unfortunately, my scanner has not picked it up well and it appears grey with a faint line of pink around the edges in some places. The orangey-red tones in the flames are also washed out. It was scanned using the highest setting of 300dpi. Nevermind. I’m sure you get the idea.
Here is a larger image:
Pocket Rocket 2021
You can see my unboxing of the December 2020 – February 2021 Artful Box here:
ARTFUL BOX UNBOXING | December 2020 – February 2021 | Ink | Art Supplies | Rhubarb & Burble | 📦🎨🖋🖌
What do you think? Please comment below.
Louisa
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Louisa and Keith (Rhubarb and Burble)
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Unfortunately, the bleaching technique which worked with the fountain pen ink, did not work with the indian ink. I decided to start again and this time around I tried the wax resist technique. However, that it didn’t really work because my firework was a bit pathetic! (I couldn’t really see where I had laid down the clear wax crayon.)
I went back to my original backgound and used the chinagraph pencil instead. It worked fairly well over top, but is quite dull in comparison to the star and shooting star effect I achieved using bleach on An inky night sky. To compensate, I used some yellow acrylic ink to make it more golden in colour. I used the fineliner to extend the light burst and drew around the edges of the clouds where the pooled ink had dried, then highlighted them with the chinagraph pencil. I am actually quite pleased with the final result, albeit the firework is not very bright.
Here is a larger image:
Firework and smoke
You can see my unboxing of the December 2020 – February 2021 Artful Box here:
ARTFUL BOX UNBOXING | December 2020 – February 2021 | Ink | Art Supplies | Rhubarb & Burble | 📦🎨🖋🖌
What do you think? Please comment below.
Louisa
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Thank you so much,
Louisa and Keith (Rhubarb and Burble)
£5.00
If you fancy setting up your own wordpress.com blog, use this referral link and we can both earn credits.
Well, I’ve finally made a start with some illustration using my first Artful Box subscription kit. I followed their first tutorial which showed me how to use fountain pen ink, bleach and a chinagraph pencil. The tutorial should be made available to non-subscribers in about three month’s time.
Here is a larger image:
An inky night sky
You can see my unboxing of the December 2020 – February 2021 Artful Box here:
ARTFUL BOX UNBOXING | December 2020 – February 2021 | Ink | Art Supplies | Rhubarb & Burble | 📦🎨🖋🖌
What do you think? Please comment below.
Louisa
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We would appreciate any contribution you could make to help us fund this blog.
Thank you so much,
Louisa and Keith (Rhubarb and Burble)
£5.00
If you fancy setting up your own wordpress.com blog, use this referral link and we can both earn credits.
Artful Box Unboxing | Art Subscription Box | December 2020 – February 2021
Welcome to our first Artful Box subscription unboxing! Watch our video on YouTube! 🔥 December 2020 – February 2021
Box Contents
—————————————————— BOXES 📦🎨 Each quarter (every 3 months), you will receive one lovingly packed box filled with materials and inspiration. Each Artful box contains a magazine with detailed tutorials + interviews with practising artists. You receive your box and can join their online community, each day they host a daily drawing challenge on Instagram and subscribers will be emailed an exclusive video tutorial once a month! 🖋🖌
It’s amazing the overall change to our living room that adding a picture gallery has made. I have watched many a YouTube video of people making over their living spaces and the difference that an eclectic range of pictures makes is staggering. If you have a particular colour palette for your room, a gallery wall makes the whole aesthetic work cohesively.
We last decorated our living room eleven years ago and the walls could really do with a fresh lick of paint. We will likely use the same colour again as it is a tone which seems to compliment any palette. Its a Crown paint in the shade ‘wheatgrass’ and is a light greige neutral. Crown Breatheasy Coloured Emulsion in ‘Wheatgrass’.
I have tried to reduce the colour palette in our living room and it is now pretty much neutral with wood tones and mixed metal tones with pops of teal/turquoise/aqua and green.
The original wall art on the wall behind the sofa was a set of three canvases of woodland trees from NEXT, which when spaced apart, make a larger image. I still like this composition and will keep them in case I can use them in another space. Here are a couple of images of the wall with those canvases.
Many people had recommended using an online prints company called Desenio. When I checked out their website, I was actually pretty impressed with the quantity and range of styles.
As well as prints, they supply frames in various different colours with modern, straight edges. I will say that their frames aren’t cheap, so I decided to shop for my frames at IKEA.
A number of Desenio’s prints are typographical and it’s not beyond the wit of man to knock something up on a home computer which will fit into an A4 frame or smaller. Larger prints and photographs are worth buying of course. I have recreated a couple of their typographical prints and even painted a piece of geometric art for my bedroom wall myself in order to save money!
Desenio have functionality on their website which allows you to select and design your own gallery wall. This function works pretty well, but the layouts are presets and I couldn’t find an option to customise my own layout. However, their arrangements are pretty good, so I selected the layout I wanted. The print sizes ranged from 21 x 30cm to 100 x 70cm.
I wanted the frames to be a mix of black, white and gold. As I said above, I went to IKEA for my frames and settled on the very cheap FISKBO range as they are light, sit flat to the wall and span the full size range. But this of course had one drawback, IKEA don’t make frames in 100 x 70cm! I decided to buy this one metal frame, in black, from Desenio. For an expensive frame, I wasn’t impressed when it turned up. The frame was dented and the clear acrylic was cracked in two of the corners, so I promptly sent it back!
I subsequently decided that the largest print was too large, and since it had a large white border, I went ahead and cut it down to 61 x 91cm (another standard size). I then scoured the Internet for a frame which would be similar to the others and I came across an Athena frame which works well alongside. The FISKBO frames are only available in black and white, so I spray-painted a couple of them gold.
Here’s the design I created on the Desenio Gallery Wall Creator tool.
My design using the Desenio Gallery Wall Creator tool
These are links to the prints I selected from Desenio from left to right and top to bottom:
Rhubarb & Burble 