Editing Stuff

One thing I find really relaxing and rewarding is editing photos. I often accept requests from friends asking me to edit photos of themselves for Facebook, and I do my own too, but as well as that I like to edit drawings, and existing pictures from the internet.

I use a combination of PicMonkey and Serif Digital Scrapbook Artist 2 (and occasionally Paint, because it's actually a pretty useful programme!).

On the left is one of my drawings, which started life as a rather messy scanned image. After a fair bit of work erasing mistakes, fixing broken lines, improving colours and exposure and cutting out I got it to something a bit more like what you would expect in a manga comic. Not an award-winner, but it was pretty rewarding nonetheless.

Sketches and Manga

Every so often, I like to pick up a pencil and draw. Sometimes I give them as presents, sometimes I sketch for personal projects, and sometimes I just mindlessly doodle. As well as drawing portraits of real people, mostly celebrities, I like to draw Manga. I'm a big Anime and Manga fan, and am trying my best to develop my own drawing style. If I'm good enough, one day, I'd like to start a proper Manga series for people to read!

I thought I'd share my drawings of Colin Morgan (Merlin) and Simon Baker (The Mentalist) with you. Portraits are really relaxing to do, and the sense of achievement you get when it resembles the person you were drawing is very satisfying! I'd certainly recommend having a go - you don't have to be really skilled or an expert, these are only 3rd and 4th attempts at drawing portraits.

If you want to see any of my other stuff, feel free to check out my DeviantArt Page - there's some manga on there as well as my portraits and some photo editing stuff.