Laura Mallaghan Illustration

  Happy Mother's Day! Today's 14th of March, celebrating all mums in the U.K., I've spoiled my mum with a fancy gift box full of goodies, they're chocolate treats and a lovely gin, by the way, and she absolutely loves them as she plans to devour them tonight! For this Mother's Day illustration I have been working on owls, I selected the barn owl as inspired by the t.v show Inside The Zoo from BBC, that I've watched with my mum, there were two barn owl brothers with amusing personalities and my mum enjoyed watching them and thought they're cute!  To start with, I sketched the mother and three owlets on black paper, for the colours I originally use coloured pencils, the Zenacolor. The coloured pencils have backfired as they don't work well on this satin texture paper, not how I wanted to look, so I've decided to use gouache paints. And they work better, although it needs to be layered. When I look at my artwork, this reminded me of the children's b...

Dark cloudy and raining weather that has been for the past few weeks here, there's a little bit of sun shining through the grey cloud. Although it's been warm, that's the result of thunderstorms we had the past few days, even had a big one on Tuesday, I actually don't mind thunderstorm as it's always been interesting to watch since I was a child, along with my brother and sister. It's typical British summer weather. Back in May, I had that itching feeling of wanting to go to the beach with really nice summery weather that May had, with the lockdown and restrictions, my family and I had to respect the guideline rules in public. So to think about the seaside town and the beach, I started to paint seagulls. Because they sure do reminding of the seaside, they're always there, a beach bird as I labelled them. My family and I always go to the beach when we were on holiday.  The last time I went to the beach was 2 years ago in Cyprus, with my family. But that was n...

A cute pot for the pretty plant! It was for my little sister, she owns some indoor plants in her room and she wanted a small pot for one of her plants. She luckily found a small ceramic pot in our garden, sat on the low wall at the end of the garden along with other plant pots, with few bit of cracks, scratches and paint peeled from the inside, but she doesn't mind as long as it's the right size. Looking at that plain, glossy cream mucky pot I thought, I could make it pretty. I asked her if she wants some bit of decoration on it, and she approved. I gathered some ideas of what sort of motif to decorate, I remembered that she likes all sort of foxes, I went for the red fox! I have sketched some fox poses, the positions on the pot, some details to add. To add it in, I have used some image references for fox body positions and faces, which helps to a variety of choices. Drawing the fox faces I still find it tricky, I got frustrated afterwards then thinking it doesn't have to b...