Kat Powell Artist

                              I was having fun with the idea of creating a few images about the Quarantine.                                                                Mostly involving the plague masks of old! They just look so creepy/cool in those old-timey photographs. I wanted to give them an update. It started with a traditional idea of a family staying home and baking. They couldn't make bread because everyone bought all the yeast! Oh well, you cannot go wrong with pie! But you know, humans aren't the only ones going crazy during quarantine. Dogs need to get out as much as we do! So I wanted to show a kid and his dog getting some sun and....well, I don't know how much fresh air you can get in a mask. No...

Check out my newest step-by-step watercolor tutorial! I take you thru the process of painting a frog with water and flowers all around it.

This is a side project I've been working on. I've been working as a Freelance Illustrator for years now, giving life to other's stories. Which I love doing!  So I want to try to create my own stories.  This first story is an experiment. And honestly I've been hesitant to create and share it for a long time. But I'm forcing myself to put it out there! I am uploading the first part of the story for free on my ko-fi page. (link below)  There will probably be 4 parts to this story and then I will have the entire story available as an eBook. Maybe later I will have physical prints....but that is for the future! https://ko-fi.com/katpowellartist (donate)

The best piece of advice I've gotten as an artist is this: "Take a single idea and stretch it over several images!" Sounds easy? Well, yes it is. For the longest time I would create an image by sketching out one composition. Then I would ink it, draw it out with color pencils, or paint it and move on to the next image. But this would often cause me to hit a creative wall, "artist block", and not be able to create something new. So, to fix this I went back to that great advice. I started with sketching out a bunch of different compositions for a single idea. Let me give you an example: This is a recent concept I developed for my "Skellies" where they are in a cyclical loop of self-consumption. So I started with one image, one concept, one color, and then I sketched out more ideas. I started with the idea of branches and berries growing out of my Skellies with a monochrome color palate. Each composition is the same as the first o...

A few years ago I saw a bunch of artist trying a drawing challenge. It is based off of an artist named Kim Jung Gi who draws extremely detailed and realistic images with only ink. No pencil, no sketch and straight from memory and imagination! So, I decided to give it a go. The image you see below is my attempt at straight ink drawing. I also wanted to test my imagination and memory by drawing everything you see from memory. Of course, most of the drawing is fantasy but this was a great challenge for proportion, perspective, background, and anatomy.     It was a great way to get out of my comfort zone and test my confidence as an artist. I would highly recommend this challenge for intermediate and advance artist! I will be honest, it was very scary at first. But if you stay focused on what you are creating and have a general idea of what you want to draw then you will have more fun! You can start off simple by drawing one object or cre...

 Quick lighting advice. For this video I wanted to experiment with a single light source. When you are working on something like this you need to constantly think about WHERE your light source is. For the first skellie you see sitting right in front of the computer screen, the light will framing his figure and casting an intense shadow around his frame. And a tiny bit of light will show around his eyes. I made the light here the most intense because that is where I want the main FOCUS of the image. Everything else still keeps with the light source but is more muted because the other figures are both farther away and not the focus of the image. By the way, rest your eyes when you can! (And I will try to take my own advice...)