Natalie Heaman

The Art Garden 🌱

  • Life Drawing

    A collection of gestures from the first time I’ve done life drawing in about… 7 years? They were fast poses, mostly one or two minutes, some 5 minutes. It was challenging – but fun!

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  • July 2025 Hobonichi

    And here is a belated compilation of my July Hobonichi pages! Better than June, as far as quantity (and quality? Who’s to say.)

    Inspiration includes: doing indoor bouldering for the first time; camping and the subsequent wildlife encounters, plus our dog entertainers.

    A loose, sketchy drawing in blue ink of a person climbing a rock wall; it is captioned “tried bouldering for the first time recently!”
    An ink drawing of a spider crab
    A pen drawing showing two dogs looking at a deer ahead of them. Both dogs and the deer have an exclamation mark over their head, everyone is surprised to see each other!
    A black ink drawing of a small black dog with floppy ears sitting on a chair, captioned “Lenny commandeered the beach chair”
    A pen drawing showing the silhouettes four owls on a tree branch, captioned “Barred owl family on Savary Island”
    A pencil crayon drawing of a heron standing on a rock in the ocean, with an island in the distance. The colouring is soft, with no hard edges
    A drawing done in blue and green gel pen of a stylizing tree with big wavy branches, captioned “The Savary Island spirit tree”
    A drawing in blue gel pen of a Mazda 5 and the lettering: “I believe in Mazda 5 supremacy’
    A page with coloured pencil crayon of different colours blended together, on is it written “Somehow it’s July already??”

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  • June 2025 Hobonichi

    Here’s a very belated post with my June hobonichi pages! June was a busy month, lots of work deadlines, and not many pages drawn – a little is still better than nothing!

    A pen drawing of a person and dog swimming at the beach. The drawing is rough and loose, and text in the upper part reads: “Recently went swimming with Boo after work”
    A gouache sketch of three strawberries on a patchy blue background.
    A red ink pen drawing of a face, which was drawn with one single line.
    A quote in blue ink, hand written: “Where would we be without our ability to see beyond what it is we’re supposed to be seeing.” From the novel ‘Winter’ by Ali Smith
    The alphabet written in blue paint, using a brush with long bristles resulting in stylized letters.
    In red ink the page says: “It’s June 21 and I’ve only done 5 pages. And I don’t like any of them. Balance is hard!” With doodles in blue ink around it.

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  • Summoning Morwen

    “You call me here, to the heart of winter…
    does my name only exist to be mocked?”

    An illustration drawn in in blue ballpoint pen, then painted on top with inks, watercolours, and gouache. The illustration shows a small woman standing in a large empty room which overlooks snowy mountains. In the centre of the room, a snowflake is carved into the floor, and above it is billowing smoke, from which a face emerges. The face appears to be make of cracked volcanic rock, with magma visible in the cracks. The face looks down at the woman, about to speak.

    It’s been a busy summer! This illustration is from June: another moment from our D&D campaign. This time of my character, Orla, summoning her warlock patron Morwen (who is also her hag – Orla is a hexblood) for a chat. I tried a new process on this one, and it got messy, but we persevered! The process was something like:

    1. Get the drawing down
    2. Ballpoint pen under drawing
    3. Some acrylic based ink for tones
    4. Wet washy vibrant inks for an underpainting
    5. Watercolour then gouache to refine

    Overall, I like the texture from the ballpoint pen, though it was time consuming to draw!

    Higher-res details plus some process pics below:

    A detailed close-up of the illustration showing the texture of the inks making up the smoke
    A detailed close-up of the illustration showing one of the magma eyes
    A detailed close-up of the illustration showing the texture of the inks making up the smoke
    A work in progress photo of the illustration: the under-drawing in blue ballpoint pen is done, and masking fluid is still on the border. Inks are starting to be applied.
    A work in progress photo of the illustration: vibrant ink washes sit on the pen drawing
    A work in progress photo of the illustration: the ugly stage. Colours are messy and there is not much definition in the volcanic face. The blues and reds are overpoweringly vibrant

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  • Willow’s Close Call

    I’ve been itching to push myself to paint something more illustrative, something I used to do a lot of. So, of course I turned to our Dungeons and Dragon’s campaign for inspiration. This is my friend’s character Willow, who narrowly avoided death-by-dragon-breath in a recent session.

    There were some big trust-the-process moments here – the base layer for her face was a colourful mess of wet watercolours and I wasn’t sure it would all come together! It was fun to create a colourful face, even if the colours are from blood and bruises on-top of an already sallow complexion. See below for some of the messy in-progress moments.

    An illustration created in watercolours, gouache, and pencil crayon. It shows a close-up of a bloodied woman’s face, as she fearfully looks to the left. Behind her is a damaged wall with a large hole, and through it a landscape of snowy mountains can be seen. A dragon is flying in the open sky. Text on the image says “Willow’s close call”
    A work-in-progress images of the illustration, showing the original drawing on layers of tracing paper, ready to be transferred to the watercolour paper.
    A work-in-progress images of the illustration. This one shows wet watercolour washed for the skin base and mountain landscape. It is early in the process.
    A work-in-progress images of the illustration. This one is getting slower to completion, but still quite messy.

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Blog Index

PROJECTS / SERIES
Gouache Creatures Series, 2019
Somerset Series, 2021
Thrift Store Catch & Release
Beautiful Day Records

SHARED SUBJECTS
Dungeons & Dragons
Figure / Life Drawing
Pet Portraits
Character Art

OTHER
Daily Challenges
Bookbinding
Writing
Photography

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