Ian McGann

Over the years I’ve tried a lot of different mediums when drawing. One of the ones that resulted in some nice pictures was when I used felt pens. Drawing with a felt pen isn’t that hard, but can result in a lot of paper being scrapped. This is mainly due to making mistakes, You can paint over mistakes that are made when using acrylic or erase a mistake made using pencil.

The pictures below have a lot of mistakes, but I’ve found that only I see them. If you can spot any let me know.

There are three zebra’s in this picture, it sometimes takes a while to spot them.

This is one of my favorite pictures, mainly cause of it’s size, its over 1m wide and with a huge frame it looks very impressive.

This is one of my favorites, actually, this picture shouldn’t be hung without the one below. Both the pictures and the frames match very nicely.

The two pictures above are done in mirror format, not sure what else to call that and I’m sure there’s a good word for it. But to make it even more difficult to draw this I put black where i see white. It results in an interesting version of the original.

You see this a lot today in Ikea. Our source must have been the same and I guess the person who picked it out in Ikea was a very smart person. This picture is also over 1m wide and has a very large black frame. The frames make these pictures very heavy and for safety I had to use two 3in concrete screws to make sure they never fell.

Seven Lakes Hike is about 45 min drive up north of where we are living in Rochester Hills. The hike started out went and cold but as we got moving it warmed up a bit and by the end of the hike was nice and sunny. In totaly it was a 6.4 mile hike, with a lot of stops and photographing along the way.

The really interesting thing about Seven Lakes is the Fen. A fen is a type of wetland fed by groundwater from natural springs, the water is either very neutral or alkaline.

What makes this very interesting is the unique plant and animal life you get from in the Fen.

This is a picture of a Pitcher plant that is not fully grown, these guys are the best looking plants. But that might be because it’s not yet fully grown

This is of a Black and Yellow Argiope Spider, if I ever see this in my bedroom, I’ll be moving house.

The is a spotted Knapweed. Was a nice picture take.

This is one of my favorite pictures. But I have no idea what it is, so if you know, please let know.

Staying with the Harry Potter theme and moving on to the second book. I decided to pick the mandrake as my representation for the second book. I still haven’t decided on what to draw for the third book, but I’ve got the fourth picked out so I might come back to the third at a later date.

For those that know me you’ll know that I’m a real fan of Harry Potter, so much so that I dragged my poor wife all the way over to Chicago to see the exhibition and the latest movie. It was brilliant, I don’t think it could have been better, both the movie and the exhibition. It was really great to see the costumes and props, especially the gravestone of Tom Riddle Senior, that was creepy.

So with all that in mind I’ve been putting what little talent I have to copying some of the harry potter moments.  I’m hoping to do a picture from each book and capture the moment I remember most in doing that.

From book one I’ve chosen ‘there’s a Troll in the dungeon’ moment, and hence drew a picture of a Troll. The picture is done in charcoal and is 8″x10″ in size.

Hope you like it

I finally managed to finish it, this is valentines picture I should have finished back in early February.

Captain Jack Sparrow

I think I’ll go back to using chalk.

I decided to add some old pictures that have been hanging around for a long time. All of them bring back some great memories. Especially the Leen and family one.

This one still has to go up, but I thought I’d put it here first.

So last Saturday my better half and I took part in our second Hike and I have to say before I tell you about the Tornadon, it was a fantastic day. I got to see and do things I’ve never done before and that’s always a great day.

So the day started out with some fantastic weather at the Daunner-Martin Sanctuary. We weren’t expecting rain and started out with no clouds in sight and me sucking on my second ever Tootsieroll.

Sucking on a Tootsieroll

As the walk went on we came across some great sights, one in particular was what looked like a great climbing tree.

As we looked around we didn’t see any sign of rain and decided to take the longer route through the forest.
This turned out to be a great idea as i got to see my first ever non captive snake. I even managed to catch it and held on before it went to bite me and I jumped and dropped the damn thing.

So far so good, I’m thrilled with myself for catching the thing but not so for letting it go so quickly. Anyway, moving on, as we started to walk farther and farther along the trail we noticed a dark cloud looming closer but it looked like it was going to pass us right by. Oh how wrong we were.

It was like standing in the shower with your clothes on, not an inch stayed dry. My watch the next day had water bubbles in it. But the great thing about all this, nobody freaked, nobody got upset, everyone just stayed really calm, even when trees were coming down around us and you could see and hear the thunder right above or when we found we were 100m from the end of the trail and it was blocked due to flooding. Nobody panicked, it made the entire experience worth it and I will go again anytime.

Cold wet walk back

Thank you Rob for a great day

Go check out his website and if you are in the area please join us next time.

http://www.hikingmichigan.com/

Edit: removed formatting as it made the text smaller in some places

So this is the monster I’ve been working on, or I should say not been working on.

everything you see in blue still has to be finished

The picture is being done in Acrylic and I’m trying to stick to certain colors, mainly cause I didn’t want to invest in every needed color. So far it’s turned out ok. I just need to get my ass moving and finish it off.

So this is my new website, I got the idea of using wordpress from Moondancer. I know it doesn’t look as good as the old flash version but this is something that I find a lot easier to work with. I’ll try and update it a lot more regularly with what I’m working on. I did have a great idea at the start of the year to paint a new picture every month but so far I’ve missed out on March and soon April. So I’ll have to make it up during the summer. Wish me luck