Nancy Farmer – work in progress!

Hello!
It’s been a long time since I did some proper artwork, or posted anything here, sorry, I am about to get this site together again. The story so far: I broke my wrist. Not the drawing one, but keeping on top of the physio and the postal orders has taken pretty much all my time, and I need two hands for painting.  Plus, the small matter of a pandemic has diverted all our lives, I don’t really need to tell you that, so even without a broken wrist I’d not have had much to say in the way of new swimming tales.

Breaking your wrist is no fun, I cannot recommend it. It is slowly recovering, but it means there will be  very little new artwork this year. There will however be a couple of new swimming hat designs, and a calendar for next year. So, I have some glimpses of the new hat design to show you.

Way back ages ago, long before you needed eyes in the back of your head to maintain a statutory 2 metres from every living being, I thought eyes on swimming hats would be a nice idea, in the manner of eyes on the prows of ships. It seems to be a thing that goes back centuries and across cultures.

And I’d been messing about with this idea, but ship-eyes just didn’t really work. So I tried sort of scaly fish / reptilian eyes. I posted the drawings on my profile on facebook, and naturally the most liked design was the one I didn’t think was going anywhere. So here is a glimpse of my design process that is about to lead to some real swimming hats (the ones here are all mock-ups and drawings).

Update: I ordered them yesterday! If you’re interested in knowing when they will be available, feel free to join my email list (see link in the menu) and you’ll be the first to know when they arrive.

hat design sketch – this was my final version before asking other people what they thought. It got second place in the popularity stakes. I might come back to this one.

hat design sketch – an alternative version

hat design sketch – I quite liked the round eyes but they got out voted by all the others.

hat design sketch – another round version

hat design sketch 5 – in fact this was about the first one I drew. Originally I didn’t think it was working well with an eye like this. Lots of people disagreed. Fortunately!

Working out the actual eye placement – this changed the design as the eye needed moving a lot from my original guess (orange hat) to the final (white hat)

Original placement – not working too well

I am not scowling, it was very hard to get my head and the camera and the mirror all in the right place!

Getting there…

Final placement, I wanted it so that it works from the front and from the side too.

Having got the eye in the right place, next, back to the actual design work, and all those scales were just too fussy

Nope, too fussy…

better…

working from the front

Yes!, with tentacly eyelashes but only a suggestion of scales.

tentacle eyelashes!