doodles and scraps

Just a few things I put together in my spare time recently:

The first couple of bands are nothing, but I did enjoy the fish. I like how befuddled they look:
I've never been a person who practices. I'm not a practicer. Practitioner. Whatever. I tend to start drawing, and I either like what I'm doing, and consequently keep working until I have a finished product of reasonable quality, or I decide I don't like it, and I throw it on the floor.
With some of my art stuff, however, practice is just a requirement. These are the product of that necessity:





As of about a year ago, Celtic spirals were an entirely new concept to me, and while it's not difficult to learn how to freehand them, it's not something that came to me intuitively. Practice was inevitable. The same can be said of Celtic/Norse animal motifs. Making an animal design usually involves being able to imagine a body/limb/wing/head shape and formation that could never and should never actually occur in the natural world. I'm still getting the hang of it.

For the record, spirals are easier than animal designs. With the spirals, there's really only four or five different tricks to choose from - perhaps more to the point, there are definite and finite tricks to choose from. With animal motifs, the only rules seem to be:
1) There should be an animal in there, the general phylum of which should be identifiable.
2) That animals limbs, and probably its torso, should not contain any bones or limited length.
3) Alcohol.