botanical design

Whimsical flowers 29 Sept 2018

Angela PorterLeave a comment

Angela Porter 29 Sept 2018

I’m home! Back in the land of reliable, fast internet. Even though I have things to do, I wanted to do a little artsy stuff after a few days with little artsy stuff. So, I coloured/textured this sweet little whimsical botanical design.

I saw a lot of landscapes, architecture and plants that caught my arty eye in my time oop t’Yorkshire Dales and it’s likely to take me a goodly long while to process it all – either in artwork or in words.

I do have a travelblog – Curious Stops and Tea Shops – for things to do with my journeys (and my pal Liz if she chooses to contribute to it) if you’d like to take a look and follow it. I suspect there’ll be more posts there in the coming days and weeks as I process my experiences and as Liz helps me to put names to places!

It’s been nice to spend sometime doing something arty, even if it is just a tiny image. No doubt I’ll do more.

For now, though, I have to get back into the routines of life back at home.

Abstract Botanical 16 September 2016

Angela PorterLeave a comment

Angela Porter 16 September2018

Another abstract botanical. Here are the steps I took in creating it.

  1. Draw the black and white line art design on dot-grid paper from Rhodia using Sakura Micron pens.
  2. Scanned the drawing in, removed the dot-grid, removed noise and created a transparent background in GiMP opensource photo editing software.
  3. Imported the image with a transparent image into Autodesk Sketchbook Pro and added colour and texture.

It took a couple of hours to draw the design and several hours to colour and so on.

My digital tools are a Microsoft Surface Pen and Microsoft Surface Studio.

I love the way many of the elements seem to glow against the dark green-blue background.

Many of my latest works like this seem to have an ocean, watery background going on. So, in the one I have on the go at the moment I’ve done a kind of sunset background. I’ll see how that turns out. Working digitally means I can alter my backgrounds really easily for sure.

I’ve been creating backgrounds digitally, but I want to create some on paper with Distress Inks and scan them in to use instead of the digital backgrounds.

I also made use of a more limited colour palette in this work – going for a more cohesive look/feel. These aren’t colours I’d normally choose to go together, but they seem to work fine.

I now have a fair few of these images and so now really need to try to work out what to do with them. I may try to import them into Repper and create repeating patterns from parts of them; that could be an interesting exercise for sure, but a fun one!

If you have any ideas of how my artwork could be used, leave a comment – I’d love to hear!