As autumn has arrived, at least astronomically, As we’ve passed the astronomical point of season’s change, from summer to autumn here in the northern hemisphere, I continue to long for the fiery costume of nature. Warm memories to sustain us as the cold, architectural skeletons of nature are all that remain. A reminder burned in our minds that nature will once again blossom and bloom once the days begin to lengthen once again.
To complete the line art, I used a Tombow Fudenosuke pen. Colour was added with Stabilo Carbothello pencils and a paper tortillon.
Today’s vlog is a sketchbook flip-through showing my week in art.
I’ve had fun creating art this week. Here’s some highlights.
The rediscovery of how much I love my Chameleon markers was a wonderful thing. I love the way I get a smooth gradient of solid colour from them. Such a stark contrast to my bumbling, chaotic attempts with other media.
Taking up the Sketchtember challenge was a good idea to dust off some of my neglected drawing/sketching skills and ways of adding interest to a sketchbook. It’s also made me try to think differently to how I would when creating entangled art.
Hand lettering, and some typographic art today, has made a reappearance in my work. That’s a good thing; it’s something I would like to do more of.
Adding a rectangle of colour behind a drawing and adding handwriting to create texture is something I’ve not done before, but I like the results.
Thyme is the herb for today, day 4 of Sketchtember and my offering is in the photo at the top of the page.
There’s been some real lowlights too. Colour choices, mediums and doing things that seemed like a good idea when I started them! There’s a lot more about this in today’s vlog on youtube.
Even with the facepalm moments, it’s been lovely to spend time just drawing with no expectation of a finished project, polished work, or even perfection.
It’s hard work trying to convince myself that it’s ok to make mistakes, to mess up things as long as I learn from them.
Another abstract botanical. Here are the steps I took in creating it.
Draw the black and white line art design on dot-grid paper from Rhodia using Sakura Micron pens.
Scanned the drawing in, removed the dot-grid, removed noise and created a transparent background in GiMP opensource photo editing software.
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!
Angela Porter 