botanicals

William Morris Inspired Botanica

Angela PorterLeave a comment
Click on this link to view the accompanying Draw With Me tutorial video on YouTube.

William Morris, one of the primary founders of the Arts and Crafts Movement, is one of my favourite artists. I love the ornate botanical and nature-inspired designs of quite stylised motifs. I also love the way that colour is used simply in them. That is definitely something I can learn from!

It can take a while for pennies to drop with me, and I don’t know how it has taken so long before I took a look at Morris’s work.

Like myself, Morris was inspired and influenced by Medieval manuscripts. That explains a lot!

I use some motifs from Morris’s designs in this drawing. I applied colour with chalk pastels to the pen drawings, with subtle white highlights from white charcoal. I’m quite happy with the result; I’ve not decided what to do about the background.

Where is this study going to take me? I don’t really know! But I know it’s going to be an interesting one. I’m particularly interested in how Morris used colour, and I hope that will make me comfortable with my own simple way of adding colour to my art.

Sunday Art

Angela PorterLeave a comment

Today, I continued with the entangled art I started yesterday. The drawing is still not complete, but I wanted to add a background colour/texture and add some shadow and light to see how it’s working out.

The shadow and light bring the drawing to life. I’m not entirely sure about the colour I’ve chosen for the background – maybe a bit to saturated and dark. I can always alter that though. I also think there’s not enough contrast betwixt shadow and light. Again, that’s something I can work on.

I’ve drawn inspiration from various things – fossils, seed pods, botanicals, crochet-covered pebbles, architecture, nature, shells, Mayan glyphs to name a few.

Leaving some more open spaces is proving difficult for me once again. It’s something I need to consider as I continue to work on this drawing.

The design is being drawn with Unipin and Sakura Micron pens on marker paper. Background texture/colour, light and shadow are added digitally.

Inktober 2018 – Day 5 ‘Chicken’ and Day 6 ‘Drooling’

Angela Porter

Angela Porter Inktober 2018 Day 5 - ChickenAngela Porter Inktober 2018 Day 6 - Drooling

Day 5 – Chicken

Chicken, I mean, chicken?!? Really? the best I could come up with were some cute, cuddly, doodle chooks, along with some eggs and feathers to decorate the hand-lettered ‘chicken’.

Oh, and I made it another dangle design. (A Dangle A Day is available for preorders).

I used Sakura Pigma Micron and Uniball Unipin pens to draw the design. I drew everything directly in ink, though I did add some pencil guidelines to make sure the letters were on the level and roughly the same height.

To add colour I used Copic markers. I added some highlights of gold using a Sakura Metallic Gelly Roll. Oh, and I added some white highlights using a Sakura Souffle pen.

It’s worked out ok…

Day 6 – Drooling

Drooling, dribbling just said ‘monsters’ to me, and as the only monsters I draw are cutesy ones this is what I came up with. Some of the monsters are dribbling/drooling, but the page most definitely is drooling from the top.

I started by colouring the paper with Distress Inks and an ink blending tool. I wanted it to look grungy and old.

Next, I started by drawing the border, then the drooling pattern at the top of the page, and added stippling for shadow.

After that, I started drawing from the bottom up, starting with some weird alien plants.

Sakura Pigma Micron and Uniball Unipin pens were used for the drawing.

After the outlines were drawn, I used the same pens to add shadows and patterns to the design. I followed this up with a white Uniball Signo pen to add the white highlights.

All caught up

These two mean I’ve caught up with the Inktober 2018 challenge! They have taken me a few hours of my Saturday morning to do, but it’s been a pleasurable time for sure.