simplicity and a daisy

happy monday! i finished another botanical drawing over the weekend - this time a daisy, the birth flower for april. i was struggling a bit at the start with how to draw a white flower on white paper, but in the end, it came together pretty quickly and i love the lightness of the piece. i am also in love with the leaf, because if you didn't know, i dread drawing leaves. it is really tough for me to get them to look dimensional, especially with this one because the leaves on my daisy were pretty old and shriveled, so there was a lot of improvisation.

up next is a gladiola for august.

art and design

since my days are my own again, i have finally found time to digitally finish my botanical drawings. yay for me!

my prints begin as fully finished colored pencil drawings, then i scan them in and add the words and border digitally. i love combining my two passions of fine art and graphic design to get something complete unique and totally me. this batch brings my total of prints up to 8 which means i only have 4 more to do before i have enough for my calendar dream. well, actually 5, because a hydrangea is not associated with any month, i just did that one because they are my favorite!

what is your favorite flower? i just might throw one into the mix as well :)

gardenias and sunflowers

something inside of me has been dying to sketch lately. i am craving colored pencils as well as ink which has led me here. these are just some of my doodles of late - a gardenia and a sunflower.

with the kids still on summer break, i don't have much time, so these drawings are under an hour and the perfect little escape in my otherwise crazy days.

what do you do to sneak away from the noise of everyday life?

wishes and books

i cannot believe i did it - i actually wrote on the first page of a journal! back in this post, i explained that i have a thing about never writing on the first page because i feel like it is such an important page and i don't want to mess it up. crazy, i know!

anyway, i've recently finished the book "the wishing year" and it really spoke to me. it ended up being a book heavy on references and light on actual story line which wasn't great, but i did end up learning a lot about the art/history of wishing. i learned that in order to truly wish for something, you need to be very specific in your desires and very discerning. no wishy washyness allowed. no generalizations. wishing is heavily grounded in the laws of positive and negative energy. if you direct a lot of your attention towards your wish, you will attract positive energy into your life which will then usher in the manifestation of your wish.

when i finished reading, i decided i needed to do something about my own wishes - that's where my new journal comes in. the cover is really a bunch of doodles that came from my rapidiograph and colored pencils and i have already created a few pages of wishes the same way. so there you have it, a photo of "my very own wish book". but i will only ever show you the cover because after all, we all know that a wish told never comes true ;)

trespassing and a work in progress

to make progress on my flower of the month calendar, i have needed to find an iris to draw. who knew they were such a hard flower to find??? i visited 2 florists and explained that i draw flowers and could i buy an iris stem and they both looked at me like i was crazy and one even added that irises are very temperamental flowers. thanks for the info.

last friday, a friend and i went to a community yard sale in the fanciest subdivision of our little community. people come out by the hundreds to be let behind the gates and sneak a peek at how the other side lives. we stopped at one sale in a culdesac and i couldn't help but notice the un-kept yard next door. this is very unusual because most houses in here have yard crews. upon further inspection, i noticed that a section of the yard was overflowing with the most beautiful irises. i quickly asked the lady running the sale if the house was empty and when i found out it was, i hurried over and snuck away with 3 iris stems safely tucked in my car. score!

the hardest part about drawing flowers is the time constraints. they literally change minute by minute, so you have to draw part by what you see and part by intuition. a teacher of mine said to photograph the flowers, then draw from the photo. i find this really hard to do though because i feel that the photo always looks flat. so i suck it up and sketch as much as i can before the flower wilts. the above photo is after i have done my sketching and before i go in and blend out all the harsh lines.

i can't wait to add this to my calendar pages. february will be checked off shortly!

experimenting and doodling

 

i did it! i finally got the courage to "enhance" book pages. part of me felt like the book police were going to show up at my door and haul me off, but the other part was wildly excited. the book was purchased at a yard sale, so no big investment if i screwed up. i absolutely loved the sweet poems and black illustrations when i found it and knew that colorful doodles would be a perfect compliment. i used black micron pens and my prismacolor watercolor colored pencils. if you know me at all, then you know that painting is not for me. i have nothing against it, i simply have other artistic ventures that i am dying to tackle. if you have this aversion as well, you should try watercolor pencils. you draw on the paper with the pencil, then take a wet paintbrush to the color and you instantly have the look of watercolor. i use a very stiff flat brush because it lets me drag the color exactly where i want it to go (as in the downward motion of the raindrops in the above image). if the page is wet, but you still want to add more color, you can run your brush against the tip of the pencil and the color will come off that way too.

 

after a night of experimenting and doodling, i was so happy with the finished results. while i have no idea what i am going to do with these pages, i am extremely excited that i stepped out of my comfort zone and tried something new. 

what new technique have you tried lately? who knows, i might need to add it to my "experiment" list :)

orchids and pansies

i finished my orchid piece at the last colored pencil class and i am pretty happy with it. i have to figure out a better way to photograph my drawings though, because straight photography/scanning, doesn't show the subtle variations of color. it ends up looking a bit more saturated and rough than it actually is.

i have one class left and will be working on replicating this pansy photograph i took last year. i'm excited to work through the dew droplets on the petals and to use colors i don't normally. stay tuned, hopefully it will be a masterpiece!

oranges and pinks

for my colored pencil class, we had to choose a 4x6in photo to replicate. i immediately fell in love with this orangy fuchsia orchid. the image on the left is the photograph and the image on the right is my drawing, in case you couldn't tell ;) i am only half way finished, so no judging! i am so bummed that i mis-drew the petal in the upper left corner, but i am hoping in the end it all turns out right. to finish, i need to fill in the background stems that run along the bottom and them amp up the color throughout the piece. i can't wait to pull off the framing tape and see the crisp straight lines i am left with.

art and supplies

i'm taking another art class at callanwolde fine arts center which starts this thursday. its focus is strictly on colored pencils, so i hope to find out tons of new tips. from the class list, i know the teacher is very serious about technique which makes me ecstatic. my last class was great, but it turned out to basically be open studio time, with very little instruction.


the same thing goes as my last class - i will post everything i do, good or bad :)

colored pencils and a budget

ok, so i splurged. i bought the whopping 120 set of prismacolors which are not too cheap i might add. we have been buckling down our budget for a while now, so i was feeling a bit guilty. but to quote my husband "these are the things you should be spending money on". is he trying to say that art supplies are more important than my new boots or bag???

anyway, they are lovely and helped me out so much with my tulip drawing. yes, technically you only need a few colors on the spectrum to make any color you want. but i must say that technically, it is so much easier when they are already "mixed" for you.

the pencil case came from cheap joes and is so much better than keeping them in the original tin. it has 2 sleeves, so all 120 fit and it zips up really tight. perfect for traveling.

botanical class and a tulip

ok, so i said i would post the good and the bad, but last week was really bad. i drew a tiger lily on a large sheet of paper since my instructor thought i should go bigger. i hated how it turned out, and lucky for me, the page was too large to put in my scanner. this drawing was difficult for 2 reasons. 1. my pencil marks are not refined enough for a large sketch and 2. going larger means it takes more time to complete. but, unfortunately, you don't have a ton of time with cut flowers because they change their shape and die all too quickly. at least 30% was drawn from my memory which turned out to not be working at it's full potential. the best part about not being graded by my teacher is that i don't have to listen to everything she says. which leads me to...

my tulip, and i am in love! the sheen on the tulip and the brightness of the green leaves really came out in this drawing. i think i have a very defined style going on here - you could say i am becoming a flower portrait artist :) i really like working small, i always have in all areas of my creativity, and i like what i am producing. sometimes i think it is ok to perfect one style before you move on to another. right???

botanical class and a camellia

camellias were the flower of choice for class this week. i brought a branch from my house, but the frost had pretty much killed any of the blooms, so i swiped one from a class mate. her camellia had the most amazing soft pink blooms that were unaffected from the cold.

i am working on blending my colors more and really looking at the shapes of the flower and trying to draw from what i see instead of what i think i see. this is always the tricky part for an artist. your brain is wired to overlook certain shapes. kind of how we can look at a misspelled word, but still know exactly what the word is. i tend to sketch the flower in pencil and then not refer back to it when i am adding color. tsk! tsk!

once i scanned this one in, i applied a photoshop filter to make it look more like a painting. i love the look of digitally altering my images slightly. i have thoughts of a 12 month floral calender swimming around in my head. a modern reference to the old flower prints that you find at yard sales. the ones where the month is in a plaque at the bottom of the print with a list of all the flowers included.

botanical class and another try

i really wanted to draw some flowers this past week, so i swung by trader joes before class and picked up a sweet little pot of daffodils. another student was giving me a few pointers before class started and then she said "yellow is the hardest thing to do in colored pencil - i stay away from any yellow flower". which i promptly thought: GREAT, leave it to me to pick a tough subject.

overall, i am please with the outcome. the darkness of the leaf on the very left is a bit troublesome to me, but i can't figure out how to fix it. one thing i am happy about is the intensity of the color in this drawing. after a few critiques, i realized that i had not been putting down enough color in my previous drawings. this time around, i made sure to saturate the image with the colored pencil, rather than letting some of the paper show through.

camellias are up for next week!

botanical class and beginnings

i started my botanical illustration class a few weeks ago and so far so good. the people taking the class are so nice and encouraging. it's crazy though - 10 of the 13 "students" have been taking the same class for over 5 years. so it has turned into a sort of thursday painting group between a bunch of friends.

i haven't drawn since i was in college, which, was more years ago than i like to remember. partly it is like riding a bike, but another part you are clueless. i sort of stare at the page for a while willing my hands to pick up the pencil, but something always stops me. the first week i messed around drawing carrots and beet leaves, trying to find my footing with the art supplies again. this past week we drew a bitter melon (illustrated above). it is a strange vegetable/fruit from india that only one in the class knew what it was, let alone had even tried it.

i broke out my 20+ year old prisma color pencils for this drawing and i don't think it turned out too shabby for rusty old me. of course there are things i am not happy with, but there are more things that i AM happy with. as i said, the women in the class are so encouraging and that in turn makes me want to continue. since it is winter, there won't be many flowers included in this class, so i might have to go to the grocery store and pick some up for me to draw on my own. i am thinking miniature tea roses or those huge white things that look like daisys, but really aren't.

i'll keep posting my drawings, no matter how embarrassing and hopefully we will see some improvement :)