anika mari

Or does it?

…

Way back in the day when I took my very first 2D design class, I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. I just knew I liked art. Even through the process of the class, I didn’t really understand how the skills we were taught would be applicable in the real world, but I wasn’t concerned about that either. I wasn’t an algebra student who hated math who complained that learning equations was pointless. I loved art, and I loved the 2D design class for the shear fun of it. Later I would realize that it actually did have applications in the real world, or at least it would have before the age of computers. But I digress.

One of the first projects in the class was to come up with a “motif” that we would use throughout the rest of the semester as we made an accordion style book that incorporated all of the class projects we’d do into one cohesive piece. In this class a “motif” was small design in black and white. Years later, when I was studying graphic design, a big light bulb went off. Essentially when we designed our motif, we created something like logo, but not for a company. It was purely aesthetic.

I filled up pages of my sketchbook with possible motifs. I spent a lot of time carefully drawing many different designs. I also doodled mindlessly in the margins, as I still do today.

Imagine my surprise when I was presenting many, big, glorious potential motifs that I’d spent hours drawing, and my professor pointed to a small doodle that wasn’t more than a half an inch big and said, “this one.”

Mouth agape, I looked at her and said, “really? but I spent so much time on all these others which I really think are better.”

She was firm, “no, this one. Make it bigger and show me again.”

Okie dokes. So then I took my time drawing it bigger. I evened it out, made it symmetrical, and to my eye more visually pleasing. She took one look and said, “no, take this small drawing to a xerox machine and enlarge it to the proper size and then copy it.”

Mouth hanging open once again, I followed her instructions. Finally satisfied, my professor approved my drawing, and I had my motif for the class.

That was the very first time that someone found something interesting in my sketchbook that I wouldn’t have looked twice at. It happened again recently when my friend, Anita, made a surprising choice when choosing a few of my drawings to be framed for her new apartment.

Anita also chose a cactus drawing to be framed.

This case is a little different in that I can see why she chose it. I like the drawing too, quite a lot. That said, in my mind it always needed a little polishing.

So I polished.

I traced the original cactus, but I made the colors brighter and cleaned up the blemishes and smudges on the cactus. I also took away the clouds, which I felt detracted from the cactus itself. However, the feedback was that Anita liked it, but really missed the clouds.

So I redrew some clouds.

The clouds I added were more monochromatic in color with a more even pattern than the original clouds, and that seemed to be the right fit from my perspective.

The final feedback was then that Anita really liked it, but was still drawn to the original drawing. She liked the fact that the original cactus was a little more weather beaten; he looked like a survivor. In the end, I printed out the original sketch and framed it, and my friend was happy.

This whole process sparked an internal inquiry. I’m not sure there’s really an answer, but I just find it interesting that people are, at least sometimes, attracted to my work for reasons that are very different from what my vision for the piece is.

I definitely have a perfectionist streak in me. Often I like to think of it as perfect imperfection. For the most part I don’t mind if my drawings are a little off or a little sketchy, or if the patterns I draw aren’t perfectly symmetrical, but there is also a part of me that believes that what’s in my sketchbook is a different level of completeness to what a final drawing should be.

My brother, John, once flipped through one of my sketchbooks when we were having a conversation about how best to get some final drawings finished. As he flipped through, he pointed out several drawings, mentioning that they were already complete. He suggested that since they were on sketchbook paper, the best route would probably be scanning them in and getting some prints made. Besides that, they’d be ready to go right away. I agreed wholeheartedly–except for that little part of me inside that was critiquing each drawing, saying, “well, yeah, it’s complete. you just have to fix a couple of those lines and clean up the color a bit, so actually it’s almost complete.”

At this point I think I have to admit that this thought process goes one step beyond belief. My inner critic, or this sense of how a finished piece should be, is deeply ingrained in me. Most of the time I don’t even notice when the wheels are turning and laying out my plan of attack for finishing a drawing.

I’m starting to realize that maybe a finished drawing doesn’t always have to be so perfect and clean. Maybe the sketchiness gives it some character, or adds meaning to the piece that I might not see.

Who would have thought that the process of finishing and framing a few pieces of art for a friend would reveal something about myself that before was at least partially hidden?

Now that I’m aware of my tendencies, I can hopefully stay aware of them when that inner critic comes up again, and look at my art in a different way, or at least pause to consider a different approach to the finished product.

With three drawings figured out, I was pretty much stumped about what to do for the fourth. I had several options, but none of them seemed quite right. I was hemming and hawing over it one night with my mom and she pointed to one of my practice drawings that I’d done to get used to tracing pencil on bristol, and said “you should do those pea pods”.

Well, to me, the drawing she pointed at didn’t look anything like pea pods, but I quickly got over that discrepancy as I thought, “Pea pods! Brilliant! What could be cuter than pea pods!?”

I quickly whipped up a sketch.

My sister-in-law loved it.

If you haven’t noticed already, the unifying element amongst the three drawings are little tiny critters. Little fishies, small bumble bees, teeny inchworms, and? The snails in the above drawing were actually added after I did the final sketch. First I tried another drawing of pea pods with butterflies.

I liked it, but the butterflies weren’t tiny enough. At this point, I wasn’t 100% sure about the pea pods any more. Another thought stuck in my mind because at one point my sister-in-law had suggested that fruit might be a good addition to the series of drawings. I had done a little sketch of lots of different little fruits.

I liked the fruit, but also felt that it wasn’t a really cohesive composition for the series. Honestly I’m not sure how the next idea hit me. Maybe I was just being silly and decided to make the peas into blueberries. In any case, the next sketch was decidedly more colorful and fruity.

“Fruit in pea pods? What? That’s crazy! and awesome! and really cute and fun and perfect for a little girls room,” was essentially my line of thought as I drew the fruity pods.

I wasn’t satisfied with the corn or the raspberries in the first sketch. I decided to go with lemons instead of oranges, so I could do orange persimmons, and get rid of the corn. I drew some strawberries that turned out very cute, which took the place of the raspberries.

There I finally had it. And I also had my critter too. The small snails were perfect.

I did a sketch to figure out the colors for the strawberries, pea pods, and blueberries.

I used pencil again on the final drawing since the placement was important. I noticed that my tracing skills are already improving, though it’s still tricky.

I think this final drawing was the perfect addition to the series. All four drawings were really fun to work on. In the process I learned a lot, improved some of my skills, and made my sister-in-law very happy, so it was a good project in many ways.

As I was working on the drawings, I knew that i wanted to have a flower that was big and bold.

My sister-in-law had originally chosen two sketches of flowers that she liked from my sketchbook.

She was drawn much more to the peach and green drawing, but I liked the softer blue drawing, so for a while I was a little stalled out about what to do.

It wasn’t until I drew on a “scrap” piece of bristol that the idea started to evolve. I wanted to get used to drawing on the bristol, which was the material I was using for the final drawings, so I drew three of the bluish flowers. However, when they were drawn, they were a little more elongated than the original sketch, and reminded me more of pine cones than of flowers. So I went with it, and I started to color them in like pine cones.

Before finishing the color, I decided to try out a few combinations on little mini sketches.

Finding a combination of colors that I liked, I finished the drawing.

Looking back at the little sketches, I thought they looked like little clusters of petals and thought they might make a pretty flower. On an extra piece of bristol, I drew a number of little petal clusters in a radial pattern, and then connected them with thin stems.

I really liked how this turned out, so I tried several color combinations in my sketchbook.

I liked the softness of the first two, but I decided that I really wanted a bold, colorful flower. After working on the sketch with many color possibilities, I decided on going with a bold background, and light petals.

I discovered that the colors blended beautifully on the paper in my sketchbook, but would hardly blend or soften at all on the bristol. Also, the color of the marker on the bristol tends to show up significantly darker or brighter, so I had to adjust the colors slightly as I was working.

The mulberry color I used for the background showed up really intense on the bristol, but in a good way. However, after testing the blue that I intended to use, it was much too bright on the bristol, so I ended up using a light gray for the petals instead of blue. The gray was a lot softer which helped balance the drawing, while maintaining the contrast of light to dark.

I like how the drawing and colors turned out. It lends the right amount of bold color to the series.

In the next post I’ll write about how fruit ended up in the pea pods drawing.

Drawing the final Heart Flowers offered some interesting challenges.

After completing several sketches, I had a basic idea of what I wanted to draw.

I was happy with the hearts themselves, but I tried out a couple of variations of leaves and grass and sky. I even borrowed an idea from design school, and cut up a copy of the sketch and rearranged it a bit, leaving out the sky and making the stems longer.

My first attempt at a final drawing didn’t work out so well.

The shapes were way too wobbly. Not what I was after at all. Plus the grass looked more like a picket fence than anything that’s actually growing. And I forgot the leaves. The colors I chose seemed a little garish as well. The bumble bees were good though, so they would stay.

The lines turned out so wobbly because the piece of paper is significantly bigger than the sketchbooks I’m used to working in (8×8 inches vs 5×5 inches). Also there were a lot of straight lines, which are difficult to draw freehand. To overcome this, I decided to work a little differently than I am used to. For the final drawing, I used a pencil first.

This was great because I could erase any wobbliness and make sure it looked just how I wanted. Tracing the pencil lines with ink proved challenging, probably because I’m not really used to it and haven’t practiced tracing a pencil line with a pen as much as I’ve practiced simply drawing with a pen. Even though some of the lines ended up a little wiggly and awkward, it was a lot better than the freehanded ink lines. The pencil provided guidelines and good placement and composition, and probably no one else but me would notice the “imperfections” anyway.

After I got the line drawing finished, I tried a bunch of different color combinations before coloring the final drawing.

I loved the center heart colored red, but wanted an overall soft cheerful look, so I chose some bold and some lighter colors. I also worked out a better solution for the grass.

I was really pleased with the texture I achieved in the grass. It looks a lot more organic, and not at all fence-like.

In the next post I’ll write about the Inchworm Flower drawing.

The four drawings are done! Just in time for little Mia Lillian (my newest niece!) to be born.

The fish under the waves drawing was the most straightforward of all the drawings. From sketch to finished drawing, not much changed, and I didn’t have to fuss with it too much to figure out the colors or the composition.

original sketches, just to refresh your memory

I scanned in the black and white drawing of the final.

The composition is basically the same as the original sketches, except for the school of fish that decided to swim in a slightly different area of the ocean.

The trickiest thing was working on a larger scale.

True, it’s not that much larger. The final drawing was on an 8×8 inch piece of bristol, and my sketchbook is about 5×5 inches, but the size was different enough that I had to draw the waves three times before I got them right.

When the waves finally looked right, then all I had to do was draw the fish and add color.

Especially for the waves, it was great to have a sketch to work from. It was still rather free form in terms of where the different colors were placed, but it was great to have the reference of what colors I used.

When the waves were colored in, I wasn’t sure what color to use for the fish. I thought the blue in the sketch was too dark, but instead of trying out a color for the first time on the final, I made a couple of copies of the drawing and colored in the copies to figure out what color to use. After trying out a few different shades of blue, I decided to try orange. I liked the way it added some extra contrast and cheerful warmth to the composition, so I decided to color the fish orange in final.

This is the first final drawing of the series, and it felt really good to finish it up. In my next post I’ll go over the details of the Heart Flowers drawing.