anika mari

Whenever I let someone flip through my sketchbook, more often than not, I’m surprised by what grabs their attention. I draw all kinds of stuff when I sketch, from rough sketches to little doodles to more finished drawings. Some of my drawings are pretty, some are kind of ugly, some are surprising, and some turn out just plain weird. Sometimes I draw stuff that I think is unremarkable, and yet sometimes that’s what gets the remarks.

When my friend Anita recently wanted some of my art framed for her new apartment, I let her choose whatever she wanted. As she flipped through my sketchbook she singled out a page of doodles that surprised me because I think they are a little odd, though perhaps somewhat endearing.

I looked at it quizzically, and she surprised me even more by the particular part she liked the most. She pointed it out, and all I could ask was, “really?”

Without hesitation she replied, “yeah. I like it. I think it’s totally my style. Don’t you?”

“Well, yeah, I can see your point,” was my response.

I probed a little further, “you really want that framed?”

“Yes, absolutely!” she assured me.

After my raised eyebrows had relaxed, I went ahead and redrew the weird creature and plants to fix up the composition a bit. I moved the creature up a smidge from the plants to balance the spacing, and changed the line quality just a bit. I also added more stippling here and there and made the critter’s “beard” longer.

Anita also chose a companion drawing.

I’d say it’s a little less odd, but I’m pretty sure she loves it just as much, and I think they will look really nice hung together in her new place.

Skeptical though I was to begin, I was actually pleasantly surprised when all was said and done. I think both drawings look really sharp in the frame, and they will undoubtedly be interesting conversation pieces hanging in Anita’s new apartment.

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.