anika mari

I had to spend a couple of days working intently on a web design project, but today I had some time to get back to the Creativity Boot Camp themes, and I finished up a drawing for the theme, “grow”.

This is the first year I’ve really paid attention to how seeds grow into plants, and I was amazed to discover that the first pair of leaves that sprout up are practically identical for all plants, and that it’s the second set of leaves that are unique to the variety. I was completely charmed by the miniature leaves, and kept exclaiming deeply insightful gems such as, “wow these little chard leaves look just like big chard leaves, only tiny!” and “look at these mini-parsley leaves! you can really tell that it’s parsley!”

Although you might not have guessed it from those excited comments, I do know a thing or two about plants and gardening. I find it completely fantastic that I can still be surprised and learn new things.

When the theme of “grow” came up, the first idea that sprang to mind was to represent my new discovery, so it was just a matter of having the time to do it.

I first drew the little plants in pencil, outlined them in black, and then filled in the leaves with various shades of green.

Shown are swiss chard, parsley, nasturtium, and basil seedlings. After scanning in the drawing, it seemed too flat, so I added some details to the leaves.

Adding detail was a good call since it makes the plants a whole lot easier to identify in the drawing, at least in my mind. I briefly thought about filling a pen with white ink to draw the lines on the nasturtium, but the desire to just get it done won out.

At some point I realized that the drawing was perfect for a repeat pattern, and it was more than halfway there already. In Photoshop the only adjustment I had to make was to the positioning of some of the individual plants in order to get the repeated pattern to look balanced.

I repeated the pattern once more to get an idea of what it would look like smaller.

I’m very happy with the result, especially since I didn’t specifically set out to make a pattern, but to simply draw my interpretation of “grow”. In the drawing itself, I’m most satisfied with the swiss chard. I think the basil and parsley could be a little better, but they are ok for now.

I’m looking forward to working on the next theme which is “fluid”. I have a couple of ideas, but I’m not totally sure about which direction I’m going to take just yet.

So many ideas popped into my head for the Heavy Metal theme from the Creativity Boot Camp. All of them involved actual metal things, from anchors, to gears, to jewelry. Perhaps all obvious interpretations of the theme, but at this point I’ve decided to be more committed to the process than to having a unique idea for a jumping off point. With a little luck, in the process of creating the drawing, perhaps something unexpected will evolve, as I’m happy to say happened as I was working on this theme.

I decided to go with chain as the imagery for this drawing. Luckily I live in a house that literally has everything, so when I needed chain, I got chain. I found a big bucket full of various weights and styles. Some was really rusty and some was super shiny. I settled on one in the middle; a heavy weight chain that was a little weathered, but still had some shine.

As I was working I decided to flatten the drawing, and not focus on the shading. The fact that it was a bit shiny comes into play later. The first step was to get the outline of the shapes in place.

I had to really push the contrast of the image so the lines were visible, so it’s a bit grittier than it really was. The most fascinating thing I experienced when drawing the chain was how the shapes and lines intersected in unexpected ways. When it comes to certain shapes, like chain, I have an idea of how it’s put together, and if I didn’t actually look at real chain, I would draw it in an entirely different manner. Working from the real thing, I was able to take my time and examine how a bundle of chain really looks. I guess that’s the fun part of all drawing, but I found it particularly satisfying with this subject.

Originally I thought I’d use gray marker and do some shading to bring out the shapes and show the depth of the chain, but after I had the outlines set, I remembered that I had some metallic pens. Now I’m thinking gold would have been fun to use, but at the time I only considered silver.

The silver marker was very opaque, so it covered over all of my faint graphite lines. I admit I was surprised by how different the pattern looked without the defining outlines that showed the individual links. I could still tell it was chain, but it was so much less obvious. I liked the flatness, but I really wanted to see the shapes of the links in the chain, so I re-drew the outlines.

I’m amazed by how different it looks with just a few slightly darker lines. At this point all I had left was the background and I was torn between using a bright hot pink and a dark gun metal gray. I went with the pink.

The scan is definitely a lot more muted than the original. In person the silver is incredibly shiny and the pink is super bright, bordering on florescent, and the combination of the two almost makes the drawing unsettling look at. I decided to use photoshop to adjust the colors a bit to see what it might have looked like with the gray background.

Since I don’t know what the gray would have actually looked like next to the overly shiny silver, I’m not really sure which I like better. Do you have a favorite?

As I was working on the chain drawing, one of the things I started to think about was the shininess of the metal, and how in general, that’s an inherent quality of metal. I took a moment to look at the chain differently, focusing only on the highlights. That’s when I had the idea to draw a version of only the highlights.

Again, I had to boost the contrast a lot to get the outlines to show up. I decided to forgo the silver, and instead use the gun metal gray I’d thought about using for the background of the first chain drawing.

When coloring in a background of a pattern with prismacolor markers, I have to work as fast as possible to achieve a smooth finish. If the “edge” of the marker line dries, and you color over it again, that edge will show through. As long as you can keep the edge “wet,” you can blend the color and avoid variations in tone.

It’s hard enough to achieve this with larger patterns, and I found that with such small shapes scattered all over the paper, the task was almost impossible. Not to mention the fact that by working so fast, I wasn’t as careful as I should have been around the white shapes, and ended up losing some of the detail.

After trying, for a few minutes, to make the background smooth, I noticed that an uneven background would actually compliment the jagged shapes pretty nicely. I slowed down a bit, and stopped attempting to get a perfectly smooth background, which probably would have been nearly impossible anyway.

I’m very pleased with how both drawings turned out. The pink and silver chain drawing is a fun, bright pattern that was very satisfying to work on. The mottled background of the highlights drawing was the perfect solution, and I’m happy that as I was working on the theme, I did indeed come to a unique solution with unexpected results.

The next theme is “grow,” but I’m not sure I’ll have time to work on it today. Lots of other Sunday stuff to do. So much for getting caught up over the weekend. I’ll just keep working at it, slowly but surely.

Theme three for the Creativity Boot Camp was “multilayered”. I didn’t have a hard set idea when I sat down to draw the theme. I know that I wanted to experiment with layering colors, more than creating an image that looked multilayered, but I ended up doing both.

I started with pink and colored in the entire paper. Then I chose another pink, and colored over the first layer of color. The second pink was a different brand of marker. Usually I stick with Prismacolor markers (though I’m thinking about making the switch to copics as my prismacolors run out), but I also have a couple Chartpak markers that I never use because they bleed pretty badly on every paper I’ve tried so far.

I decided that since it was a broad area of color, and the edges weren’t all that important, and I like the shade of pink, that I’d use my pink Chartpak marker for the second color. Ooo boy, I forgot how stinky Chartpak markers are! The fumes smell like gasoline mixed with nail polish remover. It did the job of getting color on the paper, but next time, if there is a next time, I’ll have to remember to go outside to use it. Even an hour later, the paper still stinks!

Ok, moving on. I used several shades of blue, layered over the pink. This produced various shades of purple, as one might expect. I also used a green color, but I didn’t like it so much, so I tried to cover it over as much as I could with a darker gray.

Once the colors were down, I added some additional texture with pencil, layering lines over some of the colors.

Since I can never do something just once, I did a version in blues and greens, working in the exact same manner. I started with a background of blue, and then layered various other blues and greens on top. I also added some pencil lines for texture, but they are a little more wiggly than the lines I drew in the pink drawing.

This was a pretty simple interpretation of the theme, but I’m happy with it. It was fun to play around with layering the colors, and it might be a really interesting technique to work with in the future. Layering colors definitely expands my color choices.

I’m also happy with the way the pencil and marker looks together. Pencil is something I’ve used mostly to lay out compositions before I go back and ink in the lines, so for the boot camp I wanted to push myself to use pencil as a more primary tool. So far so good. I don’t know that it’ll replace my beloved pen and ink, but it will definitely be a great tool to incorporate when suitable.

The next theme is heavy metal. I have no idea what I’m going to draw, but I’m sure I’ll come up with something!

Day two of the Creativity Boot Camp, and I was a bit stumped. I had lots of ideas, but they all seemed so obvious. When I’m faced with a project like this, I try my best to come at it from another perspective, not just go with the literal imagery that tends to pop up right away. Usually if I give it enough time a unique idea will surface, but not this time. All I could think of were sandwiches and paper plates and ground cloths and ants.

I wanted to stick with the schedule of the boot camp, so I went ahead and created a few drawings. Since I couldn’t think of any ground breaking ideas, I decided to approach the assignment in the simplest way. To boil it down to the basic elements.

So what are the basic elements that I would need for a perfect picnic? I quickly discarded the ants because they would not make my picnic perfect. Soon I had four essential ingredients for any lovely picnic.

Bright blue sky and puffy white clouds would indicate sunny weather that wasn’t too hot.

Soft green grass to walk on barefoot, and on which to set up the picnic would provide a comfortable setting.

A pretty ground cloth would add a touch of color and cheerfulness to the gathering.

A basket filled with yummy food would be the most essential part–otherwise it wouldn’t be a picnic!

Not only did I simplify the theme to basic elements, I also simplified the drawings to be representations of the items in pattern form.

I was happy with the outcome, and I was glad to finish the drawings on time. The next day, however, something was tugging at the corner of my mind, and it wasn’t ideas for the next boot camp theme.

You see, I actually did have a different original idea for “picnic”. It involved lines of ants inter-weaving to create an intricate pattern that might resemble a doily or some fine china, but I discarded the idea almost immediately for 2 reasons: ants seemed obvious, and I didn’t want the final image to look too much like the drawing I’d just finished the day before for the theme of ivory.

It wasn’t until I was discussing the Creativity Boot Camp with my brother and sister-in-law that I realized I should have gone with my original idea. I mentioned the drawing with ants that I never drew, and they both thought it sounded great. The more I thought about it, I came to see that I had been hasty in moving on from the idea, and decided that it would probably look pretty neat. Far from obvious, it would have been a unique interpretation of the theme.

I spent the following 2 days drawing little ants, letting the pattern evolve as I worked.

I drew all the little “bodies” first, and then I added the legs. As I was drawing the legs, I liked how it looked like the ants were invading the pattern; maybe crawling onto a plate looking for crumbs. I decided to limit the number of complete ants (bodies + legs) to maintain the feeling of a crawling invasion of ants.

Although spending so much time on this second iteration of the picnic theme has now set me back on three new Creativity Boot Camp themes, I really like the result, and I’m so glad I saw it through.

I think both picnic solutions are a representation of my style, but I particularly like the ants drawing because I pushed myself in a different direction.

The next theme is “multilayered” and at this point I’m actually considering trying to continue the radial-pattern-style drawing throughout the boot camp. I realize that I might hit a road block if there’s a theme that I just can’t figure out how to fit into a circular format, but I’m up for the challenge, and I can remain flexible and change it up if I need to.

Yesterday I started Creativity Bootcamp. It’s the first time it’s ever been held, so I was probably not the only one who didn’t know what to expect.

Our first assignment was to create something to do with the inspiration prompt, “ivory”.

I saw the word and had no idea of what I would do. I had to get ready to catch a movie with a friend, so I set the whole thing aside for the moment. Luckily I had a half hour drive to get to the theater. When I’m driving, my creative gears always start turning. I have my best ideas and insights in the car. I came up with so many different ideas. Some were way to involved to possibly finish in a day, so as I was driving back, I thougth, “ok, you have to think of something simple.”

I got home and didn’t have much oomph left in me with which to create something, so I watched some tv. At about 11:30 I decided to go to bed, and as I was passing my creative work area, I had the internal conversation that ended up with me sitting down to work on the theme. Three and a half hours later, I was finally finished.

So much for simple!

The idea behind this piece was to emulate ivory carvings which area often so incredibly intricate, I can’t imagine that a person actually made them. My drawing isn’t at the same level of intricacy as some true ivory works, but it took long enough anyway! Plus it’s elephant friendly.

This drawing is slightly lighter than the original. I got a closer match with another version of the image, but I liked the lighter tone, especially considering the theme.

Late at night, waiting for the image to scan, I absent mindedly started doodling, and ended up with a sketchy version that’s kind of similar to the original drawing.

I’m aware that making the sketch second is a little backward from what might typically be expected, but sometimes a backward step can still be a step in the right direction.

I’m looking forward for inspiration to strike about today’s theme of “picnic”. My first idea was ants, but I want to see if I can push it a little further, but don’t be surprised if you see ants here tomorrow!