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.

This is going to be the final post in what turned out to be a little series about the drawings I recently framed for my friend, Anita. In the process of preparing and framing the works for her new apartment, I had quite a few insights about my work. I discovered that some doodles I overlook completely can be the bees knees in someone else’s eyes. I also realized that if a sketch ain’t broke, there’s no need to fix it. However, sometimes the plan I have in mind for a drawing, might be just the ticket.

And now that I’m finished talking in idioms, we can move on.

The final lesson I took from the experience was how to enlarge a drawing. Although the steps to get a bigger version of a small drawing didn’t stir any philosophical ponderings within me, it was an interesting process in and of itself.

After scanning in the original drawing in two parts (it was a small drawing, but bigger than my scanner bed), I lined up the two images in photoshop as closely as I could. I was surprised by how off the images were, even though I kept the paper as flat and square to the edge of the scanner as possible. No matter how I nudged or budged, the images just wouldn’t line up perfectly.

Then I remembered the scale to which I was enlarging it, and I realized that it wouldn’t really matter. I cropped the image to the appropriate size for my large paper, and then used a trick I learned in design school to import the image into InDesign so I could tile and print out the large size image on 8.5×11 sheets of paper. It was only a matter of cutting and taping the pages in the right order, and before I knew it i had a large, tiled version of my original drawing.

original drawing, 11×14in

tiled version, 20×30in

After I had the tiled, full size printout, I carefully attached sheets of graphite transfer paper to the back. Graphite transfer paper is similar to carbon paper, but since it’s graphite, you can erase any lines you don’t want in the final drawing.

back of tiled drawing, shows graphite paper, after tracing

After affixing the tiled printout to the final paper with removable tape, the most tedious part of the process began: tracing all the lines! After tracing and removing the tiled paper, I could clearly see all the outlines of the drawing in gray graphite. Then I had to trace all the lines again! this time with pen!

final outlines, 20×30in

I complain, but really it didn’t take all that long in the grand scheme of things, and once I had the outlines, the fun part started: adding the colors!

first red, then spanish orange was added

next up, mineral orange, followed by tulip yellow and cream

At this stage there was only mulberry and some line texture to add before the drawing was finished.

finished drawing, 20×30in

Looking at the detail you can get a good sense of the colors and line quality.

final 20×30in, detail

Positioning the original and enlarged version side by side was pretty awesome. I was happy with how well the image held up at the larger size. Because the paper was different, the markers (i used the very same colors on the small drawing) showed up more saturated, lending a bolder feel to the larger piece, which the size handles well.

final, 20×30in and original, 11×14in

What was more awesome still was seeing the final large drawing in the frame.

This is the first time I’ve enlarged one of my drawings, and it was really fun. I’ve been wanting to produce large, bold pieces of art lately, but because I’m more comfortable drawing on a smaller scale, that’s what I tend to do.

Small pieces of paper, or even a sketchbook are easy, accessible and don’t need a lot of space to work on. Plus, because I’ve done so much drawing at a small scale, my drawing hand is used to it! I’ve drawn on larger pieces of paper, but it never seems to have the same feel, and I never seem to be as satisfied with the outcome.

While I intend to keep practicing drawings directly on larger format paper, the process of enlarging smaller drawings may be a good way for me to draw within my comfort zone and still have a large drawing as the final product.

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Just as a little side note, there were just a few other drawings that I framed for Anita that didn’t make it into my blog posts. If you are curious to see what rounds out the collection of drawings she chose, on flickr you can see: a sketch of a house plant in a pot, an interpretation of a tropical flowering tree, and three unlikely plants.

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.