anika mari

After experimenting with stone prints, I tried something similar with a big piece of shell.

The surface was very uneven, and there was a big hole going right through. I wasn’t sure how well it would make contact with the surface of the paper, but decided to try it out.

Want to see how it turned out? Go read the full post on my new blog.

An artist friend of mine commented on the recent stone print I completed and mentioned that she never would have thought of doing it. She then expressed and interest in borrowing my brain for a day. Well, I’m not sure how I’d lend out my brain, but it got me to thinking about what thought processes I went through when creating the stone print, and I realized I glossed over those thoughts in the last post. Consider this a little expansion.

The process that I undertook when creating the stone print embraces the randomness that comes when in the midst of creating art. When I set about to create a new piece, I generally have one of two starting points: either I have a subject I want to depict, or I have a set of steps that I want to take. While the former sometimes incorporates some of the random unfolding of ideas, the main distinction is the spark of the idea. When I start a painting or drawing with process in mind, generally the results tend to be more abstract, and I have no idea what I’ll end up with when I’m finished.

When starting a process focused piece, I might begin with a framework in mind, as I did when creating the black and white drawing below, or the recent tapestry drawing I completed.

in this drawing I started with the v shaped framework and added the details as I drew

The other starting point is a specific kind of mark that I want to make, and the piece unfolds from there. That’s what I did when creating the stone prints–I decided that I wanted to see what would happen if I painted a stone with watercolor and pressed it onto paper.

After the print marks were dry, I added the “cocoons” around some of them, only because they looked a little bare, and not as round as some of the other prints.

I added the lines because there were a few little splattered drops of watercolor that had landed here and there, and I used them as starting points from which I drew lines to connect to nearby stone prints. Can you spy the little green dots from which the swooping lines are drawn?

I filled in the resulting shapes with gray watercolor because the compositions needed a little more weight; something to anchor the piece together.

Hopefully that provides a little more insight into the inner workings of what my brain is doing when I’m making art. It’s not very mysterious; generally I just take it step by step, responding to whatever happened previously, but I must admit, sometimes the results surprise even me!

In my last post I shared several recent watercolors, and mentioned that I wanted to enlarge the one titled, “Tapestry”. Well, the idea stuck, and this weekend, I did just that.

I used the same method for enlarging this drawing as I’ve done before. It wasn’t quite as big as my last enlarged drawing, so I only had four letter sized sheets of paper to piece together. The tracing was limited to the basic framework, leaving the detailed line-work to be done freehand, so that part went very quickly. It wasn’t until I’d traced over most of the graphite lines with pen that I thought of taking a photo!

I started this process late on Friday night but managed to finish tracing the graphite lines with ink before heading to bed. Waking up to a relatively cool and breezy morning inspired me to sit in the shade to freehand the details.

While adding the textured detail, I made a few “mistakes” like drawing the right pattern of lines in the wrong triangle or drawing the right pattern of lines in the right triangle, but in the wrong direction. For this drawing those mistakes don’t really matter so much. There is some repetition, but what really makes the drawing more interesting are the variations. They warrant a second look and further investigation of the piece, and that’s never a bad thing.

With the ink lines in place, I moved onto the color. The original was a watercolor painting, but I didn’t have any thick, large paper on hand that could handle the water, so I decided to match the colors using Prismacolor markers.

The orange was pretty similar right out of the marker, but to get the right greens and brown I had to layer several different markers. Although not an exact match, I’m happy with the result considering how close I got to the colors using a totally different medium.

The only thing missing was the depth and variation of the watercolor. The orange in particular was very flat (maybe because I didn’t have to layer other colors to get the right hue?) and was asking for a little something extra. I wasn’t really sure what to add, so instead of forging ahead on the original, I doodled on the tiled printout and tried out several different options.

For the final drawing, I chose to add one single black line along each of the edges of the orange triangles. The simple addition added just the right amount of variance without distracting from the rest of the piece.

I must say I’m very fond of the doodled-on printout. Although the doodled additions to many of the colored triangles don’t really fit with the piece as a whole, it was a lot of fun to be so spontaneous. Art is becoming a balance between planning and spontaneity for me.

The original Tapestry painting was completely spontaneous, without much planning beyond the initial idea. In the process of enlarging the painting, there is a lot of planning, and for the most part my path is set. I just have to go through the steps. Maybe one day I’ll feel confident to be spontaneous on my larger pieces, but for now, I was really glad to have the less precious printout on which to experiment.

Once I’d figured out what I wanted to add to the colored triangles, I quickly finished the drawing. Initially I planned to add the same line detail to all the colored triangles, but once I drew the lines in the orange triangles, the piece felt finished.

In the detail below you can see the lines I added to the orange.

When you look at the original and the enlarged version side by side you can notice some of the differences and “mistakes” I made on the larger version. Click on the image to go to flickr to check out the details a little larger.

After working on the large drawing for so long, I was surprised by how weird it felt to look at the original painting which once seemed to have such a bold presence. Now it feels almost absurdly puny; but I still love it anyway.

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.