anika mari

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.

In my last post I shared some drawings I’d done, but only the outlines. I went ahead and colored in a few of the images with Prismacolor markers.

First I colored the Fishies Under the Sea Drawing with blues and greens.

I’m particularly happy with how the waves turned out.

Next I used only green markers on the more simple waves-only drawing.

I love these two greens together. I was also really happy with how the light green “sky” turned out. Because the marker is starting to run dry, it’s “juicier” when I first start drawing, which lets me slowly build up color when it doesn’t have as much ink flowing, so I was able to achieve a nice gradient.

As I added color to the “lightning bug” pattern, I intended to fill in the whole thing, but I really liked how it looked after just coloring in a few of the shapes, so I left it that way.

I also drew a few new patterns, and I colored the next one in before scanning in the outline, which wasn’t that exciting.

I am really liking multi-color palettes lately, including this one. I managed to avoid using yellow. I think it’s a little more interesting when you leave at least one color out when using many colors.

Usually I dive right in and add color to my drawings, but I wanted to get digital scans of the line drawings so I can try out different color combinations. I’m working on a little project for my brother James and his wife Rachel (a few drawings for their daughter’s nursery), and I’m not exactly sure what kind of colors they want to use in the room. I might try my hand at digitally coloring them, but if I have the black and white digital files, I can always print them out and color them with markers, not unlike a coloring book.

I’m still not sure of the direction where I’m taking the drawings. James and Rachel picked out a few drawings of mine that they liked, but it wasn’t clear to me how to make a cohesive group of four images, so I’ve been fleshing out some drawings, and coming up with new ideas.

I worked a little more on the “Heart Flowers” drawing.

I think the little bees are so cute!

I think the stems of the flowers need to be a little longer in proportion to the grass, but I like where it’s heading. The clouds are similar to some of the cloud drawings I’ve been working on (see below), which might work or might not depending on what happens with the other drawings.

From the original clouds drawing, I made the composition more like a landscape, which matches the heart flowers drawing a little better. I used the rain texture from another raincloud drawing.

It seems a little overworked to me, so I next tried a more simplified approach.

I think the rain could be “lightened up” a bit, but I really love the clouds.

With the landscape idea in mind, I tried to figure out another image to draw. The ocean came to mind, and I drew some waves that were inspired by the cloud texture.

The waves on the bottom didn’t leave much room for anything, except for maybe some clouds, which didn’t seem too exciting to me. I thought it would be cute to work in some little fish, so I drew another set of waves, this time toward the top of the paper.

I got in the swing of things after drawing so much, and I came up with a new pattern.

I think it’s really cute, and reminds me of lightning bugs, which would fit in with the nature-theme of the nursery, so maybe there’s a way to work them in? Who knows! Things are still a little scattered, but I’m sure I’ll get there eventually, and I’m having fun doing it!

My brother James and his wife Rachel are expecting their first baby. They are in the process of picking out stuff to decorate the room, and they’ve asked me if I’d make a four drawings to be a main feature in the room. Since the theme is nature inspired, this is right up my alley. It so happens that Rachel really likes a few recent drawings from my new sketchbook.

Some of the original drawings are more “finished” than others, but I’m going to use them all as jumping off points, so I’ll alter them a bit to work cohesively has a group, more or less.

The two favorites are “Hearts” and “Citrus”.

The third will either be “Peach Flowers” or “Pebble Flowers”.

I’m leaning toward “Pebble Flowers” but we’ll see how it evolves.

The last one will probably be based on the “Clouds” sketch.

I’m thinking about incorporating some rain from a previous “Little Rain Cloud” drawing that I did a while back.

This should be a really fun project, and I’m looking forward to pulling it all together. Although I’ve been making an effort to complete “finished” work lately, these will probably be the first of my drawings to actually get framed, which is pretty exciting.