anika mari

From this:

to this:

Find out how I got from the first to the second on my new blog!

After framing 11 pieces of art for my friend Anita, I definitely needed some creative down time. Ideas for drawings have come in fits and spurts lately, but I have come up with a few images that are worth sharing.

Working on a 6×6in piece of bristol, I doodled a little pattern that looks like pennants.

Sometimes a color combination will occur to me, and I’ll get hooked on it, and I’ll get no rest until I do something with those colors. In my mind, light pink and inky blue had to get on the same piece of paper. Overall it’s a very delicate drawing, and maybe the colors aren’t all that noticeable, but it fit the bill this time.

I also did some loose shadow drawings. I wasn’t totally committed to the process, and I ended up just scribbling them in my gridded sketchbook. That turned out to be a happy accident in a way, since the grid paper adds a dimension to the drawings that I quite like. I filled several pages, but a lot of them just seemed overly complicated to me. I started to color one in, but it wasn’t really going anywhere good, so I stopped.

There were a couple drawings that I kind of liked, even though there was a lot going on, but I couldn’t decide what colors to use, let alone how I wanted to color them in.

As they are, I think they look kind of interesting because of the bleed through from the previous pages drawings.

I did a drawing that was very experimental that turned out kind of, meh.

Despite a few false starts, a few made the grade and got colored in.

Heart Map (can anyone guess the source object of this drawing??)

Green on Squares

uncharted

scattered

The last drawing is not strictly a shadow drawing, but it was inspired by them. After producing so many overwrought scribbles, I wanted to draw something calmer. Something with transparency.

As a whole I like the drawings, especially as a set.

I’m shifting gears a little bit in my art and work life. I’ve decided to take the summer to learn how to build websites, so that’s been taking up a lot of my time lately. Making art is still a priority, and I hope to work it into my schedule once I get a handle on the basics of html & css. I might be backtracking into the past a little bit on this blog, reflecting on some art that’s been done for a while that I never wrote about before, but I should have some new stuff coming up too.

A few days ago I finished up a watercolor painting that I wasn’t satisfied with. I decided that I’d add some drawing to the pod shapes in the hopes of salvaging the piece.

I started by doing some sketches to figure out what patterns to use on the final painting. I worked with variations on a scalloped pattern, some simple, and some a little more complex.

Because I am planning to redo the same composition for another watercolor painting to try to get the original effect that I was after, I used a pencil and some tracing paper to copy the shapes.

When the outlines were traced, I thought it would be a good idea to try out some more variations of the scalloped pattern.

The above photo didn’t turn out great because it was back lit and the paper is translucent. It was windy so I have to use a lot of clothes pins to get it to hang straight, but I thought it looked kind of neat.

I put off drawing on the watercolor for several days because I got distracted by a few other drawing projects, plus I hadn’t decided exactly what patterns to draw. Finally I just went ahead and started. As I filled in the pods, I decided to vary the size and shallowness of the scallops.

The result is definitely what I was after. In a way it amuses me that I spent as much time as I did working on preliminary sketches, but I suppose it helped me rule out the more elaborate variations, and probably did influence the final result. In any case, I like it, and I consider the painting salvaged!