May 5, 2010
Four Drawings, Heart Flowers
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.