anika mari

Theme three for the Creativity Boot Camp was “multilayered”. I didn’t have a hard set idea when I sat down to draw the theme. I know that I wanted to experiment with layering colors, more than creating an image that looked multilayered, but I ended up doing both.

I started with pink and colored in the entire paper. Then I chose another pink, and colored over the first layer of color. The second pink was a different brand of marker. Usually I stick with Prismacolor markers (though I’m thinking about making the switch to copics as my prismacolors run out), but I also have a couple Chartpak markers that I never use because they bleed pretty badly on every paper I’ve tried so far.

I decided that since it was a broad area of color, and the edges weren’t all that important, and I like the shade of pink, that I’d use my pink Chartpak marker for the second color. Ooo boy, I forgot how stinky Chartpak markers are! The fumes smell like gasoline mixed with nail polish remover. It did the job of getting color on the paper, but next time, if there is a next time, I’ll have to remember to go outside to use it. Even an hour later, the paper still stinks!

Ok, moving on. I used several shades of blue, layered over the pink. This produced various shades of purple, as one might expect. I also used a green color, but I didn’t like it so much, so I tried to cover it over as much as I could with a darker gray.

Once the colors were down, I added some additional texture with pencil, layering lines over some of the colors.

Since I can never do something just once, I did a version in blues and greens, working in the exact same manner. I started with a background of blue, and then layered various other blues and greens on top. I also added some pencil lines for texture, but they are a little more wiggly than the lines I drew in the pink drawing.

This was a pretty simple interpretation of the theme, but I’m happy with it. It was fun to play around with layering the colors, and it might be a really interesting technique to work with in the future. Layering colors definitely expands my color choices.

I’m also happy with the way the pencil and marker looks together. Pencil is something I’ve used mostly to lay out compositions before I go back and ink in the lines, so for the boot camp I wanted to push myself to use pencil as a more primary tool. So far so good. I don’t know that it’ll replace my beloved pen and ink, but it will definitely be a great tool to incorporate when suitable.

The next theme is heavy metal. I have no idea what I’m going to draw, but I’m sure I’ll come up with something!