anika mari

In my last post I wrote about my subconscious tendency to polish sketches to make them suitable as final drawings. Now I’m starting to realize that the sketchiness might be what is so endearing about certain drawings, but there are still cases where polishing is in order.

While I was in Saipan last summer, I worked mostly with watercolor. Often I would then go back and add ink drawing to the painting. In my entry about pods from about a year ago, you can see that after I had the watercolor painting done, I did a number of sketches to figure out what drawings to add to the pods.

Especially in the large image, above, you can see that this is truly a sketch. There is a lot of similarity of pattern among the different pods, and I even drew arrows so you could see the progression of thought of how the pattern evolved.

When my friend Anita chose these as one of the pieces she wanted framed, I liked the idea right away, but I wanted to redraw the pods so that there would be more variety in pattern.

I actually liked the arrangement of the pods of each drawing (a little off, but somehow perfect in their imperfection), so I loosely traced the pods from the 3 sketches, and then I had a lot of fun filling them in.

Obviously I copied some of the patterns I’d already created. As Anita said, “the elephant is a must!” It was fun, and sometimes a wee bit challenging to come up with new patterns to add, but in the end the effort was worth it. I think the drawings turned out really great. Although, I must admit, there’s part of me that wonders if someone out there thinks the sketches are better! Still, deep down, I know I found the best solution for this particular piece.

I framed it in a ready-made triptych frame from IKEA’s Ribba series.

I think it looks pretty dynamite, so I’m going to frame a set of these drawings for myself too!