anika mari

I went to the rancho with the family and there was a good amount of down time, so I started sketching. I’d been admiring the wrought iron work that serve as bars for a lot of windows in Mexico.

A lot prettier than plain iron bars, so I decided to sketch them. At first I copied the different patterns that I saw, but I started to experiment with the same basic shapes and curves all the designs are composed of, but I switched them up from the basic patterns.

Here are the first few sketches I did while at the ranch:

Here are my own variations inspired by the originals:

I liked what I’d come up with, so I decided to take the idea bit further and work with color on a larger piece of paper.

For this image I used brown and red stabilo markers only:

For the blue version of the following pattern, I liked the blue and green, but the lighter stabilo marker that I used for some of the fine lines tends to get lost.  I decided to do another version. For the second version of this pattern I used black for all the fine lines and tried out a few different colors. I used both stabilo and Prisma Color markers:

With the last version, I was satisfied with the overall result and considered this pattern done, at least in sketch book form.