I’ve made a commitment to myself to spend some more time with family and friends, so this fortnight, I went and spent some time drawing with my niece. I had two design ideas locked and loaded, as it were, so I printed out some inspiration photos to bring with me. I gave Miss R first choice – she chose the bumble bees and clover, so I had the Kererū. Here are some of our inspiration photos.
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We worked on blocking in the major elements of a composition, looking at relative scale, and how you interpret what your eye sees and use it as inspiration for a design, rather than copying (or tracing!!) exactly what you see.
People seem to assume that I draw my images by tracing, or drawing over a photo in a different layer of an image editing programme, but I draw on paper by eye. If I superimpose my sketches over one of the inspiration photographs, this becomes very apparent!
People seem to assume that I draw my images by tracing, or drawing over a photo in a different layer of an image editing programme, but I draw on paper by eye. If I superimpose my sketches over one of the inspiration photographs, this becomes very apparent!
Kererū
I worked on paper and combined several inspiration pictures into a single design, starting with a pencil sketch, which I then inked.
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As usual, I scanned and coloured the images using MS Paint, but this was a much more complex composition – usually, it takes me around half a day to take a design from initial scan to completion, but these took almost four times as long.
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This is a much more involved repeat than I usually use, so it took a lot of fiddling to get it where I wanted it to be. I used placeholder colours to help differentiate between the different zones while I constructed the design. Once I had a final version, I worked on the ‘real’ colours.
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And after I finalised the colour scheme for the main design, I added in background colours and patterns.
Clover and bumble bees – Miss R’s version
Meanwhile, my niece had created and inked her two-page repeat. I took the drawing home, scanned it, joined it up, and this is what we had:
To demonstrate for her how the next step can work, I coloured it, created a more complex repeat using the elements of her design, and uploaded it to Spoonflower so that she could see how it would look.
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Next time, we will swap inspiration packs – or even do something different again – but at least now Miss R understands how to design a repeating pattern, so she can take much more control over the process in future. I look forward to seeing what else she comes up with!
In the meantime, look out for the new Kererū design as jewellery and fabric, and even colourables, soon!
Really interesting learning a bit more about how you do what you do. Love the designs too!
Thanks, Alison! It’s great motivation to know that people enjoy reading about my process 🙂 I really appreciate the support.
The flora and fauna is an interesting place for artists to find tranquility and sketch whatever their heart desires. The colors which it encompasses is a natural way for our mother Earth to be depicted austere. The captivating sight of our shared environment should be immortalized for generations to come. Sketching can be a way to provide everyone a chance for visualization. I remember the day when I visited our camping site. All we did that everyone was to draw the majestic beauty of nature.