Another two-fer

The gentians started blooming in a new garden I'm making.  I wanted to draw them yesterday but didn't have a chance to cut a few so I made do with an online photo:

Today I sat out in the garden beside the scabiosa caucasica 'Alba' and sketched.  I think it has such pretty flowers.  The plants are taking a long time to establish themselves in my garden, which makes every blossom that much more precious.  It's breezy out so I was holding the stem still with one hand and drawing with the other, arms crisscrossed because the plant had to be on my right and I'm handed.  Challenging!

Two for one

Today I'm posting work from two separate days: Wednesday and today.

I really enjoyed drawing the clematis earlier this week so on Wednesday I decided to draw something else that's blooming in the garden: a variegated honeysuckle called 'Mint Crisp'.  When choosing it I didn't give a thought to the fragrance so I was surprised to notice how immensely enjoyable it was to have that delicious scent to bask in while sketching.

I also wanted to experiment with the watercolors on silk but didn't know what to paint, so I decided to do a painted version of the same honeysuckle branch:

Not awesome, but I think kind of interesting to see a sketch turned into a painting.

This morning it's pouring and I didn't want to venture into the garden in search of subject matter so I chose a photo of lisianthus to sketch.  I kept getting interrupted, losing my place and having a hard time finding it again so the second flower I drew (the top one) is not as good as the first.   It's frustrating to make something and feel I could do better but I'm trying to let it go and share nonetheless.

Clematis 'Paul Farges'

I'm back from my trip to visit family and have been experimenting with some new art materials, mostly to do with painting on fabric.  While waiting for a coat of antifusant to dry on silk, I decided to draw a stem of clematis 'Paul Farges', since it's flowering exuberantly now in my garden and needs to be cut back anyway.

Usually my drawings are based on 2D images I've found, often online.  Now I want to concentrate more on drawing from life.  I initially shied away from it because it's harder to go from 3D to 2D and from a frame-less composition to something that's already been framed by the edges of a page.  But drawing from life will let me be much more inventive so I think it's important to focus my attention there.

Random toucan

I'm not feeling inspired to start a big project today because I'm going out of town tomorrow for a week and it seems like an awful lot of gearing up just to gear right back down again.  Instead, I've been doing a lot of sketching.  Here's something I drew:

As you can see, I'm trying to go a little darker with the pencil and add some shading.

The completed pattern...and playing with new markers

Here's how I'm leaving the pattern I've been working on, for the time being:

I need a little distance to evaluate it and I think the next step might be blowing it up so that it's at least four times bigger.  And then really going true black in the shaded pencil areas.  But first I need a break.

Speaking of going true black, I made a trip to my favorite art supply store yesterday and picked up a half dozen black sketch markers and artists pens that another blogger recommended.  This afternoon I tried them out.  I've never used those kinds of markers before....ones with a very flexible, almost feathery tip that's more like a paintbrush than a pencil.  It was interesting to see that they have different "personalities".  I was most drawn to the feel of the Copic Sketch.  Here are a couple of flower doodles that I did with it, mostly trying to get the hang of using it: you need to work much faster (more decisively) than I'm used to and it wants to create very bold marks so I find it a challenge to translate a feeling of delicacy. 

Day 7 of work on a bigger pattern

Here's today's progress:

I'm glad to be working on the bottom part of the pattern at last because it means the end is in sight.  I'm not sure I love the "filling" inside the larger paisley on the right.  The space looked really empty to me when it was all black so I added the little vaguely floral motifs in three vertical columns but then I realized that they needed to be connected to each other and to the outside white area or they would be lost if the pattern were turned into a stencil.  So I added the vertical stripes to connect them all.  Now I'm not so sure I like those stripes which seem a bit bar-like to me.  Maybe if they were narrower? Or maybe I should have just made the inner scalloped edge of the paisley wider so that there was less dark space in the center.  Hmmm.

Day 6 of work on a bigger pattern

Day 5 of work on a bigger pattern

I'm still working away at the same paisley border pattern. 

It's slower going than I would have guessed and there are sessions where filling in the dark areas is tedious.  (For the next pattern I do, I'm investing in some markers to make laying in blocks of color quicker.)  That said, I think doing this in pencil has been necessary for me in this instance, since I've changed my mind many times as the pattern has evolved and once the lines are filled in with marker, they're fixed.  As you can see, I had to add an extra piece of paper at the bottom of the sheet I was working on, as the page I had wasn't quite long enough.  (I realized it at the end of Day 1 but didn't want to start over and lose what I'd already sketched.) 

This afternoon I was trying to figure out the outline of the larger paisley on the right.  It's challenging figuring out which elements to include and which to leave out: the pattern is complex and I want it to feel intricate but I'm just working with continuous cut-outs, which is to say that most elements of the pattern need to be joined without losing their individual feel.  I also need to make sure that all the white areas in the design connect because they'll be the solid material (the dark areas will be the voids).  I know it will take some tweaking at the end to get the positive and negative space right but hopefully I can pull it off so it's functional.

Day 3 of work on a bigger pattern

Here's how the drawing is shaping up with a bit more graphite on the page:

Day 2 of work on a bigger pattern

Here's the progress I made today on the paisley border print that I started yesterday.

A bigger pattern

I've been feeling a bit dissatisfied with the progress of my current big project.  This past weekend, after reflecting on the reasons why, I decided that what would help would be to get some bigger, thicker sheets of paper, set one up on my drafting board and try to work out a more complete pattern idea.  I'm not sure that the size of the paper I'm using now satisfies me yet, but it's a start. (24"x 16", possibly.) 

There's an embroidered silk fabric that I've loved for a long time so I thought I'd focus on adapting that pattern so that it could work as a design that could be cut out: imagine the requirements for making a very, very large-scale) stencil.  Here's what it looked like when I sent down my pencil and eraser this afternoon.  (Apologies that the image is so pale but that's just what it looks like right now... I want to keep it light so I can make adjustments as necessary.