OMG I'm Actually Drawing Things

These are beginning, beginning, amateur drawings. They are also a lot of fun to make.  I've been afraid to learn how to draw because I am not willing to allow myself to be the beginner. There are people who argue about the basis of talent, how much of it comes from inborn skills and how much from learning and repetition of techniques. I've never quite trusted either extreme. But I can tell you for sure that making realistic drawings is not inborn in me! Or if it ever was, it has been deeply buried by lack of use and social pressures. For some reason, except for the textiles, which was my forte in high school, the art classes seemed to "belong" to the popular kids, who would take over the resources and the teacher's time. Since my mom was an artist, I felt like I should have some extra abilities and shouldn't need help, perhaps. Or just wasn't willing to shove my way to the front of the line (I never did get to use the wheel in pottery class). But whatever, those are ancient gripes and excuses. I now have all the art supplies I need and get to hog them all I want. And no job to be telling me that I need to be pencil pushing in a different sense. :-)

So, I am not necessarily doing anything right, but I am drawing nevertheless. The sense of accomplishment and even affection for my efforts is the same despite the lack of skills.  In fact, I'm wondering if I had more skills would I be much less satisfied with my lesser efforts. Here, there is very little distance to the bottom, so I'm proud of any marks made on paper.

What started this drawing thing? I think doing Zentangles opened me to the idea of just following directions and not worrying about imperfect bits but rather pressing ahead to the end goal of covering the little rectangle of paper, for better or worse. I learned something from each one, especially the idea that nothing will ever be perfect but there are many ways, as you go along, to make it better.

Then I went on a small book buying binge (I was being SO good for a while). Somehow I came across Peggy Dean's Guide to Nature Drawing and Watercolor. I think I may have actually come across it while shelf browsing in my local bookstore, an old fashioned concept. It's a pretty book. A kind of Ed Emberly drawing book for older people (he would having you drawing ships and fire engines and such just be drawing squares, circles, triangles). So you want to draw a daisy? Start with the middle, lots of little circles for a cluster of stamens and pistils, then start drawing simple petals, one by one.

This is not what the "grown up" art books tell you to do. You are supposed to actually look at the object, not try to outline it but show exactly what you see, as if your mind were a camera. But I get intimidated by this approach, and my mental shutters malfunction and I always drop my efforts after the first attempt looks wretched. Plus it ideally involves being on site with the daisies and the trees, and it's cold and wet out there right now, and things aren't blooming any more. 

So here is a simple cone flower. You start in pen and ink and just draw outlines of various parts. It's formulaic and non-threatening. Even then I rarely draw what I would like to draw. But whatever....I just kept filling this page with cone flowers. Funny thing, the first 3 were done while waiting in a parking lot. They have a lot more variety and interest than the later ones I did, where I didn't allow variation in petals, just tried to be "safe" and draw a bunch of little flowers.  A couple look more like jellyfish, in fact, I think I see the beginning to a nice little ocean scene.....

Here  are the initial sketches. Note also that I am learning how to deal with photos of my sketches. This is a cleaned up version of a photo shot with a flash, even though I had a strong craft light trained on my sketchbook. Well, at least it has atmosphere....

Here is a not-cleaned up version of those same flowers, once I had colored them. Wayyyy too much atmosphere.

So I learned this: keep that strong light trained on them, but turn off the flash and hold the camera as close as you can without it casting a shadow on the paper.

What I am learning about sketching: keep moving, keep moving. If the petals don't look great, draw some more. If the whole thing looks too flat once it is finished, add shading with pencil and darken the inner petals a bit (I could go back and do more darkening). Next I added colors, knowing it would distract from other imperfect things. Also I love the strange purple of coneflowers and couldn't draw them without trying to reproduce that. I made the pistil and stamen clusters yellow and realized that pen sketches that are later colored in with watercolor is one of my favorite art techniques when I see other people's work, and now I'm actually making my own attempts.

 It's an oversimplified and abstracted way to draw things, bordering on cute or superficial at times, but think of all the commercial designs, especially textiles, that are based on various degrees of simplification and abstraction and they still work, they succeed in bringing to mind houses or daisies or cats. I think that's the exciting thing for me, even with my imperfect works.....I step back from the imperfections and realize that I have nevertheless captured something of what a coneflower looks like.

not anatomically correct when I look at the details. Not meant to be. Once I get better and this bothers me, I should make my own simplified versions of botanical sketches in ID books. And then bring in a sprig or two of something real from fhe back yard and see what comes of it.

Here is actually the page I started with. Daisies. No context, as in leaves, stems, surrounding flowers, just happily disembodied daisies.  And a waterlily leaf, also out of context.

This horsetail was copied from a different book, one of Ernst Haeckel's nature drawing books. I did my own simplification.

Here I practiced drawing some curving grass leaves. This would also work for an aquarium scene.
Also some unsuccessful bamboo joints. I'm always making stamps of these, bamboo both fascinates and horrifies me (it will send runners out below a couple of feet of concrete)

Here are cattails from the Peggy Dean book:

and a rather sparse maidenhair fern:

This was yesterday's effort, a hydrangea. A bit more in context than previous flowers, with leaves and a stem. I don't thing the leaves are anatomically correct for a hydrangea, they are normally opposite and much denser, but they add interest.

The first image is sketched, with dry Inktense pencil added. The shading is mostly my contribution, she doesn't do much in her book. But I know from making tangles that shading can help bring a drawing alive, so I'm trying to always add some. I am fascinated by the way that most hydrangeas can't decide if they want to be pink or lilac flowers, so I added some of each.

Here is what it looked like after I added water and traced carefully over each area with a thin paintbrush. I am learning that these colors are unpredictable. Some come out just as the pencil tops indicate they will, others come out much darker, or more intense than expected. I've actually made a little chart of these pencils, with and without water added. Hopefully I will look at it before my next drawing.

So that's it with the actual drawings, but on my phone I got to play around with things a bit more. Because, while I'm always telling myself to be less digitally driven and more real life driven, I still fiddle with most photos that I take, just to see what if. Here I tinted my daisies.

Here is a close up of my horsetail (looks less realistic close up, eh?)

Which I then turned into kaleidoscope patterns.  Which in turn could become bases for new Zentangle ideas, or for carved stamps.

I love what happens with the subtlety of the blended paint areas combined with the dark pen lines.

And that's it for now. The drawing has taken over the Zentangle making, which was taken over by the bead embroidery class projects, which has taken over the leaf prints on gel plates that has officially been my unmet goal for the past few days. I always have something to feel guilty about not finishing, it's part of who I am!

So it's time to go away from the online world and back to the real world and see what I produce on cloth an paper, and which new stamps I carve or cut. At least, that's what I imagine my goals to be for the rest of today....

BTW, more of this kind of drawing, line outlines of flowers and trees, filled in with colored pencil or watercolor, can be found on Instagram, some of it by the author of the book I'm using for inspiration, under #botanicallinedrawing and #botanicallineart and some related tags for various challenges.