Sketchbook

Here are my completed flower drawings from my earlier post.  As you can see I drew a few more flowers and then colored them.  You can't tell from the pictures but I used my Twinkling H2Os for the top page and in real life they have a lovely sparkle!  For the bottom picture I mostly used my new Intense blocks.  I got both the H2Os and the blocks for Christmas and I'm having fun playing with them.  I decided to draw flowers after seeing Alisa Burke demonstrate her fabric flower doodles on the video that came with her book Sew Wild.  Now I'll have to try doing that myself.  Stay tuned!  I was also really inspired by Jane LaFazio's sketchbook pages.  She makes simple things look so appealing! Drawing intimidates the heck out of me but I have to say that working on these pages was intensely pleasant.  I really got into the zen state while drawing and painting and for once I don't hate the results.  While looking through an older art journal for some image transfer experiments I did a while back I came across the following page:

These silly creatures were created after reading Carla Sonheim's book Drawing Lab.  After doodling around with paint I found these two creatures but they are going in somewhat different directions.  Nonetheless I decided to decorate them and add shadows.  The blue one has iridescent paint and ink on it which is kind of over exposed in the photo.  The wings are white and the spots are pink.

I drew something!!!

I never draw.  It's one of those things I have immense resistance too, which is a good indication its something I should be doing!  Years of never being happy with with my drawing have left me with a huge fear of drawing at all.  Couple that with damage to my cervical vertebrae and fibromyalgia, both of which make drawing physically painful, and its a recipe for intense avoidance.  Lately I seem to be going through quite an artistic slump.  Its not that I lack ideas, its just that all my ideas seem to bog down somewhere in the process and turn into messy disappointments.  All my of projects  for over a year have fallen flat.  At them moment I'm looking at art books for exercises that are not intimidating and might yield something I'm happy with.  Last weekend I spent some time looking through Alisa Burke's book Sew Wild and was inspired to try drawing flowers.  I've been saving this old calendar with lovely photos of flowers for this very purpose so today I dug it out and tried to draw some.  I was not aiming for really lifelike renderings, so much as looking at the flowers with a doodler's eye.  I like that - Doodler's Eye - sounds like a disease or a strange desert island!  I think next time I sit down I will color these in and try to make more cohesive pages out of them.  But I feel oddly light and carefree about just having sat down to draw.  And I don't hate these pages!  Yea!