artsy fun

Drawing for Fun

Well, truth be told, most of the drawing I do is for fun but this is a little different.

A good friend of mine bought us both a copy of Johanna Basford’s 30 Days of Creativity so we could work on it together.

So I get the fun of drawing from prompts AND the fun of working on this at the same time as my friend.

Image description: a page from Basford’s book that shows two shelves filled with vases. Some vases have flowers in them already but there are some that I drew in black ink.

Giving my brain a break

My brain is being a bit of a jerk today so I spent a bit of time listening to an audiobook and drawing and colouring this.

It helped a bit.

A drawing of brightly coloured shapes with thick black outlines
Image description: A drawing of shapes created by thick, black, curved lines that takes up the whole piece of paper. Each shape is coloured with a different bright coloured marker. The shapes are somewhat similar to how beach rocks end up when they wash ashore.

Drawing with dots

I have many many different versions of drawings like this – a figure, back on, standing on a hill, reaching their arms towards the sky.

I don’t know exactly why I am drawn (ha!) to draw this so often but I am and I do.

Today, I experimented with creating this image from dots.

I really like how the sky turned out but I think that, next time, I’ll make the figure taller with longer arms.

A drawing of a person standing on a hill, arms outstretched toward the starry sky. This drawing is made entirely of dots. Curving horizontal lines of green dots for the hill, vertical lines of blue dots for the sky, clusters of yellow dots of stars, and a three triangles and a circle of black dots for the figure.

Another Reminder To Myself

There is no automatic virtue, no automatic advantage to doing things the hard way.

My best bet is always to check out the easy way first and only add more work if necessary to get the job done.

A small white card that reads “start with the easy way and build from that.”
Image description: a small white card on a wooden surface. Handwritten text on the card reads ‘Start with the the easy way and build from that.’ most of the text is in black capital letters but the words ‘Easy Way’ have softer lines and are outlined in black with the centre of each letter coloured in either red, yellow, orange or purple. The word ‘easy’ has some bright gold lines sprinkled around it to highlight it and the background of the whole card had small black dots.

Taking an easy route

Except for meditative doodles, I don’t do a lot of detailed artwork.

Anything that requires a lot of prep work or that needs a bunch of measurements makes the energy cost of getting started way too high for me.

(Meditative doodles are just ‘in the moment’ type of details so they don’t have the same cost.)

But, that being said, I like those round, repetitive designs that a lot of people call mandalas. I’m pretty sure that mandalas are a specific type of design that has a cultural meaning so I won’t use that name for the design I want to make.

I’m not trying to borrow or appropriate a cultural practice , I’m not pretending that what I am doing is sacred, nor am I adding meaning to it – I just want to make a pattern in a circle.

But making a pattern in a circle requires a lot of measuring and every time I have tried that, I have gotten bored with the measuring and haven’t finished the design.

Until now!

Last week, I bought some templates for another project and one of them was a circular pattern of straight lines.

The energy cost of using a template to make my ‘measurements’ is very low.

So now I have an easy route to creating these patterns for myself and I won’t end up abandoning my projects partway through.

Really, taking an easy route gets a bad rap a lot of the time.

Taking the hard route for its own sake, especially if it means you lose the fun and the purpose, is just foolish.