artsy fun

Words and Pictures

Yesterday, while listening to the podcast ‘The Antique Shop,’ by Ghostly Thistle media, I had a great idea for a series of stories.

My plan is to draw a series of objects and then write a story about each one.

I started by practicing drawing bottles.

A photo of drawings and painting of a variety of bottles.
Image description: a photo of a coil-bound sketchbook with white paper featuring some rough pencil sketches of a variety of bottles on the right hand side and some drawings of bottles painted with watercolours on the left.

Thumbnail Drawings

I took a fantastic workshop today about writing and illustrating micro fiction and I got a lot of things out of it (more on that in a future post.)

One of the key things I learned was that I was conflating the idea of sketches and thumbnails.

Thumbnail drawings are a series of tiny drawings that have little to no detail, just an idea of objects and composition.

Sketches are a draft version of your final drawing that expand on one of your thumbnails.

This may be old news to everyone else but, all along, I was thinking of a sketch as the brainstorming stage, as the earliest visual.

The fact that there is a even more preliminary stage of drawing is marvellously helpful to me.

Here are a few of my thumbnail drawings from today:

A series of small drawings of scenes inspired by the ‘Mother Hubbard’ nursery rhyme.
Image description: thumbnail drawings of the ‘Mother Hubbard’ nursery rhyme. 6 small squares on white paper that depict an empty cupboard, a woman and a dog looking into an empty cupboard, a sad dog holding a bowl, a woman holding a dog in her lap,,a faint drawing of a woman saying ‘oh no’ while a dog lies at her feet and a dog on its hind legs carrying a hobo bundle on a stick.

Surprised by my own drawing

I drew this yesterday.

Image description: a drawing of a bunch of half-oval shapes close together, a bit like multi-coloured kernels of corn on the cob but with one white ‘kernel’ with a smiling face and big eyes in the middle.

My plan was to make a bunch of faces, one on each shape.

But once I had coloured almost all the shapes, I couldn’t decide what colour to make that last white bump.

That’s when I realized that that was where the face was going to go, that it was a little creature peeking out of a hiding spot, not a bunch of faces at all.

Weird, hey?

Art Pause

I made this last night and I’m really happy with it.

A smal collage including a photo of a child, a pot of flowers, and the word pause against a purple/blue background.

image description: a small collage on a rectangular piece of paper. The collage includes a black and white photo of a small child with their head leaning back while the wind blows their hair back. They appear to be breathing in the scent of the pot of pink flowers in the next image. At the bottom of the collage is the word pause with each letter written separately on individual small purple squares of paper. The blue/purple background behind the other images has black lines lightly drawn on it.

Tea for Tuesday

Since I wasn’t ready to focus on my work yet today, I drew a little mug of tea instead.

I love the process of filling in the background with thin lines, starting in one corner and working to the other, then turning the paper so I can work in a different direction. For this one I also drew a series of horizontal lines parallel to the bottom to about a third of the way up and then drew vertical lines from the top down to meet the horizontal lines.

I really like how it turned out.

A drawing of a small green mug with a gold star on it.
This mug of tea would be far too small for my needs but it was fun to draw. Image description: a drawing of a green mug with a gold star on it. The tea within must be hot because there are curls of steam rising from it. The background of the drawing is pinstriped lines that overlap.