drawing

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.

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.

Decisions, decisions – a good problem to have ;)

This is the kind of evening I dream of when I feel tense or when it feels like the winter will never end.

I’m sitting on my patio on a warm summer night, deciding whether to draw or to read while I drink my (non-alcoholic!) beer.

A photo of a table with a bottle, an ereader and a sketchbook and markers on it.
Image description: a angled-down view of a small red patio table with a bottle of Corona Sunbrew non-alcoholic beer (which is covered in condensation), an e-reader in a blue and gold patterned case, and an open sketchbook with six markers on top of it. In the background there’s another patio chair, the bottom of the railing, and the end of a string of warm white lights.

Colouring sheet!

I created my first colouring sheet for grown-ups yesterday and I am thrilled with how it turned out.

I had been working on this in my head for days but, as usual, I didn’t solve it by thinking, I made it ‘work’ by starting to draw something and then course-correcting as I went.

Glerg, I hate when I learn the same lesson over and over again in the one week.

a photo of a colouring sheet for adults that has a large star in the centre the with layers of patterns within and surrounding the star are curved sections containing different patterns.?
Image description: a photo of a colouring sheet for adults that has a large star in the centre the with layers of patterns within and surrounding the star are curved sections contacting different patterns.