This sketchbook spread features a stylized pattern of colorful poppy flowers. The garden of flowers includes leaves of green, yellow and peach. The flowers are yellow with blue stems. The drawing as a whole has a whimsical and playful feel with a bright color scheme, polka dots and organic squiggle shapes, and blobs of seemingly random colors. Please check out my website ArtsyDrawings.com for more by me, Brianna Eisman. Thank you!
I often have weird dreams that inspire my artwork, and that one I had last night where I took over a jungle (or was it a forest? I don’t know) sure got me inspired.
A fairly special one for me this week, as today’s post is inspired by what would have been the time of Beltane celebrations. As it is, we celebrated at home in our own little ways, and in the case of myself indulging in my usual habits! Drinking and of course drawing, the usual stuff...
9 x 12 graphite pencil on Bristol Smooth paper.
For the background, I managed to get a nice deep black by using 9B graphite powder which I made myself by sanding down a 9B Faber Castell Graphite stick. I then mixed the graphite with linseed oil to make a paste which I applied to the paper using cotton. For the smoke, I used a kneaded eraser to lift off the graphite making shapes and direction of the smoke. I then use a mono zero eraser to add detail and more highlights in the smoke, because I use a light pressure and build up my tones by layering my graphite, I don’t damage the tooth of the paper and am able to easily lift the graphite.
An automatic drawing, everything is out of my head with only the briefest idea of a story line. I played around with shapes and lines and shading to see what affect would result. It was fun, but time consuming.
Artwork on "the other side" - playing with the bleed-through from the watercolor and intuitiviely allowing the shapes to arise. Created using watercolor, coffee, ink, graphic pens and unipen
Once again playing with shapes, colours, marks, and loads of squiggly, smudgy ink lines. No pressure. Just trying to get back into splashing around with paint and seeing what emerges.
I have dragged this typewriter around for more than 50 years. I found it in an antique store when I was in college. It's still fully useable, except that it's REALLY hard to find ribbons. Basically, it's just another object to dust. But it is a beautifully made object. The basic shapes and perspective were blocked in with a 2H pencil, then I used a Sakura 005 micron pen to do the contour drawing.