Valentine’s Day Card Doodle

Happy Valentine’s Day Elaine

Hearts are difficult - to draw. They are all curves and changes of direction. It is easy to hesitate while drawing them and this results in scrappy looking lines. My trick is to use a brush pen on rice paper. This combination gives a pleasantly blotchy line – a bit of hesitancy is just lost in the noise.

I used Winsor and Newton alcohol based ProMarkers to colour the design and lettering. They also spread unpredictably on rice paper – which means they can be blamed for any tendency to stray outside the lines.

The overall effect is controlled untidiness (a phrase borrowed from John Lovett).

The pattern was inspired by an exercise on rhythm from Expressive Drawing by Steven Aimone. I sketched it out, then refined it by tracing it and tweaking it multiple times using an LED light box.

I drew the motif and the letters on separate pieces of rice paper before combining them in GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program - a free alternative to Photoshop) and uploading onto a Moonpig card.

Happy Valentine’s Day Elaine.

Drawing and Painting the Landscape – Revealed Landscape

Walking the Mon & Brec Canal (May 2018)
Revealed Landscape
Drawing and Painting the Landscape
January 2019
Graphite Pencil
Stillman & Birn Alpha Series Sketchbook
14cm x 11cm (5.5" x 4.25")

Lesson 2 of Drawing and Painting the Landscape by Philip Tyler is about a technique to reduce inaccuracy in landscape drawings - perhaps (more subtly) it is about studying the landscape closely and understanding how it is arranged. The title Revealed Landscape describes the technique - you obscure most of a source photograph and draw the small “revealed” section.

Revealed Landscape
Drawing and Painting the Landscape
January 2019
Graphite Pencil
Stillman & Birn Alpha Series Sketchbook
21.5cm x 30.5cm (8.5" x 12")

In the first assignment you use a piece of paper to obscure everything bellow the horizon, draw the horizon, move the paper down a small amount, draw the newly revealed section of landscape, and continue down the page.

After I finished two of these drawings, I added some shading to them. In retrospect this was probably cheating because the lesson is part of a chapter called “Linear Drawing”

Basic Proportion
Drawing and Painting the Landscape
January 2019
Various Media
Stillman & Birn Alpha Series Sketchbook
21.5cm x 30.5cm (8.5" x 12")

The second assignment is to cut a square or rectangular window in a piece of card, place this over a photograph, and draw what you see through the window into a box with the same proportions. Comparing the position and size of the lines and shapes relative to the long and short sides of the rectangle helps you to recognise their size and position in the overall composition.

Basic Proportion
Drawing and Painting the Landscape
January 2019
Various Media
Stillman & Birn Alpha Series Sketchbook
21.5cm x 30.5cm (8.5" x 12")

I used photos of our neighbourhood and from recent holidays as source material for these pictures. I'm looking forward to drawing directly from the landscape in the following exercises.