Doodling

Sea Mist Rising
Ink on Paper
20.5cm x 20.5cm (8" x 8")

I’m doodling to get back into the habit of making marks on paper – taking some inspiration from Peter Draws. When I am doodling, if I notice I am deliberating too long about what to draw next, I just draw some patterns - anything to keep the pen moving.

I plan to get back on with some sketching over the next few weeks.

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.

From Doodle to Birthday Card

Happy Birthday Elaine

Elaine liked the Gone Fishing doodle I included in the post on Silhouetting, so I made it into a Birthday card for her. I know, it’s not a romantic image, but the card was made with love.

Creating it was relatively simple, I:

• Wrote Happy Birthday on rice paper using a brush pen.
• Used GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program - a free alternative to Photoshop) to colour and combine the images. 
• Uploaded the resulting image onto a Moonpig card. 

This isn’t a cost-effective way of creating cards to sell, but it worked well as a one off. One thing I would do differently next time is to save the images in a higher resolution. I would also consider combining the image and text in a desktop publishing package rather than an image manipulation package.

Happy Birthday Elaine