Drawing diary: February

This Drawing diary is not what you're used to: I decided to try something different and did some abstract painting. So you've been warned!

It all started when I stumbled upon Tara Leaver's post How to make a simple abstractified painting. In it was an extremely helpful video that showed how Tara sets up her abstract paintings. I loved this. It happens quite often that I see an artist post something cool and inspiring and I just don't get how they did it. Seeing someone actually go through the whole process is priceless.

As you guys know, I don't usually do abstract stuff, but I'm always curious to try out new things. I decided to give Tara's 'abstractifying' practice a go myself. She gave the following tip:

"My focus is always on pulling out your unique self expression rather than showing you how to copy what I do, but sometimes copying is the best way to learn a process. If you have a motif that you commonly use already and could play around with abstractifying, I encourage you to do that."

Since palm trees don't really do it for me, I decided to go with birch trees instead. I think that's the only thing I've drawn multiple times (see my September and October entries).

This is my first attempt at an abstractified something. I made it with the same crayons and charcoal I used for my hula hooping birch trees.

The good things: I had never thought of adding water to crayon strokes, but this idea was gold! It creates a smooth colouring that is perfect for backgrounds. It was a lot of fun to play with making things smooth, or adding lines to add direction and emotion. I'm certain I'll use this technique in the future.

Also funny is that the background looks somewhat like a mountain landscape, with the birches in the front. This was totally unintended: I just did whatever and it happened to end up like this.

The learning curve things: The background ended up being a lot darker than I had planned, making it hard to make the subject birch trees stand out. I fixed that by adding some depth to the trees. Still, they are kinda look-through and the whole thing looks busy. I would use more light colours, but I didn't have any at hand.

Finally, the paper wasn't very happy with what I did with it: there are several spots where it started falling apart. So I decided to give it another go with less crayon and on thicker paper (so it would hopefully withstand whatever I did to it better). This was the result.

Whoa. It's so different! The first thing that I noticed is that the crayon didn't dissolve and spread nearly as well on this paper, because of its rough surface. So you see way more strokes. Smooth paper is apparently very important for this technique, so that's definitely something you want to take into consideration when you start out. Of course both work - it's just which effect you're after.

I'm happy with the experiment and what it taught me. I'm not super enthusiastic about the above picture, though: it has a sort of wallpaper-but-not-a-painting quality. I would say it has no soul, but that's probably a bit dramatic!

Next up was a design for a blog post header. I had delved into the shed to look for more colours (yellow and green) and had already started using the crayons, when I found out to my horror that not all crayons are suitable for dispersion through water. The new ones (wasco crayons) didn't do a thing. Frustration! I had to look for another solution.

I really wanted to have more colours in this one, so I completely turned around the design. I added the red crayon (of which I knew it did work with water) in order to get the feeling of softness I was after. Then I added to the yellow and green with watercolour pencil. Watercolour pencil doesn't get as 'soft' as (the right) crayons, but more so than the 'horror crayons'. (They have been banished to the shed. Just saying.)

Overall, it ended up very different than I had thought beforehand, with way more thin and sharp lines. The layering gives it a sort of 3D feel. But it wasn't done yet.

I scanned and edited the picture with Photoshop, and added in keywords of my blog post (from people's MMO memories). Then it was ready to be used as the top picture of my post The power of memories. A quest for the essence of MMOs. In this article, I featured five of the most memorable MMO stories people had shared online, in order to find out what they had in common.

Of course it would've been easy to just use a screenshot as top picture, but that would favour one virtual world (namely the one the screenshot was from) above others, and that was something I was trying to avoid. The illustration looks a bit like a web of threads or a waterfall to me. I don't know why, but this is how I would visualize memories.

Click to shrink: this looks better in its original size

Uh yeah, so now for something completely different... Conrad's mum had her birthday and since she lives all the way over in Sweden (and we in the Netherlands) I thought it would be fun to send her something special. Her favourite flower is the lilac or syringa, so that's what I painted for her (using watercolour paint and pencils) - it's postcard format in reality.

There are several things I screwed up so I'm not 100% happy with it, but she loved it! And that was the most important thing.

This is the last thing I made in February. I guess it's technically not a drawing, but I'm counting it anyway. I used it as an illustration for Geeky expressions only my friends understand (and now you will, too). The article was about words, and I struggled for a while to come up with an header picture. This one seemed appropriate, though.

Lettering is really fashionable right now and it's something I would love to get better at. Perhaps I'll ask for one of those fancy lettering books for my birthday.

Finally, I have two interesting links to share for the art enthusiasts among you. The first is Tara Leaver's website. It has tons of useful tips for artists (like the 'abstractify' video I linked to earlier) and she organizes several really cool online painting courses. The second is Kay's Happy Mail project. Kay (My Open Sketchbook) loves surprising people with snail mail. You can leave your address behind, and she might send you some beautiful art! Totally free of charge, just because she's an awesome person. Needless to say, I signed up immediately.

That's it for February. I hope that I didn't scare you away with the abstract paintings - for me it was really cool to experiment with something new. I'm positive I'll keep using this technique in the future. Perhaps I'll even buy some more non-waterproof crayons, so I can use different colours.