A month of drawing flowers from my garden. This brought back fond memories of my garden residency in 2021 (already feels a lifetime ago). Halfway through the year, and I feel much more comfortable with the inktense pencils now, and a lot more familiar with the colour range. Still plenty of potential to explore though…
Daily Drawings - May
May was a colourful month for my daily drawing challenge, learning how to use my inktense pencils. The collective noun for a group of butterflies is a kaleidoscope, which seems appropriate.
Daily dog drawings
Who knew? Dogs are much more fun to draw than people. My daily drawings for March. This was a good subject matter for learning how to mix the wet and dry properties of the inktense pencils. A limited colour range though… mostly browns and greys, apart from the odd pink tongue!
2023 daily drawings
I inherited a beautiful set of inktense pencils last year... I wasn’t entirely sure how to use them. So I’ve set myself a new daily drawing challenge for this year - learning to use the pencils with a new theme each month.
Feeding my inner colour geek. Before I started, I made a record of all the colours in my sketchbook - how they look dry, dipped in water and with water added. This looks like a laborious task but I absolutely loved it. It’s proved to be really useful - at first glance many of the pencil colours look the same, so this catalogue makes it really easy to make a quick selection to get started on a drawing.
In January I started with vintage vases... a bit of a mixed bag, but I’ve already learnt a lot about how the pencils work (water soluble then waterproof when dry)...
February was faces. Way out of my comfort zone here… I’m much more at home with plants and animals. They are a bit hit and miss, but I’ve learnt about how to get more subtle shades of colour, building it up in layers. Nostrils and various skin tones are a work in progress though. I enjoyed seeing characters emerging each day, and I am starting to appreciate the potential of the pencils…
Week 6 – ink
My final week of 30 days of daily drawings. These were drawings using Indian ink and some of my plant inks made last year. I really enjoyed completing a drawing every day, and I may not keep it up in terms of theming each week, but I’ll definitely continue filling up this sketchbook.
Week 5 – rubber stamps
A week of carving simple rubber stamps based on plant shapes to create repeat patterns.
Week 4 - water-soluble
Five days of experimenting with water-soluble media – Koi Colouring Brush Pens and Derwent Inktense coloured pencils. Feel like I need to use these more to explore their potentail…
Week 3 – collages
A week of daily collages – one of my favourite ways of working as I never know what I’m going to end up with when I sit down with a blank page. Always a nice surprise!