• Marking Making Part 9 title card, with supplies and drawings arranged in flat lay photo
    Drawing,  Figure Drawing,  Inspiration,  Intuitive Art

    Mark Making Part 9: Various Colored Pencils

    Continuing the mark making project, these drawings are from the end of April. The delay was in the scanning and cropping, ugh. Oh well! These were fun – I did one intuitive drawing piece first, which was a sort of surreal landscape. For the rest, I decided to follow the same path from my graphite pencils post and create gesture drawings with some stylized faces thrown in the mix as well. It was a lot of fun and quite relaxing. The light pencils on dark paper was a nice challenge. It provides an opportunity for the pencil to add light to the forms, rather than the normal shadows created with…

  • Marking Making Part 8 title card, with supplies and drawings arranged in flat lay photo
    Drawing,  Figure Drawing,  Inspiration

    Mark Making Part 8: Graphite Pencils

    Yay! Graphite pencils! And I decided to do several gesture drawings and warm up pencil drills for this one, as I own a lot of 2B, HB, normal #2 pencils, and mechanical pencils. It would have gotten quite repetitive to make general abstract lines with all of them. Especially given it’s all the same grey color. Not that I didn’t do a few sheets of plainer mark making – though even then, I choose a few classic drawing drills with ellipses and lines, compared to the more intuitive drawings I’ve been doing with the other mediums. I had a lot of fun drawing very loose and carefree with most of…

  • Marking Making Part 7 title card, with supplies and drawings arranged in flat lay photo
    Drawing,  Inspiration,  Intuitive Art,  Life Musings

    Mark Making Part 7: Crayons and Other Nostalgia

    So this one was on the principle that if I’m using all my art supplies, the little kid ones count too! I bought these crayons and markers way back when I was first working through The Artists Way. I thought making art with them would be a fun “artist date”. I can confirm, drawing with crayons is a) fun b) satisfying to my “inner child” and c) like sooo easy to relax, because who cares what it looks like, it’s just for enjoying the moment of creating stuff! Little kids get this stuff right off the bat, but we can remember that carefree creativity through some repetitive effort *grin*. I…

  • Marking Making Part 6 title card, with supplies and drawings arranged in flat lay photo
    Drawing,  Inspiration,  Intuitive Art

    Mark Making Part 6: Ballpoint Pens and Highlighters

    Today was a low day, not much to talk about. I managed to do some yoga in the morning after a long shower, so that was nice. Sat out on the apartment balcony and video chatted with my family. Read more of Below the Root. Sketched with colored pencil sticks (aka, part 10 of this project). Still have a headache from allergies. >_< Today’s post are the pieces I did with the pens kept with other office supplies such as tape and paper clips. I wanted to include them in this project because using ballpoint pens to sketch can be fun. I also have occasionally used a highlighter to add…

  • Marking Making Part 5 title card, with supplies and drawings arranged in flat lay photo
    Drawing,  Intuitive Art,  Life Musings

    Mark Making Part 5: Prismacolor Markers and Little Loose Ends

    Tonight was photo session night: taking the photo for this post’s title card, as well as a couple more. It was too overcast today to use the sun for good photo lighting. Then it became so late in the evening that I had to use the LED lights, which are suuuuch a pain to set up. They are Ricky’s photography lights, so he was helping me at least. Tonight is also a night where I feel tired and worn out from stress, reading too much news, and feeling uncertain about the future. Still, it’s a blessing to have art to focus on. I am just ready to go make chamomile…

  • Marking Making Part 4 title card, with supplies and drawings arranged in flat lay photo
    Drawing,  Inspiration,  Intuitive Art

    Mark Making Part 4: Copics, Brush Pens, and Loosening Up

    I was super looking forward to reaching my Copic markers in this mark-making-artistic-medium-whatever-it-is experiment. I don’t use Copics near enough, but they are in my top favorite art supplies. <3 I tried not to use too much Copic ink on the project (after all, these things aren’t cheap!), using each color only a bit, to practice blending more than the expressive marks I was getting out of the brush pens. Plus, that way it was easier to get through them all without drawing like…5+ pages of marks. Using the Copic multi-liners to first make boxes/shapes helped with having specific small areas in which to blend color. I really like the…

  • Marking Making Part 3 title card, with supplies and drawings arranged in flat lay photo
    Drawing,  Inspiration,  Intuitive Art,  Life Musings

    Mark Making Part 3: Calligraphy Pens, Random Felt Tip Markers, and Other Such Things

    Calligraphy pens are one of those things I buy, thinking I’ll practice fancy hand lettering techniques, and yet I never really get around to it. I have this vague notion that, as someone who majored in graphic design, I should be obsessed with lettering and typography, but my interests have always focused on web design† and illustration. Typography is intriguing to me, but that isn’t a very high bar to jump: my curiosity can be peaked by pretty much any article on Wikipedia. It’s no wonder my calligraphy pens don’t see much mileage, if it was general curiosity that spurred me to buy them, rather than passion. I do like…