Colored Pencil Doodling
This week, we are doodling wildly with colored pencils.
Free doodling is the most natural way for me to create. I can just start. No browsing the internet for ideas, no trying to think what to express. It only requires trust that something will appear – that a problem I wasn’t aware of gets solved, a key to a door that I didn’t notice is found, and a place that didn’t exist is born for everyone to explore.
Mindless Doodling
When doodling with colored pencils, I like to pick a pencil and start coloring mindlessly.
I often pick a neutral color and use a light touch so that I can later add layers on the top.
The mindless curves can go on top of each other, already creating a new layer.
When I get bored, I pick another color and do the same.
I try not to worry about how it looks because it’s just a warmup.
Enjoying Colors
When my thoughts begin to flow effortlessly, I add more colors. Now I color areas or spots over the doodles.
I also highlight some parts of the doodles with color.
I cover most of the blank areas so that the image becomes less busy.
Drawing Something Intentional
If I get stuck and feel discouraged, I draw something to cheer me up.
A heart is a message for myself: “Keep going; everything will be ok.”
Discovering by Shadowing
“What should I draw?” we often ask ourselves. I often push through by picking a fairly dark tone and shadowing around a random area.
I also like to color stripes, so I color and shadow them. It usually doesn’t take long when I feel the sense of new, exciting scenery.
Doodling All The Crazy Stuff
Recently, I have become more open to allowing all the things that don’t seem to make sense. I also have got more courage to put expression over prettiness.
The success of this kind of wild doodling is connected with the more traditional art skills. I have noticed that after doing the projects for the class Doll World, I have been able to include human shapes and characters more effortlessly for drawings and paintings.
Colored Pencil Doodling – The Result
I think that the finished work expresses that I am at a crossroads. I have a new exciting project on the horizon that you will find out more about soon. I am considering what old things to continue and what to abandon.
But I think that everything will be ok anyway because when I turn the spread upside down, the world still looks exciting and inviting.
More Intuitive Art Projects
My classes – Inspirational Drawing and Intuitive Coloring, go into this kind of free-flowing process in more detail. If you prefer watercolors to doodles, check Magical Forest for a similarly intuitive approach.
This small colored pencil journal is currently my favorite art journal. Check the class Fun Botanicum for a jump start for beginning colored pencil journal pages!
Art and Familiar Things – Inspiration from Sounds and Surroundings
This week is about getting inspiration from familiar things like songs and the sounds of the surroundings.
I live in an area built in the 1960s. I love the mid-century modern tile houses and their old-fashioned gardens with apple trees and bush hydrangeas. One year, at the end of May, apple trees were blooming like crazy, and when I took the dogs for a walk on a sunny afternoon, I heard a family having a graduation celebration, singing beautifully in a choir. I felt I could touch the air and see the melody traveling on it, flying like a swallow, carelessly yet skillfully.
Visualizing Familiar Sounds and Songs
A similar kind of inspiring sight happens when I hear Aretha Franklin singing “Say a Little Prayer.” In the chorus, the choir sings the melody, and Aretha just throws in some sounds. It’s like she is the background singer there, except she’s not. The timing of the single notes is perfect, and their sound is powerful. I see her singing as lines that are effortless without being worthless, ornamental without being traditional.
See this post from 2014 for tips for using music as inspiration: 5 Ways Music Can Improve Your Art
When an old house is demolished, and that happens too much nowadays, they destroy the garden too. I see this constantly happening in our area, and it’s heartbreaking. I don’t look at the surroundings like a property developer but as an artist who seeks visual music. I want to see the old-fashioned songs: lines that are born when birds fly over the scenery, curves that butterflies make on the flowery fields, shadows that scream, and sunspots that quietly fade away. All that sound and movement creates music that inspires me to paint!
Northern Splendor – Seeing Familiar Things as a Fantasy
Usually, I have gone on an adventure to faraway unknown regions when painting, but in this series that I am working on, I’m in Finland, where gardens and nature alternate. I paint the light of northern summers and connect that with architectural ornaments.
In this painting, I imagined how a French couple from the 19th century visited Finland.
They then saw how the palaces and churches of Central Europe do exist in Finland too, but all this splendor is in nature instead of buildings.
My dream is to paint like Aretha sang – like it would all be careless strokes, yet so intentional and so creatively put that they break the surface of what’s ordinary and familiar.
Read That, Watched That, But Can It be Renewed?
I am currently working on a painting for a group exhibition. My theme is Alice in Wonderland!
It’s a tale that has been heard so many times. How to break through it? Exciting!
What familiar things inspire you?
Create a Chapter Cover for the New Year!
This week, we are creating a chapter cover for our art journals that marks the new year.
When I think about the new year, there are lots of uncertainties that first come to my mind. What will happen in the world, what will happen in my life, and what will happen in my art? I can only present educated guesses about the threats and possibilities. This kind of wondering makes me feel passive, and it’s not very uplifting, so I rather pick up my pencils and start drawing.
Draw a Chapter Cover for a Journal!
As I told you in the recent video blog post, I got the idea of making a chapter cover in the colored pencil journal, marking where the new year begins. So all I had to do was to add the numbers on the next spread and then color a bit on them and around them. This project was a lot of fun, and I highly recommend it!
Play with Numbers!
Just as the world is not only based on facts, the numbers are not just numbers either. Their shapes don’t entirely define them. The number “2” can be a kneeling woman with stockings and a skirt, or a flower that bends down – or both! The number “0” can be a mirror that not only reflects the surroundings but open ups a new scenery. Isn’t that what we want to see in the new year – not only experience the chronologically bypassing days but also make them take our minds to a new place? Stairs that are ahead can lead to nowhere or everywhere, and the fingers that hold a treasure can, at the same time, be the leaves of a plant.
The way we can combine everyday life and fantasy creates joy and hope, and uncertainties feel not only exciting but necessary.
Numbers as Fashion Models
Every time I build a course, I learn something new myself too. But this time, with Doll World, I feel that there’s a lot that comes in the shape of a person.
When I am more familiar with drawing human figures, I seem to be better able to see those everywhere, for example, in numbers too. And it often seems to come to my mind that I can dress up a shape and, that way, make it more imaginative and fun.
Year of Art
The year 2022 has been a year of art for me. I acknowledge that eight recent years have been like that in one way or another when I have been a full-time artist. But this year, it felt like Art came out of the cellar and opened her heart. And when asking what to do next, she usually said: “Leave me alone,” but this year, the answer was softer, sending a question back to me: “Tell me what you want to see!” Art, who was an animal that used to escape and hide, became a pet, even a caressing spirit. She wanted to stick around and show how something little can grow to become enough – how I can be enough.
It all felt like a gift even if I had suffered for years by trying to tame Art’s spirit, trying to understand her, trying to stick around even if she would only live in a dark cellar. And now, when I play with the pencils, it doesn’t feel like I do that without her, but with her,
even if I am not painting.
When we spend time together with Art and together as artists too, every year is different. We don’t stay the same, but our foundation becomes more similar. And the older we get, the more we inspire each other, and our art is like a group of fairies that gently fly around us. At least, that’s what I hope for the upcoming year.
Time will tell how this journal continues!
Doll World – Join Us!
Come to draw adorable dolls and their dresses with me!
Doll World begins on Jan 1st. >> Sign up Now!
Expressing Winter Memories
This week, I have a new winter-themed painting, and we talk about the many approaches for expressing winter and memories of any season.
Here’s my newest painting called Winter Night’s Poem. This time, the Finnish name is much more beautiful: Talviyön runoelma. I wanted to give the painting a poetic name – like Shakespeare’s play “A Midsummer Night’s Dream – Kesäyön unelma” but something more wintery. So I come up with the Finnish name, which sounds so romantic (if you know Finnish that is!), and then translated it to English as accurately as possible.
I painted this piece for the local artist association’s winter-themed art exhibition. Winter sceneries aren’t really my thing, but I wanted to take the challenge. I started by exploring Japanese woodblock prints and made a small colored pencil study that is more like a fall scenery, but that has similar abstract elements than in the final painting.
I talked more about this colored pencil piece in October’s video blog post.
Winter Memories
I found it challenging to get emotionally connected with the theme. As Finn, I do know winters. They are cold and dark, and there’s not much that I enjoy about them. As a child, I lived further north, and winters were even colder and darker. Here’s a picture of me in 1974 when I was 5 years old.
However, I have one special winter memory. Earlier this year, in one of the weekly emails, I wrote about Avicii‘s music and how it brings the memory to my mind:
When I hear A Sky Full of Stars, I am a little girl on a cold Tuesday evening in Eastern Finland. After participating in an icon painting group, I walked down the snowy hill looking up. The starry sky was blue-black, I realized. Not black like for those who glance carelessly or blue like for those whose skies were always blue. Working with colors had made the world look more beautiful.
I also remember getting an idea for a poem that I later wrote down. It was something about the starry sky. And there was a melody too. The sight, the words, and the sounds all formed this beautiful winter memory. And isn’t it so that memories are full of sensations of all kinds? Why should we then paint only what we see?
But then I heard myself saying: “Paivi, remember that it’s a winter-themed exhibition. It has to look like winter!”
How Does Winter Look Like?
In 2013, I made this hand-drawn collage for Christmas cards. It has a decorative approach to winter. Snow, hearts, berries, pastel colors – they all form a light-hearted and entertaining take on winter.
An even more obvious choice would be to paint a realistic winter scenery with snow, trees, and such. Here’s a watercolor painting from 2018:
My idea was to paint both fall and winter into the same piece. This is a class project from Watercolor Journey where we paint all kinds of sceneries in watercolor.
Winter in a Poem
But the more I thought about winter, the more connection I felt with the abstract side of it. I didn’t want to just paint an empty-looking scenery in black and white. I wanted the lights and darks to have a rhythm.
My favorite poet Eeva-Liisa Manner has a winter poem that I have read hundreds of times because it was in a little poem book my family had. For a small child, the content felt strange, but the more I read it and the more I grew, I fell in love with its rhythm. The poem doesn’t rhyme, it’s free verse, very modern. But still, when I read it, I feel the rhythm, and when it ends, it feels like you have listened to a song, not read a poem. The words have been thrown into the air, carelessly, and yet, it feels like everything has a purpose. It’s like every word would have fought to get into to poem, and after accepted, they are ready to fly beautifully, each on their turn, and then to get mixed up even more elegantly in the reader’s mind.
Maybe you too, love poetry and have experienced the same. The words glow like jewels and have a long effect even if the time spend on the reading, is just a minute or two. Isn’t that what we aim for in visual art too?
Wonders of a Winter Night
More than thinking about realistic scenery, I approached the painting with a poetic mindset. I imagined the sounds and rhythm of a winter night and visualized those. I trusted that the result will look wintery even if the painting is abstract.
I also thought about how things move, and one of my favorite details is the curvy black wind that blows snow.
Carelessly painted ice-like objects are on the top, and the sound of ice is visualized below them.
Probably the childhood memory of the winter night has stayed with me because it’s a little bit scary to walk alone in the cold and in the dark, under a few street lights only.
The color scheme was one of the challenges. I didn’t want the painting to look off-puttingly cold. Instead of only using blue and white, I brought a wide variety of tones but so that most of them are quite dark or pale.
Fortunately, winter is not here yet, but usually, we have the first snow in November. So the garden scenery will change soon!
I hope this blog post inspired you to express winter or any season that you have fond memories of!