Do You Aim for Clever or Honest Art? – Series of Inspiring Quotes #1
This post and the next two posts of the following weeks will be about inspiring quotes that I have heard or read recently. I hope you will enjoy this series!
This Week’s Quote
“Art is the competition of honesty,
not the competition of cleverness.”
Who Said?
American fantasy artist Sam Flegal, originally a quote of an American painter Ran Ortner
Where?
One Fantastic Week YouTube Channel, episode “Artist Mentorship #15 – Fantasy Artist Allie Briggs“
Fantasy artists Sam Flegal and Peter Mohrbacher run art discussions every week on YouTube, and they also mentor other fantasy artists to find their path. When their current mentee Allie Briggs tries to find her way to success, Sam and Peter dig deeper to discover what kind of art comes naturally to her. They talk about how important it’s to find themes that we want to create rather than consume. Then it’s not so much about what we would love to see ourselves doing and what we would like to invent but what we truly want to spend time with when we are actually creating. They also talk about how we can take almost any prompt and use the things we love to create to express the message behind the prompt.
Honestly, You Don’t Need a Grand Idea to Start Creating
When I participated in Inktober art challenge last October, I understood that the basic idea doesn’t have to be anything grand. It’s the add-ons that bring the image to a new level. The more I drew by following the prompts, the more honest my art began to feel.
During the challenge, I confessed to both myself and to the world that I like to draw luxury, beautiful physical objects that I have taught to treat as vanity. Jewels, tassels, decorative flowers, luxurious fabric, glass, crystals, etc. I also permitted myself to first draw fur, then decorative animals, and get back to my childhood years of always yearning for a new pet.
Read also:
Honesty Is Not Modesty
Many foreigners say that Finland is a land of honesty. They feel that in Finland you are safe. Nobody steals from you, and you can trust to find your treasures where ever you leave them.
But for a Finnish person, this country is often a land of modesty. When Finnish people call somebody as an honest person, it means that he accepts his limitations and circumstances and doesn’t pretend anything else. We Finnish are supposed to appreciate simple things, and not to be dreamers, but doers. Why draw jewels, when you can document your everyday life?
However, to me, creating honest art has required that I accept my love for unapologetic beauty. I am in my element when designing overwhelmingly beautiful things and dressing up beautiful animals and ethereal creatures.
Start Your Path to Honest Art – Do This!
What are the little things that you don’t consume or possess, but you do often dream about just for fun? Draw them!
More inspiration: Join us to draw fantasy art – Sign up for Magical Inkdom!
Drawing Tutorial – Let’s Draw a Magical Crystal Ball
To celebrate my upcoming new class Magical Inkdom, I made a free tutorial about how to draw glass and create magical glowing effects. In the video, we will draw a crystal ball with a black ink pen and color the ball with watercolors. I hope you enjoy this little project and I hope to see you in Magical Inkdom too!
Magical Inkdom begins on July 8, 2019 – Sign up here!
Draw Flowers and Fairies for The Soul!
This weekend, we are celebrating Midsummer in Finland. Our nights are full of light, and peonies are blooming. It’s the best time to be in this part of the planet. So I wanted to draw flowers and the growth that makes me take photos of our garden all the time.
I hope you don’t mind me starting the blog post in black and white, it will get more colorful near the end!
I have well over 10 peonies – so many that I have stopped counting. This one is Augustin d’Hour, and I wish I could send you the smell. It’s the best perfume that I know. The pink color is also adorable.
Peonies are having a party in our garden! “Who cleans this mess?”, my husband joked.
Flowers and Fairies Fill the Studio
And while the peonies are partying, I also have a floral party in my studio. There are several floral pieces that I have made for the new class Magical Inkdom. Here’s a sneak peek to one little fairy.
This fairy is the princess of the poppies and no wonder how they got there, I have quite many of them too. They are still blooming with the peonies!
Life’s Big Luxuries
I love drawing things that rise above everyday life. Can there be anything more luxurious than blooming flowers?
Roses always find their way to my drawings whether they are big or small.
When I enjoy the flowers, they become big and I shrink. It’s a good feeling, perhaps the same that makes flower fairies so joyful.
Flowers are never just flowers. They are symbols of everything precious and beautiful. In this drawing, I wanted to create a temple of flowers. You go there and feel refreshed and comforted.
Draw Flowers and Fairies for the Soul!
I hope you join me at Magical Inkdom where we get into the hearts of witches, fairies, and everything adventurous, including flowers too. Sign up here!
Zebra Madonna – Drawing Fantasy Art
This fantasy art piece is a hand-made collage called “Zebra Madonna”. It’s made mostly with Copic markers, some elements have been colored with colored pencils. It’s hand-drawn from start to finish, mostly for my class Animal Inkdom where I show easy ways to draw and color wonderful wildlife animals like flying butterflies and running zebras.
Time Flies When You Are Having Fun
It often happens to me that I am going to draw just something small, but then end up making a bigger project. Jane Austen has a novel called “Sense and Sensibility”, but my inner conversation is not very romantic.
Sensibility says: “I have an idea.” Sense says: “Don’t!” Sensibility says: “I want to do it. Now.” Sense says: “It’s 2 AM, no way! Go to sleep and wait for tomorrow.”
What was I drawing in the middle of the night? A small drawing of a girl with a zebra. The girl is a bit like zebra herself, and the zebra looks almost like a unicorn without a horn.
I started with a black and white drawing, but because coloring is fun too, I couldn’t resist. Time flew, and I was having fun.
For Animal Inkdom, I drew a lot of collage pieces as samples, and then many in the videos. So I have two boxes, big and small, that have all kinds of fantasy creatures. It felt like the zebra of the small drawing started calling his fellows, and these three came out!
Even if my zebra madonna was framed and all, I wanted to make a new image where the other zebras could join her. I cut a big piece of Bristol paper, approximately 14 x 20 inches. This is when I went to sleep! It was apparent that I would need quite a lot of energy to fill it with markers and doodles.
Self-Doubts
Next morning, I woke up determined to continue the project. I wanted to “paint” with markers – use several layers so that they would blend. I also wanted to draw with a very thin pen, Copic multiliner 0.03, so that most of the background would have subtle patterns. At this point, I wasn’t so sure if these were good ideas. Drawing took a long time, and markers weren’t so quick either.
I was also hesitating to use the zebras. Of all the animals that I had drawn for Animal Inkdom, they were my favorites. I reminded myself that because I had developed an easy way to make them, I could draw more at any time!
Before starting to ill the background, I had marked the places for the elements with a dashed line. Still, there was quite a lot to color. Here you can see how uneven the coloring is when there’s just one thin layer. I needed more layers!
It’s typical that at some point my Sense is starting to say: “This wasn’t a very good idea.” I am at the rock bottom trying to figure out how the project could be finished quickly because it doesn’t seem so fun anymore.
New Inspiration for Fantasy Art
My way to cope with what I call “the ugly phase” is to focus on a small area and start listening to an audiobook or a podcast. I also get inspired by colors, mostly by … black! It makes other colors shine, and my collection of black pens is growing steadily. I find it difficult to express any fantasy without black!
Fantasy art can be just fantasy and play, but I usually have a deeper thought in my mind. Despite the happy colors and fantasy feel, the message that I have in mind often has dark tones
Fantasy Art – Zebra Madonna in Detail
Here’s the finished piece again.
And because it has a lot of details, here are some pictures of them.
The butterflies are also from my class Animal Inkdom. I think they fit perfectly to the color scheme. I also added the third butterfly on the background. It’s just a careless drawing but it adds depth because it looks to be further away than the two colorful collage elements.
One of the zebra is flying with the butterflies, and if you look carefully, you can see his wings that I doodled vaguely.
I like how the black continues the framed image and gives more depth and contrast. The right upper corner has a grey layer so that it doesn’t take the attention away from the central elements.
Drawing and Playing in Animal Inkdom
Come to draw and decorate animals with us in Animal Inkdom! You will get the published lessons immediately after the registration, and you can start drawing right away. Sign up for Animal Inkdom here!