Inktober Warm-Up Exercise
It’s soon October and with that – Inktober! Last year, I did all 31 prompts. Read about my previous experience here and here!
This year, I intend to make at least some drawings. And because Inktober was such a great experience for me last year, I want to support you to take it too. Here’s an Inktober warm-up exercise. I hope it inspires you to use inks and black felt-tipped pens to create black and white art. Follow the steps to keep going!
1) Paint an Abstract Composition
Let’s start by playing with liquid ink! Mine is Dr. Ph. Martin’s Bombay India Ink. I make the image on Leuchtturm 1917 Sketchbook.
Put a few drops of black ink on a palette. Mix some water to the ink so that it’s grey rather than pitch black. Make some pale strokes with a flat brush. Then add new strokes on the top of previous ones. Work slowly! Enjoy each stroke and the translucency of it.
Turn the brush upward and make narrow strokes by using the tip of the flat brush. Experiment with both wet and dry brush.
Pick a small round brush and add some ink on the top of the narrow strokes. Now you should have an abstract composition that has a variety of painted elements.
2) Fill Spaces Between the Painted Areas
Use a brush pen or black ink that hasn’t been watered down. Focus on the center of your composition.
Fill most of the spaces between the painted areas with black ink. Leave some white to highlight the best parts. Black adds depth to the grey composition.
3) Draw Realistic Objects
Select black thin-tipped drawing pens of various thicknesses. I use Copic Multiliners from 0.05 to 1.0.
Choose a realistic object that you want to repeat in the image. My choice was women’s faces. For example, flowers or birds could be great too.
Look at the abstract composition and seek for places where you can add the objects. Add more black, and adjust the shape of the pale areas so that they partly outline the objects. When drawing the objects, play with the scale so that some are big and some small no matter where they are located in the image. All the objects don’t have to be fully visible. Some can hide partly behind the abstract elements.
I like to draw faces so that I sketch it first with a thin ink pen, and then adjust it by adding a black element beside the face. (In my classes Animal Inkdom and Magical Inkdom, I show easy step-by-step methods for drawing all kinds of fun figures.)
4) Doodle Decorations
Continue with the black drawing pens, and doodle on the blank and pale areas. I also use a handmade oval template to get a big geometric shape that is fun to decorate.
For decoration, the sky is the limit, but I like jewels, frills, laces, waves, and flowers!
When doodling, I also add shadows to the elements by drawing thin lines side by side.
5) Finishing Touches: Shadows and Highlights
Squeeze your eyes and point all the white areas. Usually, there are too many and it makes the image look busy. Pick a brush and paint most of the white with diluted black ink.
Especially the areas that are near the edges are worth toning down.
I also like to paint over the shadowed areas to give them a softer look.
White gel pen can be handy for those areas that need a little bit more white.
Inktober Warm-Up – Finished Piece
Here’s my finished piece again. See how limited the number of white areas is.
I hope you enjoyed this Inktober warm-up! Tell me – are you going to participate in Inktober?
Watercolor Girl in a Spring Garden
I have just finished this watercolor painting. It’s a continuum for this recent one:
This spring, I have been painting flowers, fruits, vegetables, vases, and pots – my inner garden – while my husband has been busy taking care of our outer garden!
I don’t intentionally paint what I see in the garden, but I am fascinated by it. Our front garden had big changes last summer so it’s interesting to see what has survived through the winter and what hasn’t. It’s a bit like when starting a painting – some details stay, and some get covered.
At the beginning of May, we got snow. We had just had a warm period but then it became really cold!
Fortunately, the weather has got warmer again. This morning, I walked in the garden and thought how perfect all the shapes and colors are. I imagined I am a watercolor girl in a watercolor world, translating all the beauty on a coarse cotton paper step by step.
It’s just magical when the old cherry tree blossoms in our new Japanese garden for the first time.
I only wish our tree would have pink flowers. But for a watercolor girl, everything is possible!
One of our flowerbeds is filled with a variety of tulips. We buy some new bulbs every autumn, and the bed gets fuller and fuller every spring.
I love to paint abstract shapes and then draw lines to make them flowers or filaments!
Does your garden appear in your art?
Happy Holidays from Finland
Happy, sad, deep, superficial, and recent news with holiday greetings!
The year 2018 has been a big one for me. I have rediscovered my Eastern-Finnish roots and put everything I have learned into practice to express what I love and want to cherish. This drawing called “Antonina” shows this feeling of satisfaction. It is a gift that I didn’t expect but that I dare not to give back either.
“Be the Biggest Fan of Your Art”
Artists say this all the time: “Be the biggest fan of your art.” If you create art, you know it’s one of the most difficult things in the world. There’s always something to change, improve, take further. It’s challenging to be the biggest fan or any fan at all.
But recently, I have had this strange feeling of peace. I see flaws in my work but still, it feels enough. My drawings are more superficial and representational than I had thought they should be. But surprisingly, it’s what was needed to become a fan of my own art.
I want to write more about all this when I have more time. I often write long posts on Facebook too. Recently, I wrote a Facebook post about belonging to the art world, and another about my journey in learning how to draw. If you don’t like me on Facebook yet, please do and join the conversation there too!
Preparing for Christmas Art Fair
The local society of professional artists “Vantaan
This Saturday the society organizes a small sales event, and I have a table there. Even if there’s not enough space to take the biggest paintings, it has been interesting to prepare for the fair. My style nowadays is surprisingly close to the style that I had about 5 years ago. My technical skills have grown but the old decorative stuff fits really well with my current drawing style. I still have some fabrics left, many from that time, so I am taking a selection of them to go with drawings, postcards and art prints.
Back then, I didn’t quite appreciate the point where I was. If I could speak to my old self, I would say: “Keep going, you are getting there!”
Tribute to My Bird Citronelle
A few days ago, a sad thing happened. One of my four budgies, Citronelle, died suddenly. She got flu, got weak very fast and we couldn’t save her.
If I have to quickly name what I love and admire, I would choose peonies and parakeets. I admire their beauty and their bravery. Every spring, peonies begin their sprint to grow fast and bloom. And every morning, my little parakeets start singing and hassling like they would rule the world. The time that they both have is limited, but they make the most of it. If only we humans could follow their wisdom!
I made this little drawing to process the grief and to show Citronelle in the way she would have liked to be seen. She was the leader of the pack, and definitely worth the crown. She was clever, sometimes annoyingly so if you ask my other budgies, and the star of every little event she organized. We all miss her dearly.
Happy Holidays with Rich Bunnies!
I have drawn or painted very few Christmas-themed pieces, but this year I just had to do this one!
I got the idea of two white bunnies of a Christmas card. I liked that it had rabbits instead of reindeer (common in Finland), but the card was too simple to my style. I wanted to add a touch of luxury, and I can assure you that these two little bunnies are not the poorest ones in town!
I hope that you pamper and nurture yourself during the holidays like you would be the rich bunny of the town! See you again in 2019! Special thanks to all who have participated in my classes or bought my art in 2018, I really appreciate your support!
P.S. I am in the process of revamping my websites. Quite a lot has been done already at Paivieerola.com, but this site is bigger, and the renovation is much more challenging. It may happen that the site is unavailable for a short time after Christmas. I try to make everything go as smoothly as I can, but technology can be surprising sometimes, even for a former engineer! So if you have been planning to sign up for my classes before the new year, sign up before Christmas if you only can!
Abstract Portrait – Paint with Me!
Here’s a quick abstract portrait from my sketchbook, painted with acrylic paints in 45 minutes. I didn’t use any reference photos for this one but just played with the shapes.
Create an Abstract Portrait – Watch the Video!
Get tips, ideas, and inspiration for your abstract portrait. Watch the video!
Innovative Portraits – Buy Now!
Innovative Portraits is about discovering new paths to painting and drawing portraits. Increase artistic looseness, find ways to get the proportions with ease, add more style by using shapes and colors, and invent ideas so that you never wonder what to put in the background. >> Buy NOW!
