20 Ways To Draw A Tree

I got this book for christmas and rediscovered it recently when clearing out my book shelf. It is a sketchbook with a difference, combining space for drawing with a huge number of drawings for inspiration. 

The front cover is made of matte texturised paper which makes me feel artsy for a start.

Each page consists of a different "thing" to be drawn from nature, there is a huge range from acorns to snowflakes, stars, mushrooms and feathers. 

They are all laid out slightly differently but the pages always have around 20 drawings of each thing, and space for you to add your own drawings. 

This is a great book for people who like drawing nature. I especially like it as pattern designers like me can use these small drawings as the basis for repeat patterns. 

Here are some ferns I drew on one page - it does feel strange being "allowed" to draw in this book.

The illustrator Eloise Renouf has put some truly beautiful artwork in this book with a wide variety of different colours, textures and styles to really get you inspired and motivated to draw. Even if you aren't into drawing it is a gorgeous book to own and have a flick through.

You can check out Eloise's website here and this book can be purchases from amazon here along with a number of other "20 ways to draw" books by different artists. What do you guys think of this book? Any other sketchbooks you can recommend?

The Girl and the Bird

My course leader Ashley Potter from Plymouth University has been running a project to investigate how different people tackle illustration work and how this may relate to their personalities. 

The project was entitled "Girl & Bird" this subject has been tackled many times in the past in all different ways and we were asked to interpret it however we liked, and then answer a questionnaire about our work which involved questions about ourselves, the work we did and about our personality types. 

I used this project as an opportunity to do a "real" illustration project, after months away from university I have found myself spending much less time on research and drawing development in the work I do and I wanted to push myself further in this one to try and create something exciting.

I used Pinterest to collect a variety of images to inspire me. Since I started learning aerial hoop I have been collecting different poses to motivate myself and I found myself drawn to the idea of including this in my work for this project as the grace and elegance of aerial artists posing in hoops reminds me of birds sat on branches. 

The first aerial girls I drew were ok, I found myself reverting back to the style I used when drawing the circus characters for my final year project. Whilst the facial expressions for that worked well, I wanted this girl to look less juvenile and more sophisticated.

After researching pierrot makeup and fashion illustrations I spent a while experimenting with different face styles in the drawings shown below. 

I much preferred these to the simplistic expressions I used to use and decided to carry this as a theme within the bird character. My first birds were fun, but rather fat :

I developed these using longer, curvier lines and more sophisticated faces, I wanted them to look more like birds of paradise.

For my final piece I chose a hanging pose for the girl on the hoop as I really liked the pose, I decided to use textured watercolour paper as it gave the line work a rougher style.

After scanning the drawing in I coloured it using Photoshop, I chose a palette of bright, fun colours to fit the fantastical theme, I was very happy with it and I hope to put prints online soon!

Eden Project Flower Studies

I went for a short break to Cornwall last week with the boyfriend. Since I he has never been to The Eden Project and I haven't been for years, we decided to take a day trip in the hopes we could see some nice wildlife and get away from the great british weather which basically has so far consisted of vast amounts of flooding! 

We were very lucky with the weather, it was cold but dry and quite sunny, when we were in the biomes we sat for a while and pretended we were in another country as it was lovely and warm! Definitely in need of a real holiday I think...

Here are some of the awesome things we saw whilst walking around:

Birds with furry heads

Flowers with furry heads

A hot air balloon

Some epic metal sculptures

And of course many, many flowers! I was feeling a little down the other day having not done any drawing for a good while and looking through these photos motivated me so I sat and had a little sketching session:

I used rotring rapidograph pens with 3 different nibs to create depth in the drawings by varying line thickness. Hoping to edit these and maybe put them together for a print or something when I get motivated to scan some things :)

Moomin Adventures Book Review

I have wanted to write a review of these books for ages, well, not even so much a review more just to show them off because I think they are beautiful! 

My mum bought a set of these for christmas presents but I liked them so much I got her to order me a set, you can buy them here for the absolutely stupid price of £4.99 for 3 books!

This set is based on the original stories and illustrations by Tove Jansson, they have been simplified for younger children and modernised with bright, fresh colour palettes. 

Before you even get to the first page the endpapers are absolutely beautiful!

I love the typography in the first couple of pages:

Each page has a different main colour which makes them very bright and exciting, with each illustration looking very different from the next. 

I love the style of mark making used with lots of small lines and dots creating patterns and depth within the drawings. They have done a great job of keeping the artwork in the traditional style whilst using colour to make it more modern and appealing to young children.

So awesome! What do you guys think? Do you like the way colour is used or do you prefer the more traditional style?