hello March! 🌼 | sketchbook ep 14 - fineliners, plant studies, doodles | Spring in my marker sketchbook! ☀️🌱 (Patreon)

Hi!

It’s March already! I mean, we’re heading to the second week of this month!

I had to close/finish a few big things at the beginning of the month.

For now I decided not to take any freelance projects anytime soon, so I’ll have more time to create content for you and to work on my shop!

Anyway! Let’s see what’s in my sketchbook!

Here I was playing with the idea of making an illustration in the small frame.

Some of these suppose to imitate postal stamps. I used my old trusty mechanical pencil and fineliners (for the first time in who knows how long)!

I think with a bit more of practice, I’ll switch to this medium when making coloring pages.

This illustration of dandelions was a test to see how good I am at controlling the lines. Unfortunately the fineliner dried out soon after this practice so I guess I’d need to get new art supplies :D

This + pansies were made using 0,1 micron pen. I wonder how would it be to use even finer nib!

Lots of random doodles! Most of these were just warm up sketches.

The scissors were part of the freelance project I just finished working on. I illustrated books about some plants. From these books you can learn how to identify them, how to forage them, what to do with them and all this good stuff. It’ll be published soon in the UK.

Since these books are about foraging, I drew a few scissors thinking it’ll look nice next to all the botanical illustrations!

And here we have sketches for these plants. I made sketches only for a few illustrations (I made about 70 drawings in total), mostly to better understand the anatomy of the plant.

The truth is… I can’t sketch digitally. I mean, technically I can but it just doesn’t feel right so I don’t do that. When I draw digitally from the scratch, I’d start from shapes/base colors. It’s more like a painting process! I can show you some of my digital “sketches” one day!

So yes, I made a few sketches on paper just to start somewhere and then I turned them into digital illustrations. Once I figured out how to properly draw a plant, I made remaining illustrations digitally from the scratch. Hope it makes sense!

Some of these sketches are more defined than others. For example I didn’t feel the need to draw every single flower of black elderberry simply because it’s just too many of them. I’d rather do that digitally :D

At this point I was tired of sketching and just wanted to put ideas on paper.

This is probably the messiest sketchbook page you’ll ever see here :>

I haven’t touched my other sketchbooks in 1-2 weeks.

The idea of drawing on paper after this break made me a biiit nervous. I’ve decided to get out of my head and more literally, get out of the house.

I went for a short walk and spotted a few flowers peeking through the grass. (Spring, is that you?!) Siberian squill was one of them!

I planned on making a full Spring spread in this small pink sketchbook but I think it might be too small for this!

This will be just my warm up spread and I don’t know if I’ll draw more of Siberian squill flowers or something else there, we’ll see! It was my first time drawing this flower. I call it a “practice/warm up” spread for a reason.

Isn't this shade of green just perfect??

The Spring sketchbook spread just HAS to be done regardless!

I think I’ll make it in my A5 sketchbook and I might even record the process. I haven’t made a video of making a sketchbook spread before but it could be interesting!

Marta