March theme – tulips! 🌷☀️ | scans of sketches and drawings in progress + I found a perfect green marker!💚 (Patreon)

Hi friends!

It’s about time to announce this month’s theme. March is a month of tulips!

I had to learn how to draw these flowers first. At first I wasn’t sure whether I could make a whole theme around them but the more I was drawing them, the more colors I shaped I experimented with!

Everything is still very much in progress but let me show you how its’ been going!

These are scans of my illustrations. I edited them just a bit (adjusting levels, brightness etc) but I haven’t cleared them or anything, so there might be some dust specks on the paper :D

First tulip sketches in my official sketchbook! Made using mechanical pencil.

After I realized it’s actually not that hard to draw them, I had to pick the right colors.

Here in this simple illustrations I was just testing some colors for yellow and pink tulips. The colors in this scan are a bit washed out.

That day I found the PERFECT green shade – it’s Colorista marker “leaf green”.

I was gifted these markers about a year ago and completely forgot about them! I found them last week while cleaning and started using them right away.They have really nice colors! I do realize though that I can’t just easily buy these. These are available only in sets and shipping from the UK would probably be more expensive that the set itself.

So I decided to find a marker from another brand in a similar tone.

Promarker “bright green” G267 is veeery close to that.

I actually can’t believe I haven’t tried this color before! It looks oversatured on the cap, so I wasn't expecting much of this color. Oh, how wrong I was. 

Anyway, back to tulips!This time my approach to making illustrations was a bit different than usual.

Usually I’d just draw in sketchbooks.

This time I did some color tests on a loose sheet of paper and did some sketches on 80gsm copy paper. That’s mostly because I didn’t feel that comfortable with drawing tulips then. 

Also, I was drawing in the evening.

I use beige or light blue pencil for sketches when sketching in a sketchbook and it’s really difficult to see what I’m actually doing in the artificial light! I decided to just make some sketches using regular pencil and then trace them into my sketchbooks or use them as inspiration/reference for future illustrations!

Here are color tests. I wasn’t planning on making them.

I find red and pink quite challenging colors to work with, so I was REALLY procrastinating on picking the colors for red/pink tulips.

I was on the phone yesterday and there was a loose sheet of paper on my desk… and before I realized I made these without thinking much about it.These took me about 5 minutes and are a bit messy and mostly unfinished but I just wanted to try colors and I did find some nice combos, so yayyy! (of course I’ll share later all the colors used for each illustration)

Sketches!!

I really wanted to challenge myself to draw in a smaller scale. These are quite tiny! Honestly I think it’d be easier to draw them directly in the sketchbook cause tracing sketches that are this small is really hard!I was using a vase of tulips I have on my coffee table as a real life reference. I also was looking at some pictures found online but I wasn't drawing directly from them. 

 The first vase in progress!

Yeah, I was right. Tracing it wasn’t easy and I actually didn’t trace 100% the whole thing but rather general shapes and then I kind of redraw the sketch (using the sketch as a direct reference).

What do you think of this transparent glass vase?

It’s almost invisible in the scan. I kind of like it but I don’t know, maybe I should draw tulips in a colorful vase? I think I’m going to do both options for remaining illustrations!

More pencil sketches!

I made them while being on the phone with my sister. We talked for 3 hours sooo I had a plenty of time to sketch, lol! Again, I wasn’t planning it but these turned out nice!

I already traced some of them to my A5 sketchbook!

Some drawings from this morning.

The tulips on the left side are finished and on the right are still in progress! The colors look washed out (especially red and pink!) in this scan but it's ok for now.

And here we have everything in one picture!

As you can see, everything is still in progress!

I think I’ll make another 2-3 spreads but we’ll see how it goes. I’ll keep you updated!

Please let me know what you think and how you like this kind of posts!

Thank you!

Marta