sketches ep 7✏️✨ | unfinished drawings that led to making one of my best illustration 💛 (Patreon)

Hi! Long time no sketchbook content!

Today I want to show you a few recent pages of my pencil sketchbook and some illustrations I’ve never finished but they inspired me to create a sketchbook spread you might be familiar with.

Okay, let’s go!

A comfort zone sketchbook spread.

I made it about a week ago but from what I recall, it was a drawing warm up. I’m a firm believer that warm ups before drawings are as important as warm ups before a workout. Okay, maybe they’re not necessary but do they help a lot. I always do at least 10 minutes of drawing “whatever” before starting working any “serious” illustration! (unless I’m in a rush)

One of the weirdest spread I’ve ever made. (in a good way?) It’s quite different than my usual stuff (eyes, poisonous plants, text?!)

Do you know that feeling when some lines from the song get stuck in your head? Yeah, I had to write them down. These verses are from The Smith’s “Still ill” song.

Two pages of pears (apparently my current ultimate comfort zone theme), random foliage and cosmos flowers.

It’s been a while since I drew flowers, it felt so nice!

Now it’s time to share illustrations I abandoned!

This Spring I really wanted to draw at least one floral composition in my sketchbook. Usually I’d draw a composition of just one type of flower but I wanted to take it to the next level.I chose a few Spring flowers that grows by waterside meadows (cuckoo flower, forget me not and lesser celandine) and made this quite loose, not that detailed drawing to see how they look together.

I ended up not liking lesser celandine so instead of developing this illustration, I dropped it at this stage. So yeah, there’s not even one cuckoo flower here, lol!

I’ve decided to swap lesser celandine to marsh marigold and made a test illustration of these 3 flowers.

They look lovely! I really wanted to make a composition out of them. I have a whole story about it but I’ll share in a separate post, this one is long already.The whole practice spread:

What could go wrong at this point? Well, I had to practice drawing marsh marigolds. This is the practice page.

I made a lot of pencil sketches of marsh marigolds as well but noticed that I still struggled a bit with drawing their leaves.

Instead of making the composition I was initially practicing for, I spontaneously started a marsh marigold themed sketchbook spread in another sketchbook!

It was very very spontaneous process with no plan, no initial sketch, just fun. And that’s how this spread you might already seen on my IG, was created.

After that I kind of lost interest in drawing more flowers for a while.

Being able to present my works this way is yet another perk of using multiple sketchbooks!!

Maybe at some point I’ll get back to this idea of making this Spring floral composition!

What do you think?!

I hope you enjoyed seeing this batch of sketches and these unfinished drawings!

Marta