hello November! | new (and old) drawings 💛 | my markers full color chart 🎨 (Patreon)

Hi!

I’ve been feeling under the weather for the past few days and didn’t even realized it’s November 7th already! (I could swear it miiight be November 3rd, at best).

These days warm blanket, hot water bottle and hectolitres of tea are my best friends. Yesterday I started to feel better and managed to actually do something that required brain power. Yayy me :D

Yesterday I watched “Over the garden wall” (for the very first time!!!) hoping I’d get some inspiration for autumnal illustrations.

I’d rather go out, soak up the sun and admire colorful leaves but gotta wait a few more days to do so. “Over the garden wall” is a great show! Right after binge watching all 10 episodes, I opened the sketchbook and to my surprise, I found myself drawing tropical leaves.

Umm, hello, this show was supposed to inspire me to make autumnal illustrations, so why do I draw palms and banana trees?? Maybe it was due the fever, lol. 

After a short moment of this confusion, I decided to let myself draw whatever I want. I made this monstera leaf page. It’s a comfort thing for me to draw and it was nice to explore different shades of green.

This sketchbook page reminded me of one I made a while ago and never shared it online.

I don’t even remember when I drew that. I suppose these blue flowers were a color tests for future blue illustrations and months after that I wanted to draw some houseplants and found this half-empty page in the sketchbook and well, this is how this page was created :D

Today I was looking out the window, admiring yellow leaves of the birch looking like a pure gold shining in the rays of autumn sun.

What are the most gorgeous golden leaves you could think of? For me it’s ginkgo leaves!

Of course I had to draw them.

It wasn’t the first time I drew these leaves. Here’s the comparison, old vs new!

Well, I should probably draw leaves, fruits and branches before making any comparison (so it’d be more accurate) but that’s what we have at the moment!

I didn’t realize there’s such difference between colors in both!!

The new ones are more saturated, looks more golden and are just more… yellow, while old version is kind of muted and more orange.

Colors fade with time (which is the only thing I don’t love about alcohol based markers) but it wouldn’t be THAT dramatic after only a year. So yeah, it was just definitely me using different colors. 

Also, the outline is much different! In the old version it’s much bolder and darker. I’m not sure yet which style I like more and whether I’ll keep drawing ginkgo with such subtle outline or try bolder options.

Does it mean that I’d make more illustrations of these leaves? Most definitely.

I’m not 100% sure yet but I think it would be a nice theme for November prints, stickers and wallpapers. What do you think?

I made a new color chart of all the markers I have!

I remake it every few months, mostly because colors fade with time and they don’t look true to themselves anymore after a while.

(I can scan this page and upload it if anyone would be interested???)

This time I also reorganized them a bit and added a few colors to the collection. I use markers from three different brands (well, mostly two) but I store all of them together and it’s much easier for me to pick colors when I see all of them in one place, you know?

I don’t use all of these colors.

Like, I don’t think I ever used any gray marker and I used any turquoise tone maybe twice.

I could easily have half of these colors or maybe even less and still be able to create something nice. That’s just a little reflection to myself and to everyone who thinks that they need a huge set to even start using markers. I started with a collection of +/- 10 random Promarkers I bought online before I even learned myself how to draw.

But that’s the story for another post!

I hope this post wasn’t too chaotic to read, lol. I’m still not in the best shape but I'm getting there!

Marta