hello December!🧡 | new sketchbook pages ✏️ | ✨drama✨ around markers drying in the middle of the coloring process (Patreon)

Hi!

Today I have some sketchbook pages to show you! All of them are quite unpolished and were made solely for practice.

I spent the past few days drawing a lot (like, A LOT) digitally. I don’t know what is it about but every time I switch back from drawing digitally to drawing on paper I suddenly feel like I can’t draw anymore. Even though I just spent 20 hours past weekend doing nothing but drawing. It weird me out every time I experience that!

Anyway!

I wanted to get out of this weird state as soon as possible and just stared sketching some leaves.

Leaves are definitely in my comfort zone but I had quite hard time coloring them! Ugh.

I was testing some colors. Yes, I draw mostly plants and have a few go-to green color combos but I’m always on the lookout for new green shades and combinations! By the way, I usually list all the potential colors on the page but I often end up using maybe half of them.

Oranges! (a potential theme for this month!)

Ummm I almost gave up after coloring the first orange!

Mostly because 2 of most crucial markers for my best orange color combination dried out while I was coloring it.

I knew they won’t last forever, but seriously, it wasn’t the best timing!

I tried to save the situation with some colored pencil textures but well, it doesn’t turned out well (actually it looks kinda nice on the scan but it looks terrible in real life :D the texture itself turned out great, colors? not so much)

The orange marker that just dried out was my go-to orange tone. Most orange markers have too strong red/pink undertone for my taste. I don’t know, it’s just really hard to find a marker that would be JUST orange (orange with a yellow undertone, to be more specific) and would look good on the ivory paper.

This marker was from Arteza and it’s not possible to just buy another one (I’d need to buy a whole set just to get this marker and I’m not going to do that :D). I haven’t found a pure orange in Promarkers’ color chart.

So, what am I going to do about it? I could buy online an orange marker from another brand and hope it would look as good on paper as it looked on the screen (which I might do at some point). Another option was to mix some colors I already have. Which I did.

On the right bottom you can see how I combined yellow and orange tones. These colors combined create quite nice and saturated orange, aren’t they?! Yayy, the day is saved!

I’m still not 100% happy with the colors and as you might noticed, I couldn’t decide on the leaves color’s, but I’m getting there!

As I mentioned, these pages were made just for practice and color tests. I didn’t even sharpen my pencils, the lines are quite sloppy. Well, that’s how a realistic page of rushed doodles  look :D

Here are two a little bit more polished illustrations I did a while ago but haven’t shared yet.

This one was based on the picture I took!

I believe I shared a work in progress shot + the reference picture in one of the previous posts.

Virginia bluebells, aka one of the most gorgeous flowers in the world! (in my opinion)

This flower deserves a separate full sketchbook spread! :D

I miss using blue in my illustrations and what’s the better opportunity to use this color, than drawing blue flowers?!

I was being delusional and took some pictures of these sketchbooks but all of them turned out blurry/ are weirdly sharpened on edges and no amount of editing can save them :D  Ahh, the winter light!

Here’s only one picture of all these sketchbooks together!

You know what?

When I took pictures/scans of these sketchbooks I wasn't happy with them and while I'm still not thrilled, I'm glad I decided to share them with you!

This month I have a lot of freelance work to do and I’m hoping to get better with balancing work, personal projects, drawing practice and Patreon content. I’ll be back with the new post in a few days!

PS. November’s mail has been shipped last Friday, December 1st! I hope it’ll arrive to you soon!

Marta