Orchid cartoon

Non-artists, today’s post will probably be boring, sorry.

I’m reading two books about art right now, “The Unknown Matisse” (the first half of a 1,000 page biography) at the recommendation of Laura, and “Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art” by Scott McCloud at the recommendation of Nora, who’s studying to be a graphic designer.

I’ve been working on my drawing in two directions: One is to be very specific and really draw what I see, not using the symbol of the object. The other is to learn to simplify and find the essence of the thing/person/animal and exaggerate it to make it more interesting and to be able to do wonderful cartoony drawings like Mattias, Paula, and Sparky, for example. I was asking Nora lots of questions about how illustrators create the characters they draw and she recommended reading Understanding Comics.

It’s written in comic book format and inspired me to try drawing my orchid in cartoon panels. With it’s long spindly stem, flower at the top and big leaves at the bottom, the orchid is awkward to compose on a page, so drawing it in panels was ideal. Conveniently, a pretend Discover credit card arrived in the mail today–just the right size to use to outline the panels.

The orchid is painted in a Raffine sketchbook, which was recommended as having great paper for 1/3 the cost of Moleskines. I’m not thrilled with it. It’s wire binding is huge, making it difficult to scan (gets shadows), the cover is flimsy, and the pages are smaller than my preferred Aquabee 6×9 Super Deluxe sketchbook which is about the same price, has about the same quality paper and smaller binding. I did learn a cool Photoshop trick to get rid of the shadows though: I used the Dodge tool set to Highlights at 50% with a large sized brush and it erased all the shadows without changing anything else.

I traced the panels using my trusty old Sharpie, but didn’t like the way the ink spread on this paper so switched to the Lamy Safari fine point to draw with. I’m liking the Lamy more and more for drawing and the Sharpie less and less. Then I added watercolor, but before painting the dark background (Daniel Smith Indigo) I scanned the drawing and added dark backgrounds in Photoshop to see if I liked it. I did, so I went back and painted them.