Embroidered Collage

Color again - but this time colored pencil instead of markers.  I love how this medium lays down on the paper of the moleskine sketchbook.  It gives me a lot more room for shading if I want to make the pieces appear more three dimensional than the overlapping does on its own.  The design element of having one circle be squiggly lines instead of smooth also seemed to work well.

I couldn't continue with the color because we were traveling, so I did another divided field, this time varying the size of the circular ripples for each function.  This page took me longer because of the small circles, but I really liked the effect.

A friend who saw the sketchbook at this point liked the page with ovals and circles and suggested I add triangles, too.  So I gave that a try.  I'm not particularly happy with this incarnation.  I think the shapes get lost in the other similarities.  It needs a focal point or difference of some sort.  But that's not the fault of the combination of shapes.

At some point it occurred to me that the ripples looked something like the contours on a map, so I did a page emphasizing the similarity.  I used the smallest pen point I had and deliberately held the pen differently for this one so as to get more irregular lines. 

I was a bit bored and didn't know what to do next, so I gave myself freedom to deviate further from my doodle algorithm.  I drew one curvy line and continued until I had a horn, after a fashion. I confined the usual pattern to one small section, but referenced it with the circles elsewhere.  Not bad, but I think I can do more with the concept.

See the previous three spreads.

I did go back to patterns for some of these drawings.  I wondered what would happen if I expanded one ring and added designs to it and also what would happen if I divided the field of the drawing, so I tried two of each.

My mind drifted and I tried something intended to be a landscape.  It was okay, but not impressive, so I abstracted and rounded the idea further for the next page.  This is more appealing, but I'm not really happy with it either.

I think I prefer the drawings where I'm more careful and regular with my lines and the thickness of those lines is narrower in proportion to the size of the page.  I'll definitely be returning to the ideas in those first two spreads again.

See the previous three spreads.

I began adding color by extending the largest expanding circle with the greens, deliberately not letting it intersect the centers of the other circles for more interest.  That wasn't quite enough, so I made the center green as well.  I was really pleased with this one.  The next page I tried to have red and blue intersecting circles make purple.

I added colored lines inbetween black ones and then tried circles expanding through a color progression.  This one didn't scan very well.

This doodle with the same idea but a different color range worked better.  Then I decided to space out the colored rings, placing them as the ripples traveled outward.  Red always looks so good with black and white.  The result was kind of blah until I made the one red circle thicker.

Maybe some additional patterning next.  I'm not sure...

See the previous three spreads.

I continued with rings of asymmetric growth from the origination points, altering which direction the objects grew in.  I really like the movement in these and will probably return to this variation of the motif.

But the next day I felt like combining circles with ovals, or origination dots with origination lines.  The ovals made me think of eye, so I played that up a bit on the next doodle, putting in an eye, nose, and mouth.

I stepped back a bit to see what happened when I placed the origination points in more orderly lines.  It was very difficult to keep the ripples circular instead of just arcs duplicating the previous arc.  My eye wanted to play tricks on me.

I have the first page on the next spread done and have started trying to add in a bit of color.

Go back and see the first three spreads.

The expanding circles doodle that I used in Taking a Line for a Walk stuck in my brain so much that I decided to commit an entire moleskine to elaborating and varying the idea.  I've never tried to stick with a series that long and this is going to be a bit of a challenge for me.  The idea is mutating already and I have no idea what the last page in the sketchbook will look like.

I began with just one circle, as a sort of introduction, and then did a page with a basic set of interactions showing how I think about this doodling algorithm.

I tried a version with more origination points, then decided to see what would happen if one circle expanded by three lines at a time while all the others expanded with only the usual one.

That led me to the idea of having a larger gap between the expanding circle coming from one origination point.  I slid sideways a bit from there and started a page where the "circles" expand assymmetrically.

There are many more pages to come.  I find these soothing, like cross-stitching, and easy to pick up and put down when I only have a minute or two to be creative.

I thought I'd spend some more time this year working off of references.  The first sketch, to the left, was done directly from a photo in the Wetcanvas! image library.  I can see the tentativeness of the lines I made as I tried to reproduce the lines of the reference.  Part of the difficulty was that the angle of the photo wasn't directly on the wingspread, but slightly off so that the left wing should be foreshortened a bit, an aspect I didn't capture.  The second sketch to the left was an attempt to draw the same butterfly in a freer fashion. Instead it ended up distorted and child-like looking, at least to my eyes.

For a third try I decided to use an aid.  I sketched out guidelines with a pencil.  First, one across the wingspan, then a perpendicular one for the body, then diagonals for the remainder of the wings.  Then I picked up the pen again.  The result was more stylized, but appealing.  However, symmetry can be difficult.  If you're just a little off it can look wrong instead of interesting.  So I decided to try not worrying about it and just draw one wing to make the whole composition asymmetrical.

The concept worked out great.  I like the composition and enjoyed the drawing.  Unfortunately I felt I added one too many pattern lines to that first try.  Something about that feathered line bothers me.  So I tried it again.  I like this second attempt much better. 

Next I wil try adding color to a few of these sketches.