Inspiration
I’ve been working on developing an animal illustration style after taking a class by Liz Kohler Brown and using brushes by Liza Glanz.
Liz created a class called “Design Your Animal Illustration Style” for her The Studio community. I’ve finished the lessons, but have much more to do.
So far, I’ve written about my style development here:
The other day I saw my friend Nancy’s fun rabbit sketches on Instagram which inspired me to continue my style development. So I drew and wrote Back to Rabbits and today I did a quick draw of five more rabbits.
Progress
Liz had suggested to start with one animal and working with that animal for a while to develop the skill of drawing / painting it. As you can see, I chose ‘rabbit.’ And today I discovered the truth of Liz’s suggestion: daily / or almost daily practice of one animal gets you to “know” the animal, able to know its characteristics and shapes, allowing your drawings to be more free. Then you can develop your own style.
Inspired by Nancy to continue drawing more rabbits in a freer style, I also tried some unique ways to highlight the sketches with the background since I couldn’t leave them at just sketches. I added an lower opacity oval beneath each rabbit to ground them a bit.
I used some fun brushes this time from Lisa Bardot— a messy brush, spotty liner, for outlining and a texture brush, crayon, for filling in. The Bardot Spotty Liner is in the Texturrific Liner set. Bardot Crayon is in the MidCentury set. Sgraffito Rough is in the Scratch Art set.
The sgraffito rough brush created the background. I brushed diagonally in diamond shapes beneath the rabbits in different colors. Then I filled in the left over diamond areas on the edges. The sgraffito rough brush blends the colors together. I duplicated the layer twice. The first duplicated layer added opacity. The second duplicated layer I flipped horizontally and set it ti Linear Burn which created a brighter, colorful effect.
Thank you
This was even more fun and relaxing, and I have to say, it was much easier to draw rabbits again this time after playing with sketching them for several sessions. I’m appreciative of Lisa Bardot, Liz Kohler Brown, and Nancy Giammarco for inspiring the techniques and strategies for improving and creating my style.
#warmup4art #cldoodle24 #rabbits #aprildoodle #findyourstyle
#bardotbrush #thestudiobylizkbrown
I wonder, if I draw a line... 