Drawing every day

My one and only New Year’s Resolution is to draw every day.

I used to draw at least once a week, because I always start with a drawing and (usually) a watercolour painting for each new fabric design on Spoonflower. You can see the finished fabric design developed from this painting at the end of this post.

Tuesday is design day and I enjoy the time taken to do this, as you can see in this post.

I haven’t always drawn though. I remember virtually nothing from my Art lessons at secondary school and certainly wasn’t considered ‘good at art’. When it came to choosing subjects for public examinations at 16, I did want to choose Pottery (Ceramics) and was strongly dissuaded from doing so and was pointed in the direction of Biology-with-Chemistry instead!  Reflecting on it now, this seems odd as I would say both my parents were creative: my mother was a practised dressmaker and my father an expert gardener and garden designer, as well as an amateur oil-painter.

It wasn’t until very much later that I swam back against the current and returned to creative pursuits, including drawing. I paid to have drawing lessons from an artist called Jill York who lived near me. I owe her a great deal. This is the result of one lesson, using coloured pencil:

In the end I did a Textiles degree at CCAD, as a mature student. On my first day at college, we sat on our stools, with our drawing boards, in front of a large display of Japanese-inspired flowers and artefacts and drew for two days. It was wonderful: I had to pinch myself to believe I was really sitting there.

So I want to return to the practice and the pleasure of drawing.  During my visit to Iona in November, I saw this book, which seemed to offer the perfect prompt, especially as the user is encouraged to use different media in different months.

Little did I realise that January media meant felt-pens! I have no experience at all of these as a drawing medium so that was a challenge in itself.  I bought these ones (for £3.99) as a useful starter kit!

Fortunately, I already had some grey fineliners (Graphik Line Makers), which are very useful for marking out the confines of the drawing, and a black fineliner for highlighting key areas (Mitsubishi Uni-ball).

So far, so good. Half-way through January already and fourteen drawings are complete.

You can find all of them on Instagram here.

This is my ‘Mama Camel and Baby’ fabric. You can find it here.

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Thank you for reading my blog. Quilt patterns are here, Fabrics are here, Classes are here