Thirty Days of Drawing — Day One

Once upon a time, many moons ago, I loved to draw. Every day I would be sketching something, doodling on the margins of my school books, indulging in my imagination with pencil and paper... I tried to get back into drawing over the past couple of years with digital art, but it just wasn't the same.

Last week, as I was preparing my son's Back To School stuff for the year, I bought a fine-liner for him... that action alone made me want to draw once more. Suddenly I found myself on an art website I used to buy paint and canvases from, and I bought a small artpad, my own fine-liner, and some coloured gel pens because I've always liked those things. They arrived yesterday!

Eager to start drawing and indulging in my creativity once more I scoured the interwebs for drawing challenges akin to Inktober, and found Ellolovey on Instagram who makes up monthly prompts for artists. And I've decided to play along!

Honestly, I don't really like February's prompts that she's put out ready for next month, but I'm totally down with January's... so I'm thinking of mixing and matching them. My artpad has thirty tear-out pages so I'm going to do thirty-days worth of drawing and hopefully I still feel motivated on page thirty to buy another artpad and do it again and again. I want to get back into drawing wholly and completely.

Just a note that I'm not going to be doing this every single day — it could take me a few months to complete my thirty days!

I'm going in order, so the first prompts are: Cottage and Cherries.

At first I was going to do a cottage in a cherry blossom forest, then a cottage with a cherry plant for a roof, but it ended up becoming a mere cottage in a fantasy forest. I'm not really good at shading, but that's something I can improve over time, and overall I'm fairly pleased with this 8 hour work. Especially for my first drawing in so many years.

Excuse my photo quality. I'm in a dark room and using the phone camera. But this is how the work began... as a bunch of lines as I tried to work out where my cottage should go.

In goes a very fugly cottage. xD

I start to plan out what else should be in the drawing. I chose cobbled stone for the path, a nice big tree, and I was going to do some bushes and flowers around the cottage.

Then I had a massive change of plan. At this stage I was still trying to work on getting cherries into the drawing somehow and I was thinking of covering the roof in cherry leaves and have cherry fruit integrated somehow.

My next plan was to have vines wrap around the nearest trees, and have cherries on those vines. But in the end, I decided I liked the vines to be simple leaves rather than fruited.

I then decided I was pretty happy with the drawing so far and it was time to go over my pencil with my beautiful new fine-liner.

All penned in and the pencil has been erased. Now it was time to get started on some detail.

And there we have the final, finish product! 😊

The last time I draw a picture, by hand, with pencil and paper, was all the way back in my teenage years a good twenty years or so ago. I can barely write with pen and paper without my writing going messy and my hand getting sore, so used to typing I am.

So I'm really surprised, and pleased, I managed to do this in one day, in 8 hours, and my hand isn't even tired. That's really cool!

The next two prompts I'll be mixing and matching are crystals and frog so that'll be interesting.

 

Until next time!! 😄🎨🖌️

 

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_{All images in this post are courtesy of me, @kaelci.}