It's one of my goals this year to make my art practice front and center in my work days. I can get caught up in all the other aspects of running a creative business (ie. administrative task, packing and shipping, social media, research, etc) that I leave little room for the actual creative part.

As I’ve been slowly moving away from social media, I’ll plan to post weekly to monthly round ups of art that I’ve been working on lately here in the journal. 

New line art style drawing

In the past few weeks I've been interested in making art using more of a line art type style. Usually, I do more shape based art. I do sometimes use line work, but it's more so on the inside of the shapes to show the details and it's usually pretty minimal. I really love shape based art as I’ve always been a fan of that bold graphic design look. 

Lately though, I've just been interested in more of a line work comic drawing style. I've kind of just been interested in actual drawing and sketching more in general. 

To play around more with this new style, I first went through some of my in-progress art work and used this different style to see how it would work out. Still trying to wrap my head around how I feel about it and what I like about it, what I don’t like, etc. More experimentation and thoughts to come.

Analogue painting and inking

I’m also experimenting with line work and color using traditional paint and ink. 

I love the way painting makes me feel when doing it, so I always try to make a room in my art practice for it, but there are also drawbacks to working traditionally.  It can be stressful and it takes more time, since there are so many mistakes you can make and you can’t go back and easily fix it.

Working digitally can be so much easier to do, since you can go back and erase, but sometimes I spend just as much time reworking a digital image as I would painting something once and going with that.

Most of all there’s that magical, tactile quality that goes along with traditional materials that you just can’t get when working digitally.

Here, I’m experimenting with painting the shapes first and then drawing lines versus drawing lines and then painting, I’m also playing around with painting very neat and clean versus painting loose and organically.

First I’ve painted the shape only. I was going to just do the line work digitally.

(shape paintings, shape paintings with digital line work)

Then, I decided I’d try to see how it turns out with the inked lines added after the shape. First I only did the lines inside the shape. Next I did the line outside the shape.

(shape painting with linework inside only, shape painting with lifework inside and outside)

For this one below, I drew the lines first with a micron pen, then I painted on the inside. For this experiment. I decided I wouldn’t just paint the whole inside clean and neat and instead, I would paint in a much looser style and try not butt right up against the line. It looks a bit of a mess in the photo, but it’s a nicer effect in real life. It's a bit more organic and loose and free, which I do like.

In the end, I wasn’t totally happy with either traditionally painted example and I prefer the digital style better. More experimenting to come. 

(ink line first with watercolor painting loosely inside, digital version)

I ran across an interesting post that goes more into detail about these kinds of drawing styles and experiments. Wendy Mac, who has a great drawing substack and community, writes about more about this concept here. Feel free to check out that post for more info.

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As always, thanks for being here,

Pauline Stanley
Founder/Designer
therarebirdco.com