Details are Sketchy...

My latest finished drawing - meet Ella Blue. I have included the bare sketch to create sort of a before and after.

I got the idea to scan in my bare sketch from watching a You Tube Video of Milliande's where she printed out one of her sketches and traced it onto her collage with carbon paper. This is often done by the artists who paint the whimsical folk or petit faces currently in vogue. For the art I make, I thought it couldn't hurt to have it saved...who knows if or when they would come in handy, so why not?

I've fallen into a bit of a pattern with my sketching /slash/ drawing. I've been trying to draw something new in pencil every day with my first cup of coffee. Then later, in spare or idle moments, I work on lining over it with my india ink pitt pen which I love, and erasing all my pencil lines and smudges, then coloring it with my dry pencils.

I'm considering buying an electric eraser because the entire page sometimes gets erased. The india ink is awesomely permanent and takes the erasing beautifully. Ella is the first drawing that I have done this way and it's a bit of extra work but worth it, I think.

Sketching the drawing is the most frustrating part for me because I cannot stress this enough - I erase every other stroke sometimes. If I just leave it all to erase after lining it with the india ink pen, it not only requires less erasing, it makes the process much more calming for me.

I'm also beginning to use my blender pencil on my coloring. Every once in while I can't tell it's working, but most of the time I can see it blending the color. Reminds me of stirring batter...how's that for a food fetish? LOL I think it depends on the pencil I used, either the color or the brand, I don't know...yet. Or, it could just be I need more practice.

What I do know is that coloring my drawings is a must for me. I absolutely love to color, always have. Believe it or not, when I was preggers with Missy, I used to pray she was a girl so I could color and play Barbies cuz I knew how to do both of those, LOL.

So when I color these now, I automatically go back to those feel-good times as a kid, except nowadays I'm not laying on my stomach on the floor rug. I'm through feeling that I have to think the desire to color is childish and silly. I'm embracing it now. Feel-goods and comforts are too hard to come by lately to pass on any, not to mention being able to connect back to childhood pleasure.

I don't know where I picked up those ideas anyway. {insert eyeroll}

The *almost daily* journal page I'm working on is a tribute to my learning about collage backgrounds, and how doing that made me realize I already knew the *secrets*, that it's the practice and experience with the process that makes you be able to do the techniques. I hope to finish it sometime this week.

Otherwise, I'm continuing to gesso pages and paint pages for page prep. It would be so easy for me to just do nothing but that for days and days because I am such a linear-minded worker. It's tough to just do a few pages and walk away. I'm thinking I will work ahead as much as possible while I am in the mood.

Until next time,