Inspiration

Day 15 | #MarchMeetTheMaker is #Inspiration 

There are lots of pictures I could post for this. It was almost this picture of the sycamore I took yesterday...

It could be of artists, friends and family that inspire me. Words and humour are also up there as sources of inspiration.

However I settled on this, a fairly ordinary subject- brambles and their friends on a woodland floor.

The woods, nature and the predictable yet awe inspiring seasonal changes that happen all around us inspire me. I notice something new each year and am regularly fascinated by the often overlooked detail in the 'ordinary' subjects.

Spring is Springing

I love this time of year as everything slowly turns green and comes into leaf. 

For my Drawing A Day this week I've been looking at different tree species - drawing their buds as a sketchbook study. I'm a bit of a tree geek and love how you can play detective and work out which trees are which. At this time of year the buds are one of the ways to identify the species (as well as the bark, remaining seeds and silhouette). I'm hoping to draw a few more this week and build up my collection. 

I also really like being able to tell what time of year it is in my Drawing a Day book when I flick through - maybe one year I'll manage to do a whole year as a nature journal...

Here is the process...

These studies are the starting point for another project I'm working on... but that's for another day!

Inspiration

I have been having a look at a couple of my favourite illustrators recently. The first is Emily Gravett. She has a lovely website and I have quite a lot of her books now as I love them. I really like her drawing style and recently invested in this book of hers;

The Little Mouse is fabulous - although very scared throughout. I tried to draw him, copied directly from the book. I find trying to copy someone else's style fascinating and way trickier than I think it is going to be. I try and work out which order they drew which part of the picture - where they started and how they worked. I think Emily Gravett is left handed, and I am right and so I expect we tackled this mouse in different ways. I realise I always start my pictures in the top left and work across and down - probably so I don't smudge the work as I go. I only realised when I had a go at drawing on a tablet and it recorded the drawing as I did it - then I could watch the replay which was really fun.

Here is my version of the Little Mouse. He is a bit taller and skinnier than Emily's. I love the pencil he clutches - it gets smaller as the book goes on as he nervously nibbles it more and more!