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@ Tynka
2025-01-18 19:14:39I feel like the new year is slowly starting to settle in. That doesn’t mean I’m off to the races. I still intend to take the whole month (or as long as it takes, really) to make plans and carefully set a course forward. I’m not rushing it, I’m letting it all set, like tea leaves at the bottom of a glass.
I still draw daily (I’m around day 193 now), but the nature of the drawing seems to have changed. Instead of using colours and taking time to capture light and mood, I only seem to be interested in quick line sketches, the quicker, the better.
They go well with being slightly absent-minded, which I am, in a nice way. Instead of looking around for inspiration, I turn to the books I’m reading and just sketch scenes that stay with me.
All drawings in this post are based on The Book of Doors by Gareth Brown, one of the many tasty books I was gifted for Christmas. I’m adding the sketches in the order they were made because it’s kind of funny how the characters emerge. I didn’t plan for the main character to have short light hair, but somehow she does.
The book lends itself perfectly to easy sketching; the characters are not very complicated, but they are described with a lot of visual clues, and the story moves from location to location, leaving clear images in my mind.
It’s pretty clear who’s the bad guy and who’s not, and it was a good exercise to try to show that in a sketch. There is also a lot of movement in the story, with characters being surprised by the events and having to run/ hide/ escape and confront each other.
There are a lot of doors, many different locations and a good dose of time travelling. I don’t think I ever drew a time-travelling kind of scene before, so of course, I had to try. I used the hairstyle, a piece of clothing and a bit of colour to show the same person at two points in time but also in the same room. Did it work?
Recently, I’ve been really into the black and white illustrations in young adult, early reader, and chapter books. I love their simplicity and how much they can convey with a line drawing. I will hang around in that space for a bit, with my quick sketches.
I started a new book, funnily enough also about doors, so I might share more sketches soon.
Thanks for reading.
x
M