This week I have a short inspirational video for you. I wanted to make a video that I can share on Instagram, so this has different portions than my videos usually are. You can watch it bigger by pressing the last icon on the menubar below the video.
Most of these drawings are made with regular colored pencils (or crayons as some call them) and some with watercolor pencils. I love both.
Coloring Freely on Blank Paper – Simple Start!
I am an advocate for coloring freely – starting with blank paper, adding colors on top of each other, and getting excited about what comes up. This doesn’t have to be anything difficult. Here’s an old picture from 2015 that I still find inspiring. You can illustrate your journaling with freely colored boxes.
Children draw freely with colored pencils, but when they grow up and become “colored pencil artists” they need all kinds of references to get started. References are great for learning some techniques, but they don’t make anyone an artist. A big part of art is in our mind – how we open up and how we allow ourselves to break boundaries.
Growing Your Skills
My love for colored pencils is based on a promise that I have made for my inner child: I will color for you and help others to color for theirs. So even if I make oil paintings and media art too, colored pencils always have a special place in my heart.
So, welcome to my courses to improve your skills and expand your artistic thinking!
This week, I have something very different than before: cross stitch! Buy my first commercial design Primavera from my Etsy shop called Needle and Peony!
There are two main reasons for designing this pattern. The first is the need for creative play and the second that I couldn’t find anything like this from other designers: a fantasy woman’s facial portrait that wouldn’t be a huge project.
Playing and Drawing in the Stitchly App
My need for creative play comes from being very serious with art this year. I have spent a lot of time in programming computer art and I have been painting a bit too. It’s all great but I started to miss drawing, and especially, making something that is purely illustrative and not so abstract and artistically challenging.
So because I have had cross stitching as a hobby almost all my life, I bought an app called Stitchly and started drawing there – on lunch breaks and such, a few stitches at time. First I just doodled freely with the Apple pen to get to know the app.
Stitchly is easy to use and with the pen, drawing is fun and the squares get filled nicely. Of course, you can also import a photo and let the app create the chart automatically. But to make the image look realistic enough, the stitch count needs to be high and the design … well I don’t think it would be a design anymore, just a pixelated photo. So, when I design, I like to draw with the pen and if I use references, I only use them as inspiration and draw every square myself.
I also like that you can have a custom palette in Stitchly. I have made a palette that has all the DMC colors from my stash, so I can also check the real color when designing.
Drawing and Stitching Faces
When people begin drawing in adulthood, they often start with faces. Eyes, mouth, nose too. Facial features create a connection to the person born on paper. It’s also fun to draw hair and add decorations there.
So, one day it hit me that even when doing cross stitches, I can get company from the character I am stitching. However, couldn’t find a cross-stitch pattern that was a reasonable size and where the character was naturally asymmetrical, but still sparked the imagination.
My stitching time is lonely time in the evening. I clean the studio if I have been painting, and then pick extra glasses and while stitching, watch other cross stitchers’ videos on Youtube, so Flosstube as we cross stitchers call the channels.
So when I wanted to stitch a facial portrait of an imaginary person, I decided to draw it in Stitchly. After making the chart, the fun started – I was stitching my own pattern!
Primavera can be stitched in the colors I suggest in the pattern, but since there are only 11 colors, it’s easy to change them as you like.
Although Primavera means spring, by changing the colors you can associate a different season or different theme with the character. The decorations are designed to be so general that they don’t limit the character you create.
The hair has three colors of different darkness, the skin has four. The hair band has two colors close to each other. It is easy to change the accent colors of the mouth and eyes, and also the colors of the decorations.
You can buy the pattern for Primavera in my Etsy shop!
Needle and Peony
It feels nostalgic to have something on sale at Etsy again! Long before I became a full-time artist, I opened the Etsy shop called Kukkilintu, then later changed the name to Peony and Parakeet. That little shop had a major impact on my career and life. Most of my customers lived outside Finland and I started communicating more and more in English.
Maybe some of the current readers of this blog were my customers over ten years ago when I sold folk bags (currently available as a knitting pattern), handknitted doll clothes, hand-decorated papers and cards!
Now I changed the shop name to Needle and Peony and intend to add some charts over time. Maybe some slow stitching ideas also, as I have some of them too. Last week, I set up an Instagram account called @needleandpeony to show my cross stitch projects – also what I have stitched from other designers.
While designing Primavera, it hit me that I have a pile of drawings that I have made for classes and that could be turned into cross stitch patterns. When I browsed them, I couldn’t decide what to choose next, so I now ask you – what would you like me to design next? I have picked 5 drawings to choose from, leave a comment and let me know which one is your favorite! Which one of these would make a great cross stitch design?
Free Spirit, acrylics, 2015. See the blog post: Art is Freedom
#4 – For Those Who Want to be Freer
When you want to be freer, the art of seeing is as important as the art of creating. See the video of making “March Still Life”: Painting in Liberated Style
Take this challenge to move from illustration to fine art: Step out of your comfort zone and think about a bird shape as a canvas for expressing its surroundings.
Reduce watching those photo-realistic colored pencil videos and start coloring freely. One heart shape can lead to many and start your flight to the world of imagination!
Our creativity has winter and spring too. We need each other to keep the inspiration going – to turn the winter into spring. A challenge for you: How can you make a new start – create a new spring for your art?
Gather your art on a side table for display! Make a collection of all kinds of pieces – even the smallest drawings and collage pieces can look fun this way.
This picture is from 2020 when I was making the course Decodashery. I have a plastic plate that is the same size as my table. It protects my art, and it also protects the tabletop when painting in watercolor.
Kevät is spring in Finnish and the song was presented by a Finnish girl band Tavaramarkkinat in 1985. Here’s an English translation of the lyrics. The tone of the song is melancholic. This kind of controversy between melancholy and joy is one of the most inspiring things in spring, I think!
P.S. PostScript for Spring Art Ideas
We still have a lot of snow in Finland, and I miss spring so much! In these spring art ideas, I wanted to combine my yearning for spring and the celebration of being a full-time artist for ten years. The actual anniversary is in September, but I want to celebrate this life span the whole year of 2024.
One part of the celebration has been making the course Liberated Artist Revisited where I invite you to paint with me – to follow directions from Paivi many years ago, and then create more with the current Paivi. At the same time, you can ponder, how your art-making has changed and will change.
Because of the 10-year celebration and the nature of personal stories, Liberated Artist Revisited is a limited edition – only available for purchase until the end of March 2024! >> Buy Now!
This week, we apply art to something different than usual. We use our skills to transform a Schleich horse or other plastic figurine into a fantasy animal.
I have a soft spot for plastic horse collectors, and I follow many of them on Instagram. One of the most inspiring accounts is Lightning Leoo (@lightningleoo). Leo has organized community challenges on Instagram and Discord. I have participated in them a couple of times. Like Leo, most of those who customize collectible miniatures aim to make the animal look more realistic. However, I want to be more playful with colors and ideas.
Step 1 – Choose a Theme and Paint the First Layer
Start by choosing a theme that gives ideas for the coloring. The animal figurine here is a brown Schleich foal and my theme is daffodil. I used acrylic paints to make the legs green, the body yellow, the hoof orange-red, and the tail and the main white – just like the flower!
At this point, the animal doesn’t look nice at all, but that’s ok. The idea is just to cover the original paint and make a simple foundation for the decoration.
Step 2 – Add More Tones and Decorations
After covering the original color with the theme colors, mix more tones of those colors. For example, if you have used one green in the previous step, now mix more green tones – cooler and warmer, darker and lighter, brighter and more muted. Add slight variations of tones on the top of the first color layer so that what used to be one solid color has now a gradient of tones. This makes the color more natural. Note: you can use this technique in any art!
In this project, I created color mixes of all kinds of greens, oranges, yellows, and whites.
At this point, you can also start decorating the figurine and use these color mixes in decorations, eyes,You and other details.
Get ideas for decorations from the theme! I painted small daffodils.
Step 3 – Optional – Add Shadows with Soft Pastels
Soft pastels make the figurine look more real and highlight the best parts. First, scrape them with a sharp blade to get color powder. Use a small brush to spread it where the shadows are, for example, where the leg meets the belly. You can also soften the color changes with pastels.
Attach the powder more permanently by spraying the fixative over it. Notice that after attaching the powder, you can continue with the finishing touches in acrylics!
Step 4 – Take a Fantastic Photo!
We always should take a good photo of the finished work, but with a fantasy horse, it is very rewarding. Find a place where you can fool the eye about the scale and bend down to take a photo a bit upwards.
Another option is to make a gallery set up so that the background is white and the figurine is photographed like a piece of art.
Another Example of a Fantasy Horse Repaint
Here’s a Schleich horse that is bigger than the Daffodil fowl. My theme for this one was peach. The decorations are simple, but there are many tones and lovely gradients.
Making one foot in a different color adds drama and a bigger horse is easier to paint.
It was fun to photograph these two together!
Natural light creates its own effects and makes the fantasy look real.
Horizontal lines in the background make the movement look more real.
Gift Box for Fantasy Horse
These small fantasy horses are great for presents. I gave the fowl to my friend who owns not just a collection of plastic figurines but a real horse too. I found a sturdy box that I had got when ordering paint tubes.
One side had writing on it, but I painted a floral decoration over it.
Creative Play as an Art Form
Playing has always been important to me. When I play, I get ideas that go beyond the ordinary and that combine different fields. In 2020, I even made a painting about the power of play called Steppe Wind.
Arotuuli – Steppe Wind, acrylics on canvas, 2020. See more about the painting process: Painting an Intuitive Fantasy
In the course Magical Inkdom, we draw and decorate paper horses and other animals.
By playing we can enjoy the beauty and be comforted. It’s like we enter the same big hall of art but from a different door. Then when it’s time to get more serious, we have new energy and new power to overcome our fears.
That’s why I want to bring up topics like painting and photographing figurines in this blog.
