Drawing techniques we'll explore on our travels through Rajasthan!
Art Journaling is a great way to capture your life and the world about you. On the tour we’ll explore lots of different drawing techniques that will help you capture your personal experiences of Rajasthan.
Some of the ideas and techniques we’ll use are those that I like to use in my art journals and visual diaries. You can use them on their own or combine them. Learn more about some of these drawing techniques below.
Simple Line Drawings No need to overcomplicate things! We can use line drawing throughout our journals and add bits of colour as we go along or later on. We can do a few line drawing exercises to get the feel for it. The food and drink we enjoy in India will be a daily inspiration for your travel journal! I added to this page of line drawings over a number of days. There's space for me to add some writing, as I think back on my experiences and what I loved about Moroccan cuisine!
The food and drink we enjoy in India will be a daily inspiration for your travel journal! I added to this page of line drawings over a number of days. There's space for me to add some writing, as I think back on my experiences and what I loved about Moroccan cuisine!
I drew these beautiful birds, below, from a painted wall in the National Crafts Museum in Delhi. Using a gorgeous sketchbook of khadi paper, I drew them first in pencil then went over the line with a fine-liner pen. The background colour is watercolour. We'll give you a khadi sketchbook on the tour!
I copied this gentleman from an Indian miniature painting in the V&A Museum, London. We'll see lots of paintings on our tour that we can gain inspiration from!
Mark Making Let's experiment with mark making! I love to experiment with the types of marks I can make on the page to add interest, information and liveliness to my drawings. We can experiment with mark-making in any of the ideas listed here. Mark making is also a helpful device to add to pages if we want to convey feelings and emotions, as well as them being useful for filling in areas on the page to simply add interest, colour and pattern. I made the drawing below before breakfast one morning, wanting to capture the scale of the Moroccan landscape I was in. I started with a line drawing then began adding different types of marks to add interest and texture to the drawing
Before I left the hotel the rain came hammering down - it was exciting to see and on this page I wanted to capture the feeling of it hitting the cobblestones outside. Note that this page was produced over the period of a day using the 'Breaking it Down' idea! (see previous blog).
Using Negative Space Drawing the space around a subject will result in the subject being drawn – it’s just a different way of looking and can be useful for capturing complex subjects. We can practice this to add accuracy to our drawings, but having said that, nothing about the drawings in our journals need to be about accuracy!
In the example below I drew the negative spaces between the bamboo stalks, then worked in to those spaces to draw the cacti behind. I simplified the shapes of the bamboo leaves and didn't draw as many as were actually there!
Hatching and cross hatching using coloured pens and pencils One of my favourite techniques, hatching and cross hatching, will help us to add a sense of 3D form to our drawings. So whatever we’re drawing, whether it’s a cup, vase, branch, column, architectural feature, or person, we can add hatching and cross hatching to make it look more 3D. It’s not essential though!
Adding some hatching lines to this drawing has helped these leather-working objects look more 3 dimensional.
Turn two lines curvy lines in to a vine or branch by adding some hatching and cross-hatching lines. Leave a space in the centre to create a highlight, and you'll see them come to life!
Adding writing to your pages using creative lettering I love to combine drawing and writing in my art journals. We can write about anything – I tend to be quite factual and descriptive with the writing I add, but you could be writing about your experiences, how you feel, what you did, what you saw – anything! We’ll have a go with a range of creative lettering ideas that will help add interest to your pages, and which are fun to do! Below, writing in between the branches of the magnolia, which was coming in to bud.
Descriptive writing below, in red and black, and some very small lettering in amongst the branches of the tree, thinking about the new year.
Look out for more in this series of travel journaling tips and techniques for 'Create a Travel Journal - Rajasthan'!
For further information about the 'Create a Travel Journal - Rajasthan' tour please click here
Or email Jo Beal: jo@cottoneyejo.co.uk or Fiona Wright: Fiona@creative-arts-safaris.com
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All images in this document are from original drawings by Jo Beal. Please do not copy or reproduce any images without permission. Thank you.