One hand, different styles

When it comes to painting, I am still looking for myself. One and half years of experience ranks me as a pure beginner, so I need to work on basic techniques and test various supplies.

According to the comments on my personal art challenge I agree to see a tendency towards illustrations. I have a lot of ideas, most of which are stopped by lack of skills.

A great example from the past few days is a painting of lantern. Immediately, I imagined a scene from an old fairy tale, which I listened to as a child. The story tells about daily life of beetles that fly with lanterns to bring the light to people at night. Because of audio version I had no pictorial prejudices.

Full of joy, I sketched the basic idea on a scrap paper easily. Then I produced a problem in my head – mainly because of figural drawings. Although I reduced the number of beetles from five to three, the result lacks the poetics and simple lightness of the original sketch. Painted in watercolor with black liner and with the final touch by colored pencils.

Conclusion – I need more practice with figural drawings and courage to do it. My wise inner voice adds – maybe start with simple silhouettes like in the sketch, don’t push yourself into a real figural drawing. They won’t look real anyway.

In the shadow of Campanula

I made this drawing with silhouettes a few years ago by colored pencils only, maybe it looks better than actual beetles with lantern, what do you think?

There are also two of non-figural painting, covering topics of my personal challenge – document and butterfly. In these dark days I couldn’t paint a summer butterfly, so I decided for a night moth, specifically army green moth. I took a reference photo from wikipedia, hopefully it is free to use.

I would appreciate your comments, especially on the figural drawing. Some advice how to combine my lack of skills and experience with my desire to paint all the ideas and imaginations I have?

Thanks for reading and stopping by!

With love and hugs,

Ivana

Advertisement

Drawing Tarot cards

Opening an account on the deviant art platform makes me to take even old drawings from hidden cabinets and show them without shame. I never claimed to be a professional artist. I draw by heart and cannot do it better.

Long ago, I started to draw my own tarot cards with related Aura-Soma bottles on them. At that time I was sitting several hours a day surrounded by this colorful miracle and absorbed the energy and story inside. I was fascinated, so it’s no wonder I put them into the system.

I made about half of the major arcana when I realized how cowardly I was trying to avoid drawing people because it was a nightmare for me. At the same time I clearly saw that cards without people didn’t have enough energy, they were somehow flat. But the others looked strange because the people didn’t fit anatomically. I began to feel more frustration then pleasure, so I interrupted the whole project.

I took the cards from the bottom of scrap last week with the same result as many years ago. The cards without people are nice but flat, the cards with people are strange but strong enough. The only difference happened in the mind. It seems that I began to like my strange people and even the strange perspective. And I proudly show you some of them today.

I’ve been always saying that my drawing replaces therapy. It took several years, but hopefully I did accept my imperfection finally.

With love and respect to imperfections,

Ivana

In the case you’d like to look at more of my tarot drawings, here is link to the gallery.