Doodle Process

Recently I discovered Creative Bug. It's a website that offers a ton of artsy online classes for a fraction of the usual cost of online classes. For a little less than five dollars a month I have access to all the classes they offer plus I get to keep one class a month in a personal library for ever and ever. I mean really, where can you find even one class these days for that price?

Anyway, one of the classes I really enjoyed was Lisa Congdon's class on line drawing. I love line drawing because it's not so much about rendering things realistically as it is about letting out your own imagination.

One exercise she showed was about concentric circles and I wanted to try that one in my journal. But what happened was what always happens when I try to follow instructions: I start out doing what the teacher says and then I go in a totally different direction. So the only thing that looked anything like the exercise was the fact that, yes, there were circles involved. But instead of making concentric circles I simply started filling the circles with doodles and then coloured them in with red and black. It lead to quite a nice page if I do so say so  myself and I actually took some pictures of the process that I thought I might share with you:

I started by drawing circles like a good little artsy girl.

Then I already started doing things a little differently by colouring in the negative space with black.

Then I wondered 'what if?' and things got out of hand.

And before I knew it I was left with a page looking like this.

I love the colour combination of black, white and red. Somehow those colours to me always seem made for each other.

This is what I love about online classes: you can use them just to infuse your own work with a little inspiration. It's not about copying the teacher, it's about getting a glimpse of new possibilities for your own work.

Hope you are inspired by whatever it is you are doing and wishing you a wonderful and artsy day!