Shiny garden - a step by step artwork

Hello friends!

I have a new drawing for you :) I had some very hard-working and disorganized time in January. I was following fantastic blogs of other fellow Steemians, but didn't have much opportunity to post myself. I felt inspired countless times, and now there are several new things that I would like to try in the close future!

The drawing below is a first one of my experiments. Namely, I was getting frustrated with what happened to the black areas of my scanned drawings. One could see easily the texture of the paper, the marks left by pen and markers, and different colour shades of black- bluish, reddish, greenish. And as I'm a happy owner of an Intuos Pro tablet, I decided to finally modify one of my pieces in order to get rid of these defects. You can see the result below. Maybe I'll create some art from scratch using a tablet, we will find out soon I think :)

Pen and ink on paper, edited with Intuos Pro, 29,7 x 42 cm

This piece was meant to be an entry for @opheliafu's contest, however I was late for the deadline. I decided to post it anyway, as another postcard from Shiny Forest. Here we can see a forest ghost who is a key keeper, guarding a secret garden in the middle of the dark forest.

Funny how the bright part of my drawings almost always lands on the right side. This may have something to do with the fact that I'm left-handed, but perhaps it's simply related to the usual orientation of written or visual narrative (from left to right).

Would you like to know how I drew this piece? I documented the progress with my camera, as I couldn't use my scanner at the time that I was creating the posctard.

STEP BY STEP PROGRESS

I started with a pencil sketch,

which I then repeated using a pen.

And after this point I immediately proceeded with shading and filling shapes with black. To those who are in love with craftmanship and don't have a self-healing cutting mat, I must tell you that I freaking love my green mat, even though it doesn't do for a great photo background ;) But it sure is practical, it protects the surface of the desk (which in my case is demolished anyway, but that's just me), I also use it as a ruler and I make some small lino cuts on it.

In a close up you can see that I used more defined stippling for the forest, and a fine and bright one for the garden wall. I wanted the wall to look ethereal, and a bit glowing.

Well, this kind of art takes its time to get finished. At this stage it's me, pen, paper and lots of time and patience ;) But I as I find stippling very relaxing, I don't really mind!

Another close-up showing almost ready piece.

And a photo of a ready piece.

I wasn't satisfied with the final scan, because the paper was folded, besides, my art had some minor defects, like the smudgy black or some marks.

So using my tablet and a Brush tool in GIMP (colour black and white, with different levels of opacity), I started to modify my piece. I wanted the darkness to be deep and impenetrable. I also got rid of the paper folds, and some minor lines or marks here and there.

I had to revisit my piece, because I left out a fold on the garden wall. This time I have only this small, modest GIFfy for you, showing only the last, digital steps of my artwork. I'm very happy that I could edit my art digitally, I'm pleased with how it worked out, and I'm surprised that I managed to do anything at all :) haha!

There may be a postard in the future showing the inside of the secret garden. I've started to negotiate a little tour with the guardian ghost, but he's not very convinced to this idea. I wonder what imagery could we find in there. Some archetypical symbolism, perhaps :) Well, we'll have to be patient and wait for the ghost to make up his mind. Would you like to visit a secret garden like this?

I hope you enjoyed seeing the secret garden from the outside, guys ;) And as always...

Love,

Klaudia