Today, I thought I would share a little bit of my backstory and my progression as an artist. And, tell you about my favorite teachers, tutorials, and books that helped me along the way. Never stop learning!
I started drawing in December of 2014. For the first few months, I only drew Zentangle. My son and I were at Michael’s and I happened to see an art book on Zentangle and I thought it really looked fun. If you are not familiar with Zentangle, it is a combination of patterns and lines that you draw using a micron pen. I had never drawn anything before and this seemed somehow accessible. Here is my very first one:
I drew a new Zentangle piece every single day for several months. Soon I discovered a Facebook group called Ornation Creation where artists were combining Zentangle and doodling with outlines provided by an amazing artist, Ben Kwok, to create drawings that looked like this:
Quickly I found that I wanted my drawings to look more realistic and around the same time, I discovered Lachri Fine Art on YouTube. I binge-watched every single one of Lisa’s colored pencil tutorials on YouTube and when she started a Patreon account, I was one of the first to join. I have learned SO much from watching her techniques and I owe a lot to her tutorials.
Here is my (never before seen) very first attempt to draw a flower with colored pencils:) This was drawn in July of 2015.
I think this is supposed to be a Peony but I’m not sure.😂 My blending needs some work! But, I was proud of this drawing and I had so much fun doing it. In other words, I was hooked.
Soon I was googling and researching everything I could find about colored pencils and particularly botanicals. I read Ann Swan’s book called Botanical Portraits with Colored Pencils and I still refer to that book from time to time. I read The Colored Pencil Painting Bible by Alyona Nickelsen and Ann Kullberg’s Colored Pencil Portraits. The first actual tutorial I ever did was from an artist called Cynthia Knox. She has a drawing tutorial called Vivid Flowers in Colored Pencil on Craftsy.com that I would highly recommend.
Here is the first drawing I did from her course:
This one was drawn in December of 2015- about 6 months after I started drawing more realistically. It still needs a lot of work but it is a big improvement from the first piece. Tutorials are helpful!
One of the first pieces I remember being REALLY proud of was of these Artichokes. I drew these in May of 2017. 2 years (and hundreds of hours of practice) after I started drawing realistically.
I continued to draw almost every day and I learned more and more about drawing with colored pencils. In October of 2018, I started my Instagram account and began posting my drawings there. I was really inspired by the community of artists I found on Instagram. Everyone was so positive and encouraging. It was fun to make connections with people all around the world. And, I started getting a lot of questions about my drawings.
In March of 2018, I started learning to record my process. This took a while! There was a lot to learn and I had many fails. In October of 2018, I finally posted my first video on YouTube. It was the drawing of this leaf:
You can watch that first video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mBtQnWHNeo
And, you can see the Patreon video I recorded using that original footage here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/colored-pencil-30271271
I started my Patreon channel in May/June of 2019 and have been posting regularly there ever since.
Moving forward, I still have so many things I want to learn. Now that I have found art, I feel like I will be learning for the rest of my life and that gives me something to look forward to each day. The two books I am currently reading/studying are Botany for the Artist by Sarah Simblet and Botanical Drawing using Graphite and Coloured Pencils by Sue Vize. My short term goals are to improve the quality of my tutorials on Patreon and to complete my Botanical Colored Pencil Process e-book this year. I would like to improve my photography skills and learn more about setting up still life shots and reference images. I would also like to improve my free-hand sketching and illustration skills and learn to learn more about incorporating new mediums into my colored pencil drawings, such as graphite, pastel, and watercolor. My long-term goals are endless.
I hope you enjoyed this little timeline:) I would love to hear about which books or teachers have really inspired you and/or what you hope to learn in the coming years. Never stop learning!
To learn more about how I create my botanical colored pencil drawings, check out my Patreon site at https://www.patreon.com/JenniferMorrisonArt.
And, for a complete list of my available colored pencil drawing tutorials see jennifermorrisonart.com/patreontutoriallinks.
Jennifer
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