
Peace Lily 15th of November

Adapted an old butterfly design for RedBubble products.
I redrew the pattern to make it fit the masks at RedBubble:
And just used the regular design on other products:
The whole stem has started to bend under the weight of the flower.
The stem is thinning and has gone all dark.
Adjusted the Fake Flower illustration for RedBubble. Needed to do some cleanup to make it work without the background and made some other minor changes too while at it.
I’ve been prone to using ballpoint pens rather than pencils for sketching for the last few years, so I didn’t really consider other alternatives when starting this exercise. Using pens make me commit faster to a design and there is less opportunity for fixing mistakes. I almost always get some of the proportions wrong when doing these sketches, but I just have to accept that when drawing with pens and try to do better next time rather than fussing over a single drawing. So I guess I like sketching with pens because it speeds things up and I’m not second-guessing myself as I do when drawing digitally or with pencils. Another advantage over pencil sketches is that the drawings don’t smudge and I don’t have to be so careful when storing or looking through a pile of sketches like that one I have for this project.
The kind of ballpoints I use are not as final as for example drawing with markers though, and maybe that is something I will experiment more with later. I tested a few different brands when I first started sketching with pens, but so far I’ve found that the cheap Bic Cristal pens is just as good, and in some cases better, than the more expensive alternatives.