Folk Art for the Climate

I love dragonflies; I’m sure in their past life they were fairies. So when I continued my Skillshare class from Liz Kohler Brown: Folk Illustrations with ProCreate, and Liz’s project was “birds,” I started with a dragonfly. For what I worked on previously, see Folk Art.

My purpose was a nature appreciation picture since I live in a rural, lake-filled area. My drawing is partly symmetrical and partly not, which created a problem for me.

The project begins with outline sketches filled black. Then, parts are erased to create designs to be filled in with color, as you see in the above dragonfly.

I started with the dragonfly at the top, then dropped down to the lake/ocean floor with seashells, fish, and water plants. I chose the lotus and another non-water plant that dangled little flowers off its stem.

I spent much time creating the “parts” of my blackened sketch because I needed to rethink the “parts” of each object, revising many parts so the coloring could be added in a somewhat balanced way.  I kept areas of black throughout to maintain a flow and balance. 

Like the Cats and Coffee in Folk Art, I chose the blue background — because most of the objects are “under water,” but it was too muted and hid the lovely colors. So I switched to a tan/lighter background and texture.

As I appreciated the results [not perfect, but I do love it], I realized this would be a beautiful “Protect Our Planet” poster. I did use Liz’s fonts, but wanted a funky, fairy language font for “the creatures of the world.”

So, I took Liz’s Create Fonts class and created my own font with the app iFontMaker, called “Pixie.” I’m still revising it, but it was ready for this project: “and all the little creatures of the world.”

To darken the Pixie font, I duplicated it several times and merged the layers. Then I duplicated that layer and used alpha lock to fill the layer [text] with black. I placed that layer beneath the green text layer. I then moved that black text slightly right and down to create a shadow.

What do you think?

Wasn’t that fun?

Now on to the rest of the lessons… and revising my Pixie font so it’s ready to share.