Folk Art for Nature

In my Skillshare class from Liz Kohler Brown: Folk Illustrations with ProCreate, we created stamps.

My theme is the balance of nature, complete with bugs and weeds.

First, draw the outline of a shape for your theme. Fill it in with black. Then erase areas to separate the parts of the shape and create designs.

Ladybug:

Wood Sorrel:

My favorite place for resource images is the Biodiversity Heritage Library’s Flickr albums— most are public domain.

Once your design is created [one at a time, large], save it as a .png to your photo album on your iPad. In Procreate, duplicate an already made stamp and replace the image with your own.

Now, take your stamps and arrange them into a folk art display. See the project examples [the last ones] in this post by Liz. Once arranged, add color to each shape and fill in with leaves, optional.

I had a vision in my head, but didn’t actually plan it out; my project is therefore different than our expected project, but I still like it. I organized my shapes around the wood sorrel stamp, adding in more leaves and buds, leaving room at the top. I added a Rachel Carson quote and lightly filled the background with the “ginkgo” leaf brush I created in an earlier project. Instead of “multiply” blending, I alpha locked the merged object layers and painted a texture to that layer.

I’m excited to share it with my class.

What did you create today?