Day 124 Monochrome Art

Ha. Those three berries on the ground look like eyeballs 🙂 I might have to soften those up a bit.

Today I am retaking Charly’s skillshare class which I wrote about a while ago here: Monochrome

My updating iPad didn’t have the ProCreate App ready so I actually created this in the vector app Affinity Designer. Now I can make it any size– and recoloring is easy. That’s the benefit of vector apps. But– planning and drawing is a little different.

The plant is based on the red twig dogwood in my back yard.

I should have created the stems first with the extensions for the leaves and berries. The leaves are on a separate layer as are the veins.  For the berries, the layers are separate: berry, dot, end stem. I added an inner glow to the berries which gave them a bit of highlight.

For the faint shadow, I copy the the leaves and stems and join them together, turning them a very dark teal. I distort them according to the lighting, change the mode to multiply to blend it in, and lower the opacity.

There’s more to do, but for today– that was fun.

The next part of the class is to color in the primary colors red, blue, yellow. Then add a layer of another color over the top and reduce the opacity so that the filtered color blends in with the primary colors for new parts of the palette.  I created several versions [on my old iPad in ProCreate]:

The white/circle areas are all the same. I should have saved pngs after each subtle change, but I just kept changing the filter color and then selecting the new colors, sketching them in beside the circle. For the background, I chose a color opposite the vase color on the color wheel.

This is fun and very therapeutic for these anxious times.