What a month! I love Me Made May I find it super inspiring and even this year when I felt my own clothing offering was boring and repetitive I still enjoyed the challenge of going out and finding walls to photograph my outfits in front of.
The drawings though, wow those were a challenge! I normally try and do a few at a time so I don’t have to rush each day, but I just couldn’t seem to get ahead of the days so there were quite a few done late at night or over breakfast in order to keep up.
Despite the pressure I really enjoy drawing and I find I notice differences in how I approach the drawings as the weeks go on.
A few things stood out for me this year
– the sheer breadth of talent in the sewing community. Some days I’d get stuck just trying to decide what to draw because I had too much choice!
– I need more practice at faces, gah they are so hard to try and capture and I’ve spent so long focusing on drawing the clothes I need to keep working on the faces more
– I struggle with skin tones. I’m working on an iPad Pro and using tools that replicate the marker pens I love to illustrate with. You get this kind of translucent quality to the drawing and it makes replicating skin tones difficult. I’m going to work on it and hopefully I’ll see a big improvement in the depth I can bring to the tones?
Just wanted to say an enormous thank you to everyone who left a comment, sent a message, shared my imagery, left a like and allowed me to use their photos to make a drawing of. Thank you all so very much and hopefully I’ll be back with another round of drawings next May!
If you want to see the full range of drawings I’ve done of the sewing community you can search the hashtag #sewcialsketches on instagram
colette
I love your style susan – you really manage to capture the life of the fabrics and the character of the sewcialists. You did well with your wall challenge too ;o)
Susan Goodwin
Thank you! I do really enjoy drawing and want to keep pushing my skills more. Mostly it’s just lots of practice much like sewing is