Drip Doodle

I looked at my header and realized that it hasn't changed since fall. Time to put something new up! The new header is very simple but it's a style that looks very different than what you're used to seeing from me. Today I'll talk about the process I used to color it.

My new header was drawn very loosely with a Sky Blue Multiliner SP 0.3 mm pen. I wanted this to look fun and whimsical, so I kept it very simple and fun. Then I scribbled in some light blue, B32 for the sky, added YR31 to the stars, and dripped on some colorless blender. Last I added some BV00 for accent color. The whole process, start to finish took maybe 20 min. I didn't scan in the steps, so I'll walk you through the same process on a different image.

Here I'm using the stamp Tree-Mendous Love by Our Craft Lounge. I stamped with Memento Tuxedo black ink. and let it dry longer than usual. This process uses a lot of colorless blender and I want to be sure that my stamp line is good and dry so it won't bleed. Then, I added a simple sky in BG01 and colored the trunk in YR31. Notice that I'm not too careful about keeping the sky smooth. I'm going to be doodling and dripping all over this area so I don't need to be picky.

Next, I drip on colorless blender. To get the best control, I'm dipping the brush end of my sketch blender directly into my large bottle of blender and carefully adding the solution in dabs. I started with the tree branches then dabbed out the color from the trunk. This gives me my big, main "pools" of color that halo the tree. After those dried, I added more drips all over the image to give a second layer of drip, so the drips overlap and look cool.

Once this was dry I colored a few of the "leaves" with the YR31 and some BV13 to give nice contrast.

You could leave your project at this step, but I wanted to do more to it. Here is where the doodling comes in. The shape that keeps getting repeated in this image is the circle. Circles in the leaves and circles from the drips. The tree also has a repeating heart shape, so I could have accented that through repeating heart patterns. The choice is yours. I'm going with dots & circles though, since they are simple and go along with the doodling from last week.

With my BV13 I doodled half-circles with only dots. See how these little doodles add to the overall circle effect? I added larger dots of the YR31 to carry the tree-trunk color throughout the whole image. Now my tree looks very interesting. It's loosely doodled making it unique, but it has cohesion through the repeated circle motif.

On my new rocket header it's hard to see the repeated dots, since I drew them with the YR31. Part of doodling is figuring out which elements are most important and should have more contrast. On the rocket, I didn't want the dots to overwhelm the image, so I drew them very light. The tree is very clean and graphic, so I wanted something dark to break up the smooth look of the image.

I challenge you to step out of your comfort zone and color something totally differently than you normally would. In this case, using only 3 colors and the repeating circles the image ties together well even though it also looks random. What can you do to alter an image or create a self-doodled background? I hope this gave you some ideas, have a creative week!