Image Source: Amazon
Did you know I have a thing about flowers? 
I love collaging with them, creating artwork and animations with them. But I’ll let you into a little secret… I’m not at all confident about drawing them.
When I saw the book How to Draw Modern Florals: An Introduction to the Art of Flowers, Cacti, and More by Alli Koch, I felt hopeful I could challenge this fear.
I’ve wanted to return to simple line drawing with pen for a while now. In my quest for simplicity, I find the act of drawing flowers with a pen very therapeutic. A pen requires assertiveness in the hand of an artist. There’s no eraser. No CTRL Z. The line is permanent, warts and all. A pen forces you to just go for it. I love that.
I’d also recently acquired the Spectrum Noir Artliner Pens from the Crafters Companion site. The Drawing Modern Florals book was the perfect opportunity to put the Spectrum Artliner pens to the test.
Getting Started with Drawing Modern Florals
The Modern Florals book is beautifully and simply laid out. And if you’ve ever thought that drawing flowers is hard. It needn’t be.
Alli takes you from drawing simple leaves to peonies and roses, to cactus’ and succulents. Through to drawing bouquets and more complicated arrangements. Breaking each modern floral form down into a series of shapes.
You may want to use a pencil to draw the flower lines first. I wanted to get stuck in with the pens so embraced my mistakes along the way. I even discovered new ways of drawing flowers not covered in the book as a result.
Without a doubt, this is the best book on drawing flowers I’ve seen. What is great about the techniques you’ll learn here is they are a great foundation for drawing in general. Looking at a form, and breaking it down into simple shapes. The techniques you learn in this book, you’ll be able to take further in your own art practice.
My Tools: Spectrum Noir Artliner Pens (and my sketchbook)
Spectrum Noir ArtLiner is a range of fine line pens for sketching, outlining and colouring fine detail. They come in various colours and line widths, along with a fine brush point that’s perfect for creating beautiful hand-drawn lettering. Most noteworthy, they are also very reasonably priced without compromising on quality.
I have a range of Spectrum Noir Artliner pens in blacks, greys, browns and even coloured pens with differently sized nibs and brush pens.
My personal favourites are (again the simple choice here) the Spectrum Noir Artliner Fine Nib 6 piece pack in black. I adore the .5, .3. 1 nips for their detail. And the brush nib is just gorgeous. Especially if you want to try your hand at some typographic shapes.
Fine nib
Brush nib
I have to admit I also let Daisy have a go with the Spectrum Noir Artliner Brush Nip in Brights (8 pack) and my goodness – she’s an artistic genius! At 4 years old her marks and colouring, well, it was gorgeous. OK so giving precious art materials to your 4 years on a regular basis may not be a good idea, but my point is, these pens make even a 4-year-olds line work a thing of beauty.
About Spectrum Noir Artliner Pens
- Each ArtLiner pen is filled with high-quality ink that’s been specially sourced from Japan – resulting in a silky smooth finish, with even coverage and pin-sharp accuracy.
- ArtLiners are completely smudge proof with alcohol ink, so they will give you a perfectly crisp, detailed outline when illustrating with markers. All whilst their artist’s grade micro-pigments ensure outstanding light-fastness, for colour that won’t fade.
- They come in black and neutral tones that are ideal for outlining and shading and a small selection of primary and secondary colours.
Whether you’re a beginner or pro, a doodler or drawing master, the Spectrum Noir Artiner pens are great tools for your creative experiments.
And what did I do with my modern floral pen drawings? I scanned and animated them for an Instagram post of course!
I’m loving the Photoshop timeline at the moment, to create animations for social media. My modern floral drawing created with the Spectrum Noir Artliner pens didn’t need any fancy work. Scanning them directly from my sketchbook, placed them on the photo below and animated them in the Photoshop timeline. Simple.
(@georgiestclair)And Finally…
I’ve really enjoyed experimenting with some different tools and techniques. As a result I’m back to working on some simple line drawings (like this Sassy). I’m definitely using these pens and the skills I’ve learnt from the how to draw modern florals book.
What are your favourite pens for drawing? Share your drawings and modern florals over on Instagram with me, tagging @georgiestclair. I’d love to see them.
Have an inspired day
Georgie x
NB These pens were gifts but all thoughts and opinions are 100% mine and genuine!
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