Today’s drawing started while I was flipping through one of my favorite books: The Styles of Ornament by Alexander Speltz. This thick little number, which I found at a Boy Scout rummage sale, smells like a whole decade of wet basement. Yet just keeps on giving when I feel like I’m feeling uninspired.
It has thousands, literally thousands, of tiny little illustrations of decorative motifs from the last thousand years of Western art history. It’s a great rainy-Sunday, sitting at the coffee table sort of book, and it’s absolutely fabulous to sit and doodle from.
This drawing from the sketchbook is a mash-up exercise between two pages from two very different eras. The beasts are medieval “grotesques” – representations of fantastical beasts and/or poorly understood animals. The chair exists forward in time many hundred years in the 19th century, when a growing interest in naturalism inspired the organic lines and botanical touches of Art Nouveau.
I smooshed them together in my drawing! The sketch was felt-tip pen, followed by just a few colors of marker to give things some contrast. This has become my favorite way to work with pen, by anchoring it with one nice big area of color.