drawing Archives - Studio Katie

My Top 5 Tips for Sketching in Your Planner

Hello everyone, My latest post for Tombow USA is live and I wanted to direct you over to it.

In the post I am sharing my top 5 tips for sketching in your planner!

I doodle on everything (I always drew on my schoolwork as a kid. Thankfully I was homeschooled and my Mom didn’t mind), so obviously my planner is going to be filled with random sketches too, right. I know you would expect nothing less. 😉

Tombow partnered with Bloom Planners to supply those of us on the design team some new planners, and I love they planner and address book I received!

Grab the full post on Tombow’s blog here.

Tutorials

How to Draw Your Own Stickers!

If you’re as obsessed with stickers as I am, then you’ll have wanted to design your own before, right?

Today I have a brand new post on Tombow USA’s blog showing you how to draw and color your own stickers! I based mine on emojis for this tutorial, but what I love about this technique is you can draw anything you want for your stickers. Emojis, quotes, or even your own style of art, whatever that may be!

Grab the full tutorial on Tombow’s blog here.

Sketching

DIY Wedding Couple Portrait

Hey guys, I have a new project up on the Tombow USA blog today that I wanted to share with y’all! Wedding season is coming up, and if you’re headed to any this summer, you might need a gift, and that’s where this project comes in.

I’m sharing how to create a fun wedding couple doodle, that will make a really cute gift for your friends!

In the tutorial I share some tips for sketching out each character to customize them to the wedding couple, as well as how to color them in using Dual Brush Pens and paint the floral backdrop!

Grab the full tutorial over on the Tombow USA blog here.

Art Journals

Easy Highlighter Drawings

*This post contains affiliate links. which help pay for this site. That being said, I never promote anything I don’t love! If you purchase using them, I might get a small commission at no additional cost to you.

Hey everyone, fun project today! I recently took over the Tombow USA Instagram account to share a project using their brand new MONO Edge Highlighters, and I wanted to show y’all too! I discovered a fun way to really make drawings pop by coloring them in with highlighters, aren’t the colors so much fun?

Supplies:

MONO Edge Highlighters
MONO Drawing Pen or Fudenosuke Brush Pen
Paper

Okay, for these drawings I’m working directly into my journal, but you can use whatever paper you like best. They don’t bleed through most papers, so I was able to draw directly into my art journal without them bleeding through to the next page. Yay! I’ve found that the highlighters work nicely on smooth paper!

Step 1: Sketch out your girl (or whatever you’re drawing) and ink it.

Step two: Color it in! This is the super fun part. The MONO Edge Highlighters have a really cool palette, I think their yellow is unique because it’s a golden yellow, which makes for a nice skin tone.

I like to leave a couple of spaces on faces white, for skin highlights. And I use the red, pink, and blue highlighters for the face shadows to give it dimension.

Click the video below to watch the process!

Highlighter art! Today I’m taking over the @tombowusa acct, using their new MONO Edge Highlighters. I would love it if you could hop over there and say hi!! ❤ . #Tombow #tombowusa #tombow2018dt @tombowusa #getmessyartjournal

A post shared by Katie Smith (@studio.katie) on May 14, 2018 at 11:20am PDT

Now that we’ve learned how to draw with highlighters, try experimenting with the colors. Give your girl some wild and colorful hair, or stick to just the one color. The neat thing about highlighters is that you get even more shades by layering the markers.

Feel free to comment below with any questions you have about the MONO Edge Highlighters and I’ll do my best to answer them!

Have fun creating with your highlighters!

Painting

Watercolor Double Exposure Nature Art with Tombow Dual Brush…

This post contains affiliate links. which help pay for this site. That being said, I never promote anything I don’t love! If you purchase using them, I might get a small commission at no additional cost to you.

Hey guys, today I have another fun project to share with you that I created for Tombow USA! What is it? Double Exposure Art! I really love creating paintings inspired by double exposure photography so I thought I’d show you an easy way to do that too!

A double exposure is the superimposition of two or more photo exposures to create a single image.

Supplies:

Watercolor Paper
Pencil (I like these MONO Drawing Pencils)
Dual Brush Pens
Blending Palette
Paint Brush + Water
White Gel Pen (this is optional, but I use the Uniball Signo)
1500 Colored Pencils (also optional)

Step one: Start off by drawing an outline of an image with a pencil. As I said, I’m using a MONO Drawing Pencil. I love these pencils for drawing, especially the pencils in the B range, as they’re nice and soft. Because we’ll be painting our image, I recommend using a heavy watercolor paper.

Step two: In the video below, I’m using Dual Brush Pens to paint a forest scene inside my girl outline.

Start by applying the Dual Brush Pen ink to the blending palette, then you can pick the ink up with a wet paint brush and they act just like watercolors! You’ll want to have a few different shades of your color, and starting with the lightest, paint trees at the top of your image. Switch to darker and darker shades as you work your way down.

Hey everyone, it’s @studio.katie here again, showing you how to create a painting inspired by nature and double exposure photographs! . In the video, I’m using @tombowusa Dual Brush Pens to paint a forest scene inside my girl outline. By applying the Dual Brush Pen ink to the Blending Palette, you can pick them up with a wet paintbrush and they act just like watercolors! You’ll want to have a few different shades of your color, and starting with the lightest, paint trees at the top of your image. Switch to darker and darker shades as you work your way down. . Stay tuned to see the finished painting! #tombow #tombowusa #tombow2018dt ? #illustration #illustrationoftheday #illustrationartist #illustrationdaily #drawing #drawings #draw #drawingaday #sketch #sketchbook #artwork #artist #art #artstagram #arttutorial #artoftheday #artistsoninstagram #artnerd #tombowart #natureart

A post shared by Tombow USA (@tombowusa) on Apr 18, 2018 at 11:31am PDT

And you’ve made a double exposure painting! YAY! To finish mine off, I used a few of Tombow’s 1500 colored pencils to darken the edges of the girl and fill in any gaps. These colored pencils layer so nicely over top of the Dual Brush Pens! I also used the white gel pen just to add in a few highlights. I was thinking they could be fireflies in my forest girl.

Leave me a comment telling me what you would paint inside of a double exposure piece!

Sketching

Easy Colored Pencil Hedgehog Art

This year, 2018, is the 30th anniversary of the Irojiten Color Dictionaries, Vol 1 was introduced in April of 1988! wow.

Yesterday I took over the Tombow USA instagram account, showing how to use Irojiten colored pencils to color in this cute little Hedgehog doodle, and I wanted to share my tips for working with these colored pencils here!

I like to start with the lighter colors and then layer the colors for more depth and variation as I go. I colored the hedgie belly with a light cream color and then layered on a bit of pink to give him rosy cheeks.

Next I just started adding more and more color to the sketch. For the blue of the cloche, I started out really light, but then layered the pencil a bit more heavily around the edges to darken it, leaving the center pretty light.

For the bottom of the cloche, I lightly colored in the wood, and then used a darker brown to draw the woodgrain pattern on top with a bit of pressure so that it’s embossed into the paper.

I used to shy away from colored pencils because I always had trouble blending them, and the white of the paper would show through no matter what.

I’ve since learned a few tricks. The first being what I said above- work in light layers so that wax doesn’t build up.

My second tip is to use Tombow’s Colorless Blender to blend the pencils. You can use the Colorless Blender over top of the pencils, just like you would use it with Dual Brush Pens. The pencils can stain the tip of the Colorless Blender a little bit, but just rub it off onto a piece of paper and the ink still comes out clear even if it’s stained.

The blending marker helps to “burnish” the pencil, so that the lead is worked into the paper more and less of the white shows. yay!

It’s @studio.katie one last time today! Swipe to see a video of how I blended the colors! My best tip for blending the Irojiten Colored Pencils is to use the Dual Brush Pen Colorless Blender over the top of them, just like you would use it with Dual Brush Pens. The pencils will stain the tip of the Colorless Blender a little bit, but just rub it off onto a piece of paper and the ink still comes out clear even if it’s stained. . After I finished my little hedgie doodle, I mounted it to a piece of paper and turned it into a cute little card for Spring! That’s it from me today. Until next time, – @studio.katie #tombow #tombowusa #tombow2018dt ? #illustration #illustrationoftheday #illustrationartist #illustrationdaily #drawing #drawings #draw #drawingaday #sketch #sketchbook #artwork #artist #art #artstagram #arttutorial #artoftheday #artistsoninstagram #artnerd #tombowart

A post shared by Tombow USA (@tombowusa) on Apr 6, 2018 at 2:23pm PDT

After I finished my little hedgie doodle, I mounted it to a piece of paper and turned it into a cute little card for Spring!

You can grab the products I used for this project on the Tombow website here.

Sketching

Colored Pencil Butterflies

Hey everyone, I wanted to let you know that I have a new blog post up on the Tombow blog this week using their 1500 Colored Pencils. These colored pencils are one of Tombow’s newest products and I was pretty excited to get my hands on the 36 pack, which has so many pretty colors including metallics!

For my project this week I showed an easy way to draw butterflies, and how to color them in using the 1500 Colored Pencils. Read the full tutorial here.

Sketching

My Sketchbook Portfolio

Hey friends! One feature of my new website that I’m pretty excited about is the gallery/portfolio! On my previous blog I didn’t have one, and I never really shared much of my artwork and sketches in my blog, but I want to change that!

So, if you haven’t already seen them, I wanted to let you know that I have a section in my gallery with my sketchbooks. I’ve kept many many sketchbooks over the years, so I’m only showing you the most recent, as I feel it’s only in the couple of years that my art has really grown into what it is.

Check out my sketchbooks here.

Katie Smith Sketchbook 03 @studio.katie — Sketchbook 03

Katie Smith Sketchbook 02 @studio.katie — Sketchbook 02

Katie Smith Sketchbook 01 @studio.katie — Sketchbook 01

I love having my sketchbooks in one place here, as I can see how my artwork has changed and I think it’s really neat to see how I’ve progresses as an artist. Do you keep a sketchbook?

I hand bound all 3 of these with watercolor paper and chipboard covers.