I realized the other day that it’s been quite a while since I shared any Zentangle black and white drawings. Or any work in my Travel Moleskine.
I haven’t been working in my Travel Moleskine very much lately. Mostly because I’m usually very busy at my work or any other times I’m out of the house so I haven’t been pulling it out.
However, a while ago I had started on the design for this particular layout and finally this week decided to get it finished.
I’ve found this serves as an excellent mental break for me during work. Most of this week I have been working on a catalog design for a mini mailer that we’ll be sending out. Don’t let the “mini” name fool you, however. Just because it’s fairly small doesn’t mean it didn’t still require a lot of my creative energies to put something together that looked visually beautiful among all the text descriptions of the products.
The company I work for is praised by its customers for its beautiful packaging and design work in all its marketing materials, so this catalog is no different.
I have to honestly say I love working for a business like this that emphasizes great looking designs on top of excellent customer service and high-quality products that they stand behind. I watched a fun YouTube video the other day of someone unboxing some of my work’s stuff and it was fun listening to all their praise about how great everything looked and the overall value of what they felt they received.
Okay, enough gushing. And no… not brown-nosing here. I am quite sincere.
As it is, that caliber of quality design can be a bit taxing on the brain at times and I need to give my mind a little mental break – even if it’s to go and design something else.
The step away from working on my computer in Adobe InDesign to simply hand-drawing something serves as a sufficient break.
In addition to this particular drawing, I have also been using my Travel Moleskine as a place to practice brush lettering with one of my Faber-Castell PITT artist brush pens. I may share some photos of that in another post.
There’s not a whole lot to say about this particular piece. Only that I did it using my usual favorite Sharpie pen, and stuck with my usual favorite floral-type design work.
When I completed the flower images on the left, I wanted to put a quote on the page. As some of you know, the actor, Alan Rickman recently passed away. Very sad indeed. I really liked him.
As a result of his passing, of course, there are tons of tributes to him being shared across social media and my Facebook news feed was peppered with such tributes.
One had the wonderful quote that I added to my drawing. Now, hopefully I haven’t been punked by the Social Media Trolls out there—there is a risk that Alan Rickman never said such a thing. People love to put fake quotes up with various people’s photos. I didn’t check SNOPES or the rest of the internet to confirm the quote. I still think it’s nice, whether it came from Alan Rickman or not.
Once the quote was on the page, the drawing was finished and it was back to working on the catalog design.
Hope you enjoyed this drawing. Please leave a comment below or like the page and share with your friends. :) Thanks for reading!
List of materials:
Moleskine travel sketchbook
Sharpie Pen
Odyssey Art 