My daughter draws - a lot! - and every now and then I have to go and extract piles of paper out of her room for sorting. I'm sure most parents know how it is. You'd like to keep every piece of art your kids create but often that's just not possible. It's definitely not possible for me simply because there is sooo much of it! And quite honestly: not every drawing is worth keeping - it's just the truth. Many are really cool and well done and beautiful and creative and original and imaginative and whatnot; but there are many which only have a few lines on them, were started but not finished or are printed out colouring pages that were carelessly coloured scribbled over with neon markers and are just plain ugly.
Anyway, it's my job to sort all of my daughter's creative endeavours into three piles:
- keep and pile into a large box to look at and marvel over much later
- discreetly stuff into the recycling bin (mostly the ugly colouring pages, torn pieces of frayed paper pulled from under her desk and wardrobe and trial/error pieces with only a few lines on them that were abandoned to start a new, better version)
- unfinished pieces with a cool person/creature/castle/landscape/tree/flower on them that were still deemed unworthy of being finished
This last pile I keep with my journaling supplies and I use the half-finished things my daughter drew to collage with. She knows about this and finds it both funny and very exciting. She always lights up when I show her one of my art journal pages that has one of her drawings as focal point. I think she considers it an honour that I'm using her art to put into my art (because she thinks I'm a fabulous artist - bless her!) - just as much as I consider it a great honour that she lets me use it. I really love her style and her approach to drawing!
The above unicorn is one of these unfinished drawings. All I did was clean up the line art a little and colour it in. I cut it out and stuck it into my journal - no need to do anything else to it.
On Friday, 4th and Saturday, 5th my mum came over and I helped her create Thank-You Cards for all her friends and colleagues at work as she's retiring at the end of June. We made a bunch of colourful papers, including this rainbow striped one I used for the above unicorn. We had this scrap left over and I decided to cut out a simple silhouette. I google-image searched for silhouettes of horses, printed one I liked, added the horn, simplified the mane and tail for easier cutting, transferred it to the rainbow paper, cut it out and glued it to a scrap piece of wrapping paper with the white foliage on it. I had planned to do a different unicorn that day but I finished sticking panels onto card bases after my mum had left - it was quite late when I even started with the unicorn and I decided to keep it quick and simple.
Yesterday, after my mum had left and the kids were in bed, I made this unicorn-dragon. I didn't come up with the dragon design myself though. I had seen a beautiful illustration of a dragon done in this style while searching for something else and saved it in my inspiration file. (I have an inspiration file and I use it for exactly that: inspiration. I never use other people's pictures, art work and images as they are without permission.) I'd love to tell you who did the original dragon drawing but I don't know - it didn't say anything about the artist in the original source. I even tried reverse-google-searching the image but it was nowhere to be found any more... So if you see this and think I might have copied your drawing, please let me know.
I changed the dragon's posture/the arrangement of its body to better fit my page format and matched the colours to the flowery wrapping paper I used. I drew with paint pens with only a light pencil sketch as a rough guide. Then I added the medieval-esque vine as a border because I felt like it needed something more. It doesn't show well in the photo but the background of the wrapping paper is actually gold. Only a little of it shows because there are so many flowers covering it up but the gold that does show is a lovely accent and I deliberately left the last of the dragon's scales uncoloured which means he (it's definitely a he) has one gold scale.
Lots of love! And unicorns... xxx