Crafted By Colette

I love getting my monthly Scrawlr Box, but also on their website they sell past boxes that they still have in stock.  I went through the list and picked out the ones that I wanted.  Originally there were about four, but by the time I had the money to buy them, there was only one left in stock.  The August box from 2017 – the little gadget intrigued me.

Inside there is a very clever piece from the featured artist.

There was an IsoSketch, a Derwent precision mechanical pencil, two Spectrum Noir Illustrator markers, a Stabilo .88 fineliner and a Derwent shaped eraser.

There was also a couple of sheets of card, but they weren’t listed on the menu.

The IsoSketch tool appeared to be very interesting.

It was flipping impossible to get into though.

The first step is always swatching.

Normally my second step is to draw a monster, but that doesn’t really work with isometric drawing.  So I did a little thing instead.

Next came several days of trial and error.  As cool as the little gadget is, it’s not so good for drawing a big piece with multiple shapes.  At least not for me anyway.  I printed off a grid to use as a template on my lightbox.

And I created a semi decent sketch.

I made a few mistakes though, and it got very confusing.  So I added some doodles to differentiate the sides, before lightboxing over it using the IsoSketch to make something semi-neat.

This resulted in a bit of a mess.

So I tried tracing over it again, using a long ruler to do each angle at a time.  This also did not work.

So I gave up the pretence of knowing what I was doing altogether, and sketched out the isometric grid lines in pencil.

I tried to transfer over my design directly, but made a few errors so it didn’t translate exactly.  And I ended up needing to differentiate the sides again.

Once I’d finished I set to erasing the pencil marks.  I didn’t bother erasing the very edges of the page, because I had initially planned to cut the piece out and place it on black card.

I used the Spectrum markers to colour two of the sides.

I was going to cut out all the space (hence the sticking it on black card), but I decided that was gonna be too flipping fiddly.  So I picked out another marker – Ohuhu 37 – and coloured the final side.

Once it was finished I decided that I quite liked the look of the guide lines round the edges.  And I think the patchy colouring gives it a nice texture.

Isometric art is intriguing though.  I might do some more of it.