Sharpies Art

I never set out to be a Sharpies artist. I was something that just happened. It all started with this handbound book, with handmade pulpy pages, that I bought at The Magick Cauldron, when I visited my daughter in Houston during June 2014.

As I am a big sucker for notebooks and sketchbooks — the more fancy the better — I could not resist this beauty. But as much as I have been seduced by pretty notebooks and sketchbooks, I have also faced the fear of “contaminating” the pristine pages with a poorly executed drawing or scratched out words.

But I decided to do something different with this book — something different from the couple of pages of Zentangles and mindless doodling that had already  soiled the first couple of pages. I decided that this book was going to be filled with drawings — every single freaking page. And because the rough texture of the paper did not really support colored pencil drawing — not the way I like to draw with colored pencils — I decided to use Sharpie markers instead. (Or course, the paper wasn’t all that ideal for Sharpies either, but I would make it work.)

Little did I know that I was to embark on a new artistic journey.

The intention of my first Sharpies drawing was to create the energy in order to manifest my move to Houston when I was going through divorce 
proceedings. Basically, it was a visual spell — a
magickal working.

While this was not the among my best Sharpies drawings, it was a drawing where I totally got into the energy of creating it.

From that followed other efforts. 

For the first time ever I actually got into drawing 

portraits. Up until that point, I had never been into 

drawing portraits because I felt that I was not good at them. And I will admit that my first few efforts 

were a bit crude. But I also knew that I was on to something.

 

The interesting thing about drawing with Sharpies was that the limited color palette forced me to make some design decisions concerning skin and hair colors. Plus, since I was not using black or white (which is not part of the Sharpies palette), I also had to make design decisions concerning these two color