Earlier this month I signed up for an ink flower drawing course from Ioana Pieoru. I had actually never heard of her or even followed her on social channels. The ad showed up in my feed and I was really struck by the beauty of what she was creating. Also: flowers!
When she started showing her sketch marks, I was not surprised that I decided to sign up for the class. I’d been doodling that way since high school, still doodle with hatch marks when on the phone or listening to something and have a couple of pages in my art journals like that.
When I started the flower, I could actually feel my brain stretching, remembering what it was like to focus and pay attention for a long stretch. With the amount of scrolling and attention-hungry media that we consume, our attention spans are not used to more focused blocks of work. And drawing certainly requires focus time!
I also remembered how much I liked to draw – all those late nights finishing drawings for art class in college came flooding back!
I also liked that she had warm up exercises using different sized pens and different spacing for the markings so that we could see the difference and also warm up our hands. There were a few practice exercises, small nature images to further practice her style of drawing. And for the larger drawing, we did smaller sketches to get a feel for the layout and the shading.
I found all those smaller exercises to be really helpful. Left to my own devices, I would have just jumped into the larger image and probably ended up frustrated and made limited progress.
Referenced: Drawing Flowers by Ioana Pioaru
