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  • Line Drawing Tutorial

    by

    Lindsey Bugbee

    , ,

    Lately I’ve been hooked on making thumbprint guest “books”. I love the idea of a guest book that is not a book at all, but a work of art. I don’t know about you, but I’m one of those people who displays guest books for a year — maybe two — on the coffee table,…

    Fireflies and Bell Jar Thumbprint Guest Book | The Postman's Knock

    Lately I’ve been hooked on making thumbprint guest “books”. I love the idea of a guest book that is not a book at all, but a work of art. I don’t know about you, but I’m one of those people who displays guest books for a year — maybe two — on the coffee table, and then it {lovingly} goes into storage. I prefer the idea of a framable piece of art that will be displayed for decades to come.

    As I was creating my first thumbprint guest book {a tree}, I realized a line drawing tutorial might be helpful to some of you. It’s a wonderful, vintage-looking technique that can be used whether you are handy with a calligraphy pen or not.

    Line Drawing of a Tree | The Postman's Knock

    Before I begin this tutorial, I’d like to talk a little bit about how I know how to use this technique and many other techniques that I write about. I absolutely love all the art that I get to create as a designer, but to be honest, I was very hesitant to try my luck in this industry. I always felt that I was at a disadvantage because I didn’t study art or graphic design in college {and instead opted to pursue an English degree}. Then one day I realized: I’ve actually had more formal training than a lot of people … it just wasn’t in college.

    I went to a little {80-ish people per class} school in rural Kansas. Somehow, that tiny school had hit the jackpot with its art teacher, Mrs. Roberts. I had the good fortune to work with her starting around kindergarten or first grade. When I was a little girl, she was teaching me how to see things properly to render them onto 2D media. She’d set out a cylinder, a sphere, and a cone and guide me through drawing them in order to understand the relationship between shadows/contouring and shapes. As a teenager in high school, she exposed me to new techniques and materials like batik, clay, and stamp-carving. It is from her that I learned you should always paint glue on with a brush, and sprinkling watercolor pieces with salt results in an intriguing drying pattern. No matter what I created at what stage in my life, though, she always had a signature phrase: “Let’s look at it on the drawing board.”

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