Inuit Women's Art and yet more trees....!

This is the finished three tree drawing. I really enjoyed this piece. Looks a million times better in real life but don't they all....lol

Guess what...another tree design. I am not too enthused with this one for some reason. I may improve upon it in the future.

This is a very decorative and stylised leaf design I drew sometime ago. It made a nice image for a greeting card.

Young Mother And Children from Inuit Women Artists. This is my absolute favourite from the book. I love the bold, graphic quality of the illustration and the cute little children, especially the tiny one on her shoulder.

Affectionate Mother from Inuit Women Artists

Bird Landscape from Inuit Women Artists

Red-necked Loon from Inuit Women Artists

Woman Proudly Sewing from Inuit Women Artists. This is one of my favourite illustrations from the book. I love that little baby cuddled into his mum's neck.

I have an extensive (some say too extensive) library of inspirational, art and craft books. One I have had for many years is "Inuit Women Artists" and is a very large book filled with wonderful illustrations, many stone carved, of inuit or eskimo life in the Cape Dorset area of Baffin Island. There are about 9 women featured and it details their beautiful artwork, inspired by their culture and their environment.

It is a whole world away from what we understand and their lives can be very difficult due to the extremely harsh elements they survive in. Until I bought this book many years ago I had never even thought of the inuit having any artistic or craft traditions, but they do and they are wonderful Their work is quite naive and primitive in some ways but quite complex in others and has a lovely graphic quality. I hope you find these illustrations as inspiring as I do.

I was so pleased with my three pen and ink and watercolour trees from my last post that I decided to work the image up into a finished drawing. The trees came to represent spring, summer and autumn because of their tones of green and I added a contemporary figure to fill the picture our a bit more. I am quite pleased with the result. I am becoming a real fan of ink cross-hatching these days. Prior to this I always added tone to a drawing using pointillism (tiny dots of ink) but that technique is so laborious that it takes about an hour to produce a small square (1") of drawing. Cross-hatching is wonderfully quick and you can see the drawing taking shape much more rapidly. I still prefer pointillism for realistic looking animals or birds and portraits though.