Back to hand-drawn sketches! This the first week in a looooong time when I’ve posted an actual pen-and-paper sketch rather than something I created on the computer. After a fairly long hiatus, I finally forced myself back to the sketch pad this week.

I started with a fairly rough sketch I’d made of a star block awhile ago. I decided I was happy with it as-is, but repeated it to see what came up. Don’t these look like poinsettias?

From this sketch, I continued to iterate the design, and I’ll post some of the resulting sketches over the next week or so. That process of accidental discovery is something that’s been missing from my software-enabled sketching, which I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. Each method definitely has its advantages, but (in my experience, at least) hand-drawn sketching leads to far more creative output.

Still, EQ8 can be useful for colouring in blocks (although still kinda clunky in certain ways):

   

This design could be made using a combination of squares, rectangles, flying geese or half-square triangles, kite in a square, and triangle in a square.