words out west

8x8 very tiny drawing on a 0.5cm grid of flowers and fairy-tale motifs. The tip of a ball-point pen is visible.

Some extremely tiny process sketches, collecting my thoughts for the school workshops I taught last week at Words Out West.

These smallest drawings, just the faintest hint of thoughts, are very useful for collecting thoughts, and sorting through plans, ideas, and references it would take a long time to organise any other way. It’s therefore also a good way to condense large and nebulous ideas onto observation journal pages.

Several rows of very tiny drawings of fairy-tale motifs. — 2 down, 6 across is a plumb line; I think the lower right is a… lion?

The workshops ended up being about drawing tiny things (although not this small!) and collecting favourite parts of stories (because most of my art workshops end up being about stories).

The drawings with the students were much larger than these, but I did show the classes these examples, to demonstrate how low the bar between informative and illegible is.

A ballpoint pen lying on a very tiny 6x6 grid of drawings of map elements — map components

The grid is the 0.5cm grid in a Moleskine notebook, and the pen is a Pilot BPS-GP Fine tip ballpoint.

This post began as a post on Patreon — if you’d like to support more tiny art, patrons there get behind-the-scenes process and sneak-peeks, starting from US$1, or you could buy me a (virtual) coffee at ko-fi.com/tanaudel (and I get through quite a bit of coffee).