Sketchy Veggies

During 2018 I focused a lot of time on refining my skills by diving into textbooks, and applying theory to practice (as seen in the Daily Logo Challenge*). To get me out of the house, I was invited along to one of the local craft group gatherings. It presented a new environment, a set time once a week to work on something away from the all encompassing desktop and looming threat of job applications, social media and other distractions.

One week I just started playing around with Procreate – messing with different brushes, toying with textures. And finding myself missing the life drawing studio classes we’d had at uni, set about trying to recreate those sessions within my own limits and interests.

So I started drawing vegetables. Why vegetables? I don’t know. But there’s probably more than a little influence seeping through from the Harvest Moon, Story of Seasons and Stardew Valley games.

I really started playing with textures and charcoal brushes while working on the artichoke, but it always surprises me when I am reminded it was actually the sugar snap peas that were the first of the Sketchy Veggies. Both of them came together sufficiently quickly, that I set myself a goal after the meeting – doing one a day would give me seven veggies after a week. Something small, yet fun. And something that went back to basics.

It could have ended here – beans, sugar snap peas, broccoli, zucchini, asparagus, artichoke and bok choy.

But you know it didn’t.

Showtime (2018)

Coming off the back of the much more detailed bok choy illustration, last of the seven Greens series pieces, the purple cabbage combined challenging textures such as the leaf veins and water droplets on the reference image. In comparison to the Greens which came together within a week, the purple cabbage took that long and more, and it turned into a rush to try and get it finished in time to submit to the Melbourne Royal Show’s Art, Craft & Cookery competition, Tablet Art division.

Despite the last minute entry, “Eat your Greens” came second!

The rest of the purples were completed in the time between submission drop offs for the Melbourne show (September) and pick up of artwork (early October). The project continued into the new year, 2019 bearing groups of Orange and Red fruit and vegetables. Somewhere along the line my intention to just draw the vegetables shifted to focus on creating linework that was still identifiable as each fruit or vegetable on their own, without having to rely on colour to do the work for me.

Plan? What Plan? (2020-2021)

In 2020, I finally sat down to try and work out a plan of attack for future extensions of the project; gathering reference images for remaining colour groups, and the first overview image for the colour group sets; Yellows, Blues, Brown veggies and White veggies.

2020 Overview with existing groups for Red, Orange, Yellow, Green and purple.
Solid colour squares waiting for Brown, White and Blue veggie groups.

Slowly throughout the rest of 2020 and 2021 I made my way through the Yellow and Blue veggies sets, bringing the total of vegetable colour groups to six and a grand total of 42 different fruit and vegetables.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfVWzlH3EhQ

Experiment, Evolve, Exhibit (2022)

With so many fruits and vegetables to play with, 2022 turned into a year of experimentation. I tried out Red Bubble’s notebooks, only to be extremely disappointed at the physical size of the books that arrived (as well as the binding). I played with a short run of 80x125mm stickers, as well as a run of A5 prints that included a full print of the veggies artwork that had been used on the notebooks.

And after a period of not exhibiting, discovering that the 2022 Melbourne Royal Show was celebrating Agricultural milestones, I was convinced to challenge myself and prepare a new submission for a different, and much bigger competition category – Still Life 2D Artwork.

There was some fear about submitting for what was, typically, a very traditional category. And the work was done digitally, but with pencil and charcoal brushes that made people question whether it was traditional or digital. The schedule information for Still Life said “Any medium, including mixed media”, and at that point the worst thing they could say is “no”. So I set about working out the dimensions, composition, and then realised a small problem.

Eat Your Greens never had a fruit.

Every other set more or less had a fruit – Oranges had 4, Reds had 5, Yellows had 4, and while Purples didn’t have any explicitly, at least 2 of the 4 Blue fruits could pass for purple. So once again it was back to the drawing board; What green fruits were there? What was something I haven’t done before? Grapes were out – I’d just done a bundle for the blues. I still hadn’t done apples, but they seemed so simple and plain. But Kiwifruit. That fit the bill. In more ways than one. (At this point it was almost traditional to have at least one, stupidly complicated fruit or vegetable per set. Purple Cabbage, Cantelope/Rock Mellon, Lychee, Pineapple… and now, Kiwifruit)

All the pieces for my metaphorical chess board assembled, now it was time to set up the final piece. Heavily inspired by accent kitchen tiles, it became a rainbow of fruit and vegetables matched beautifully with a rustic wooden frame that pulled everything together nicely.

To my surprise, despite going into the show just wanting to get my work out there and seen, it came home with a Highly Commended award. Not a bad effort for dipping my toes into the larger art categories.

Long time no see (2024)

It took until 2024 for me to show Sketchy Veggies again, when I was made aware of a local regional show that was actively looking for submissions for its arts and crafts show, and encouraged to see if I had anything I wanted to submit. It was such a last minute throw together, I was shocked to walk into the exhibition and see one of the felt ribbons I had long associated with other agricultural show awards, draped over the framed Sketchy Veggies. They had done it again, this time coming away with Best In Show.

The idea of doing business cards with the Sketchy Veggies, as a kind of easter egg set had been something kicking around in the bowels of my brain for several years at this point. And finally it became a reality in the wake of the Holbrook show results and another Typism Summit focusing on marketing and business practice. One of those silly jobs that you spend forever putting off, but when you sit down to do it, it comes together quickly. Before too long, the cards were printed and I was sorting them into decks.

The cards were part one – I couldn’t properly start working on part 2 until I had a full deck on the proper paper stock to get my dimensions to build a dieline for a box to house the cards. The next stage was a combination of print house experience, and the years of building mockups of packaging. Getting the dimensions, setting up the artwork and getting it printed was the easy part. My scalpel hand did not appreciate cutting out and creasing multiple boxes.

Final box with a sample of different veggie cards, numbered as per their order of creation.

I’m a Real Project now?! (2025)

And somehow, finally, in 2025 after 7 years of Sketchy Veggies, I finally sat down and made them a proper series logo. Something that after all this time felt right, in spite of many many past attempts to make something that clicked.

Inktober (2017)

What is Inktober?
Started in 2009 by Jake Parker as a challenge to improve his inking skills and develop positive drawing habits, the basic rules have been to create a piece of art in ink, every day, and share it with people – online or offline. In 2016, Parker begun sharing official prompt lists for people to work with.

Challenge Accepted
When the frustration at not using my ipad as much I thought I should aligned with an increasingly bleak looking work situation, and off the back of a team-initated drawing challenge, Inktober 2017 became the perfect escape. And the perfect excuse.

Instead of going back to my traditional art roots, I wanted to use the challenge to develop something else. A problem that had been sitting gathering dust: the ipad pro and apple pencil. The 31-day challenge would be a great opportunity to push ahead one day at a time with getting more comfortable sitting down with the ipad and smashing something out.

But of course, worth doing, worth overdoing.

Go on, I dare you

I never wrote it down but I remember setting myself a few ground rules for this Inktober challenge.

1. Everything had to be done on the ipad with the apple pencil
2. You have from 00:00 to 23:59 every day to work on a piece. No more, no less.
3. Regardless of how finished or not it is, you have to post your final piece.

All 31 pieces were made with iOS Sketchbook Pro, and there’s a whole range of styles and pieces that came from the challenge. It’s fun to look back at these retrospectively;

Pieces such as #5 and #13 being inspired by Stardew Valley (#5 in anticpation before the Switch version had been released, ironically incredibly prophetic given the number of time I spent hunting down hardwood in-game once it came out. And I had managed to play enough of the game that by [Inktober] Day 13, I had an idea of what Amaranth as a grain crop was like.)
#15’s creature in the dark looking over its shoulder serves as a permanent reminder that The Rasmus’ album Dark Matters was on high rotation during this challenge (“Something in the Dark”, Track 2)
The teeny tiny Foreign Shrapnel Dragon as he appears in #7 after being spotted by the human owner of his spare coin hoard (mortified, truely), and #21 defending his stash of coinage.
Several pieces that serve as a reminder of circumstances and current events at the time too (#12, #27 and #29).

Some of these were revisited later, and some were polished into finished pieces:

In Conclusion:

All in all I achieved what I set out to do with this challenge – 31 days in a row, sit down with the ipad and the apple pencil and make something. Some days were easier than others, it got easier the more I did it, some prompts were easier than others. I might have a great idea one day, and barely execute the prompt the next. And that’s okay! If nothing else, it gave me the starting blocks for several illustrations that I could come back to – and in several cases, did.

Lettering sketchbook 2023

In the middle of 2022, I was gifted a Domestika Course – “Typography Sketchbook: Drawing Letters with Style” by Joanna Muñoz”. Of course I signed up, logged in, and then things happened and it fell to the wayside for a while. Quite a while. Eventually in September 2023, I dug up my log in details, grabbed an old dot-grid notebook, and started to make my way through the first few introductory videos.

An Introduction to Lettering

Going through the motions of following the course was a personally bizarre experience; I’d been dabbling in and out of lettering for decades, done at least one university-level introduction class to Typography and heard far too many coursemates telling tales of woe during their time taking the later electives. I had been able to see several prominent lettering artists present at Semi-Permanent in 2014 (such as Jessica Hische and Seb Lester), and had the chance to add some of their own books to my reference library in the years that followed. I knew all too well what things like descenders and ascenders were, I’d spent weeks studying the differences between different types of serifs and san-serif fonts for 36 Days of Type. It felt, in some ways, like I was rehashing things I already knew. That I already should be fine with.

But at the same time that frustration became a strange kind of super power. I could identify more easily what I didn’t know from what I did, things that I agreed with vs things that I didn’t (Even in the “old days” of 2023 I was still skeptical about leaning on pintrest for reference material, after personal experiences that showed it could be extremely difficult to track down original sources).

Of course, if you’ve been around the blog this should come as no surprise, as once again “worth doing, worth overdoing” kicked in; Tasks within the course, each done in triplicate.

Same Words, Three Ways (san-serif with a 3D effect, high contrast bracketed serif, and monoline script)
Flourishes and Swashes (script styles)
Interlocking Forms (blockwork styles)
Carved Out (more blockwork forms)
Circles (letttering in a form)
Arches (using guidelines)
Arcs (guidelines and rotation)

Moving from reinforcing new and old fundamentals, we started to get into the meat of the course. The stuff I was truly in it for.

Creating Compositions

The next task called for students to pair a single phrase with one of the references gathered during the ideas phase – where we looked at where we get our ideas and inspiration from, and whom. And yet in spite of following the assigned task to the letter, something felt missing.

Worth doing, worth overdoing.

I set about making my own twist on the task – picking 5 specific artists whose styles I liked and/or wanted to emulate, looking at examples of their work and identifying what made it feel like their work (to me, at least). Choosing artists with a range of styles and looking at how and what still made each piece feel very obviously “them” was something that appealed in the wake of the annual “style” discourse that flooded the internet so often and the push for creatives to be their own “brand”.

Putting It All Together

The course followed this with a set of exercises – a serif piece, a san-serif piece, a script piece, and a mixed lettering piece. (4 pieces total)

You know the drill by now, don’t you? Worth doing, worth overdoing.

(Can you tell what I was watching at the time I was doing these?)

And of course now that we’ve got a basic grasp of composition in pencil and black/white, the next task was to start adding colour to pieces and documenting them for social media.

SIDEQUEST: Font Studies in Letraset

Somewhere along the line I also paused the colour project to do an abrupt crash course in different font families from ye old trustworthy font friend, Letraset.

Final Project(s)

At this point you know I couldn’t just do one final project, of course I did three – and added an extra layer of complexity! In unit 4 we started with sketching compositions and adding black ink to them. Unit 5 saw us adding colour to our compositions. So it only felt fitting for Unit 6’s grand finale, to finally translate the skills across to the digital front and complete them on the iPad with Procreate. The final missing piece in this lettering journey.

In the end I gravitated back to this composition inspired by Snooze One’s blocky, bubble-like style
from the exercises in Creating Compositions for my final submission.

Words By Bangtan (2024)

Somewhere between 2021-2022 I ran across a monthly challenge within the fandom for Korean group, BTS. As with so many challenges, I would see the posts for the month’s event when it was finished, and forget to keep an eye out for the following month’s theme. “Oh, I should try and do something for that!” Famous last words.

What is Words By Bangtan?

According to the fan account’s carrd from 2021;

Launching a new monthly ARMY event to celebrate the lyricism and words of BTS called #WordsByBangtan! This commences on the 25th of each month, starting February 2021, 12 pm KST. BTS' lyrics have been an instrumental part of their artistry and propensity to build a connection with the fans.

This is an opportunity to showcase our personal connections to their words through a variety of different mediums - lyric analysis threads, sharing our favourite words by them, edits, visualizations, collages, blogs, dance choreographies, films and many many more - if their words ever inspired you to create something or moved you, this is an event for you.

We will also have monthly themes to make it more engaging. It is up to you whether you want to stick to these themes, as they're only created to provide guidance. The only instructions are to credit translations you utilize, use the hashtag, and most importantly - have fun!

words by bangtan, introduction carrd

At the start of 2024, as I was finishing up the final projects for Lettering Sketchbook* and working through Typism’s Lettering Summit, I set out to make a concerted effort to keep a close eye on the Words By Bangtan challenge. When the themes dropped, when the submissions were due. Because without the lettering course to keep me on my toes, how was I going to put these skills to practice? The challenge gave me an opportunity to pursue an interest in the music and lyrical content, while also putting skills gleamed from both the Lettering Sketchbook course and Typism Summit lectures to practical use.

Challenge Accepted (Method)

As is probably expected by this point in the blog posts – project worth doing, project worth overdoing.

Research: From the get-go in January sketchbooks were filled with notes, pages of lyrics that could apply to the monthly theme (From memory, the majority of Korean-language translations came from doolset, where I could I would translate the Japanese lyrics to the best of my abilities). After all, it’s easier to narrow down options from a short list.

2. Sketches: After narrowing it down to a top 3 or 4 and using it as an exercise to try and do several sketches for each, I would move onto a final composition in another A5 midori dot-grid notebook.

3.Digitally Finishing: Once the final sketch/es were completed, a photo was taken with the ipad, dropping it into a fresh procreate file to finalise composition, colours and add embelishments.

The themes that I participated in from first to last included:

January: Revolution
February: Connection
March: Objection (missed)
April: Passion
May: Deconstruct
June: Reunion
July: Restoration
August: Inception
September: Protection

Overall this was a fun way to launch from Lettering Sketchbook and Typism Summit into continuing to give my lettering work a cause and a reason for practice, as well as diving deeper into the lyrical content of Bangtan Sonyeondan’s rather vast discography.

Links

Words by Bangtan carrd
Words by Bangtan instagram | twitter/X
Doolset lyric translation
Where to find BTS songs/albums: Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, Amazon Music, Youtube Music, etc. I’m sure you’ll be able to find it somewhere if you haven’t already.

36 Days of Type

Writing this retrospectively means that remembering exactly who, or where, I found out about the 36 Days of Type. It could have been somewhere like Creative Bloq, or even lettering artists like Jessica Hische, Seb Lester, or Ian Bernard. But I can’t recall precisely where.

36 Days of Type was a challenge to draw a letter or number every day for 36 consecutive days.

It was the kind of once-a-year event that I would find out about after the event, swear to do it the next year, and then proceed to forget until it was over again.

But not in 2019.

At this point the “go hard or go home” mantra is probably pretty obvious. Why stop at a single letter, when it could be a launching pad to level up and work on my visual library of fonts and letterforms?

Initial spreads for different types of ‘A’ and ‘a’s, with no solid direction

Spreads for different types of ‘S’ and ‘s’, after redefining expectations

"So, you're putting these off?" 
"Yeah. Apparently." 
"Why?" 
"Lack of variation." 
"Lack of variation?" 
"This was meant to be a study of ligature forms across a string of styles. All that's been looked at - even though it's a wide category - is Script fonts." 
"What do you want to see more of?" 
"Base font types - serifs, san serifs. Even some blackletter varients and unical." 
Sketchbook notes, 2019

On with the Show

You can see just flipping through the sketchbook that it quickly tightened up from being a loose and aimless “draw as many types of <letter> as you can” to a very structured study with purpose:

How is the capital <letter> presented across different fonts within five main font groups (Serif, Sanserif, Blackletter, Script, and Display)
How is the lowercase <letter> presented across different fonts within the main font groups.

Each page was split into 5 rows, one for each font group. The challenge became less about just drawing a single letter and more about finding the ways in which letterforms were being drawn significantly different from each other, yet still recognizably that letter – which ironically meant paying more and more attention to the details. Unwittingly this was developing a skill that would come in handy when trying to identify or match fonts, as often has happened during my time at the printshop.

The final exercise came to 52 pages of letters (26 uppercase, 26 lowercase), with 10 pages of numbers (0-9, single-pages). And probably a little more than 36 Days.