This is part 2 of my last Warm & Cozy post – and fleshes out the idea I originally had when drawing this young lady gathering firewood….I saw her in my mind’s eye at night, bringing firewood to throw on a bonfire. 

Tutorial: Warm & Cozy Art (OLO markers)

Watch the video below and scroll to the end to leave comments or questions — or click HERE to watch it on YouTube and leave comments over there. I read both dutifully!

Are these the colors in my curated OLO set?

There aren’t enough darks in my own set of Olo Markers – but if you have some blacks and greys, my set will work perfectly with those additions! Any reds and yellows can accomplish a drawing like this – but I didn’t include those neutrals in my set when I selected them. 

Drawing fire

A few years ago I had a revelation – I realized I had been drawing fire completely backwards my whole life! I had created the interior hot portion of a flame in reds and transitioned to oranges and yellows then whites as I worked my way out. That must be something done in children’s books to have convinced me that’s what fire looks like. (Can you look through your collections of kids books? Is my theory right?)

I do know that continued through my crafting life – we almost all colored it backwards. Red in the middle and lighter as it got to the edges. 

But in reality, most of the flame is white, and in a bonfire like this, some of the flames bounce around in licks of yellows, oranges, and sometimes edges of oranges and reds before it goes black in the background.

Red firelight at night

When I’ve got a unique lighting situation I want to render, I start with research – I did look around while at my sister’s house around her fire pit at the way everyone was lit. Or not lit. 

But “remembering” what I saw wasn’t enough. I got onto the googles to see if I could find the “right” kind of lighting I was imagining, something that indicated the feeling of the heat in the winter time. Several were absolutely RED! And I mean red for half the face, and everything else went black into silhouette. 

I decided to just use a mix of reds and oranges to make that happen, with more of the darks on the side of the fire that’s further away from the heat, leaving a bit more seen by the viewer. 

Dark trees in the background

I wanted to create a simple background, just indications of something behind where she’s walking from. I decided on the same kinds of trees in the new class but with more dark in them. That led to trying out the RGs (red grays) in the OLO marker line. They’re a little redder than the warm greys. I liked having those darks around the fire to help define the curled edges and shapes with negative drawing. But something seemed not quite right.

Red gravel in the foreground

The ground around the fire definitely needed to be red – lighter near the fire, darker as it stretched out, and more desaturated too. This was a quick sketch (the 12 or so minutes plus a few marker-switching moments) so I didn’t get into massive detail, but did get out that Copic SP Brush Marker to make some ground squiggles to indicate rocks. 

A wee bit more red

The trees, well, they looked too close to the fire! I considered blacking them out entirely, but still liked having something going on back there – so added the dark red instead. It pushed them back a bit, and since I’mjust making up the girl’s bonfire story anyway, I’m going to imagine buckets of water and lots of friends to help if anything catches fire. Ha! All that red really did make the fire just completely light UP!

Girl with firewood

In class, we’ll color her up small for a card, and create a similar but simpler background behind her. And she gets a toasty warm cabin to walk into!

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Warm & Cozy Wishes class

You can read the backstory on how the class came about here.

The new Warm & Cozy Wishes class teaches:

1. coloring both of these drawings large size, real time
2. coloring them small with scenes that only require the ability to draw rectangles

What else you get:

1. The two printable images are free inside the class, as their separate jpgs to be sized as desired, but also in PDF format at size
2. An hour of realtime video taught in the Ohuhu markers, with a little treasure–color numbers are on the screen.
3. Sentiments for inside and outside to print out, trim, and finish the cards.

Glad that’s out of my head now!

Do you ever get an idea that just HAS to be put on paper before you can rest? Yep, that’s this bonfire. For now just a quick sketch worked to get it out of my system. Who knows if it’ll be back or not!