Alyn Carlson

Alyn Carlson is an artist and designer, who uses a lot of different medias when making art. Quite a large proportion of her work consists of bold, colourful oil paintings, but what inspires me most is her watercolour and sketchbook work.

I love the way that she injects colour, texture and meaning into these loose watercolours. As stated on her blog, she is “Always in search of the line, font, pattern, seed, flavor, musical note to be placed at the right time in the right place.”

These are some examples of her drawings, which she created in her Moleskin Sketchbook using fineliner. She states that she does this as a daily practice and that her drawings are never planned; she puts pen to paper and lets her pen do the work. She is therefore surprised daily by the results. 

These are the results when she started to add watercolour to her daily doodles. She uses minimal colours, which adds to the effect of her drawings. I admire how loose and free her drawings are, and I am going to experiment with these aspects in my work ,as quite often I create neat pieces without this much character and fluidity. Another reason why I love her work so much is that I can see a clear link to surface design, which is an area of textiles that I am passionate about.

After being inspired by Alyn’s work, I decided to do a page in my sketchbook based on her style. I really enjoyed doodling on my page with a pen; I hadn’t realised that I haven’t doodled on a big scale before which I really enjoyed. However when adding the colour I didn’t like my work so much. I think I didn’t narrow my palette enough and I also think I applied too much colour, so I would like to have another go and see if I could improve my last attempt.