More Acanthus Scrolls, plus Homemade Envelopes

When I was looking for techniques for drawing that interesting foliage-like scroll, I found two useful sites. I made use of one of them in my last post, to draw a decorative scroll on a tuckbox. This time I tried Calligraphy Pen’s technique to make an interesting envelope. In doing so, I also discovered that my cut-and-paste skills need work.

The finished envelope

 The envelope template that I used is from The Postman's Knock. She offers a number of decorative printable envelopes, some for free. If you print them full size, they will hold a standard sheet of paper folded into quarters (important if you are making cards this way.) I traced around one and then started adding a scroll to the back flap of the envelope, and then started one that I wanted to go along the left-hand side of the envelope where it would not interfere with the readability of the stamp or zip code.

Here I have drawn a box lightly in pencil where I want the second scroll to go. You can see the one on the back flap already done.

Box penciled in

Here I have drawn the scroll in pencil.

Penciled-in scroll

Here I have gone over it in pen, and added some rather random shadows with a finer pen. If the art critiquer at SCBWI saw this, he would no doubt ask me where the heck my light source is supposed to be coming from. Oh well.

Inked-in scroll

Now that I’ve gone over it in pen, I have a sudden realization. This scroll is on the WRONG SIDE of the envelope. Oops. Rather than start over, I decide to cut and paste. Since my computer art skills are limited, I cut and paste in the original sense of the phrase, then use the photocopy function on my printer.

Envelope template with scrolls cut and pasted in

Unfortunately, I haven’t stuck the pieces down well enough and faint lines show where I have pasted. And it turns out there is not a single bottle of white-out in the house. I try white watercolor, and then I try running white gel pen over the faint lines on the photocopy.

Finally, I decide that this isn’t such a wonderful scroll anyway, and I may as well make an envelope out of the copy with faint lines. I’ll make a better scroll decoration some other day. Meanwhile, I have plenty of photocopies that I can color in different ways if I want.

Till next post.