Time to get those greens out!
Today I am thrilled to introduce you to the work of whimsical artist and illustrator Beth Logan. Based in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, Beth has been drawing since she was able to hold a crayon, and hasn’t looked back since! Most recently, she created the beautiful coloring book Inkspirations in the Garden: Fabulous Floral Coloring Designs Celebrating Life in Full Bloom.
Beth agreed to share some super interesting insights about her inspiration and process in an exclusive interview for Cleverpedia readers, along with some advice for anyone hoping to succeed with their own art! After the interview, I’ve got an in-depth review of her new book to share with you all!
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Cleverpedia: What led you to creating and publishing coloring books?
Beth Logan: I have been drawing and designing for the licensing industry for over 2 decades, where I work with manufacturers and publishers who create awesome products like greeting cards, fabric, giftware… all sorts of goodies. I’ve been wanting to create coloring books for some time now, and have been pretty excited about this one.
Cleverpedia: Why the gardening theme? Do you have a green thumb in addition to being an illustrator?
Beth Logan: Gardening seemed like a natural place to start for my first coloring book. You could say it’s in my blood. My granddad kept an acre of meticulously groomed terraced paths through the woods right in the middle of the town where they lived, the pathways lined with found-object sculptures and birdbaths made from electrical insulators or industrial lampshades. Clever little handmade signs along the paths showcased his quirky sense of humor. It was a wonderland for me as a child. And right in the center of it was my grandma’s fabulous flower garden. She arranged and photographed her flowers, and pressed them to make cool, unique handmade cards.
When my parents’ vegetable garden outgrew our own yard, they expanded it into a vacant lot across the street. I grew up working in those gardens and helped can and preserve our harvest to enjoy year round.
My small city lot pales in comparison and is far from the magazine-perfect garden of my dreams, but I love my crazy mix of veggies and flowers I call home. Digging, weeding and trimming is like a form of meditation for me… much like drawing and coloring.
Cleverpedia: Sounds lovely! Where does your inspiration come from?
Beth Logan: Some of it comes from my own little garden and the critters who visit here, but I suppose mostly I’m inspired by amazing spaces I visit, those gardens I dream mine could someday be like! That’s kind of the best part of being an illustrator: my dreams can become reality on the page.
Cleverpedia: What is the process of making a single page like?
Beth Logan: As I do with all my artwork, these designs were drawn by hand and scanned so I could work with them in Photoshop. In most of my commercial work I use Photoshop to adjust colors, add or change details, and reformat designs to fit on different sizes and shapes of products. For the coloring pages, I traced them in Photoshop using my Wacom tablet and stylus just as I would a pen and paper. Some started as a pencil or ink drawing in my sketchbook but quite a few of the images in this book started out as full-color pieces using watercolor, colored markers, and Prismacolor pencils that I had originally created for greeting cards, garden flags, or wall décor before I traced them digitally to turn them into line drawings for colorable pages.
Sort of like coloring in reverse, I guess, which was actually really fun for me!
Cleverpedia: Do you like to listen to music while you work?
Beth Logan: I listen to a pretty wide variety of music, podcasts, and audiobooks when I’m working in my studio, but most often this time of year I keep it quiet inside, as I prefer to listen to all the birds outside my studio window!
Cleverpedia: Which was your favorite page in the book to illustrate?
Beth Logan: There’s a drawing of a full, lush flower garden with a little trailer in the background. This is an illustration of a happy memory of a dear friend: her funky little pink trailer, her enormous fat cats, her whirligigs and quirky collectibles and most of all her gorgeous flowerbeds.
When she was no longer physically able to get down in the dirt and work in that garden, she still had that plant and bulb buying addiction that gardeners have! She couldn’t pass up a garden center or bulb catalog without picking up “just a few new things”. I’d get the phone call every month or two, no matter the season or weather: “Hey kiddo, you’d better get over here. I’ve got a bunch of new bulbs that need to be planted. I’m tired of that one yellow rose bush, I found a different one to replace it. The ajuga needs thinning. I think that big rhodie should be moved. Oh, and I have some plants for you.”
I’d go visit and often spend the entire day sweating in that garden. I learned a lot from those visits, and although I miss her terribly, she can be found in many forms all around my own garden (including that one yellow rose she was tired of!).
I can’t look at that picture without smiling.
Cleverpedia: That’s such a sweet story, thanks so much for sharing that! So what’s next? Are there more coloring books in your future?
Beth Logan: I’m currently busy with a few projects including a couple new coloring book ideas. I can’t be too specific at this point (I’m sorry!) but I will say that they’ve been inspired by some major life changes I’ve experienced in the past year and a half. The themes are deeply personal to me, the sharing of which is pretty new ground for a weird little private keep-it-to-yourself introvert like myself but it feels really good and the art is super fun. I think this is something a lot of other people will really relate to and I can’t wait to share it. Oh, and did I mention the art is super fun?
Cleverpedia: I can’t wait! What advice would you give to someone interested in pursuing a career in art, or publishing their own coloring book?
Beth Logan: Be yourself.
That’s the most important thing. Create the art that you love, the stuff that comes from that spot deep down inside that no one else can touch: that thing that makes your work uniquely you and not anyone/everyone else. The light that comes from that will transcend any trend or market or color-of-the-year or whatever, that’s what will shine through. Besides, like Oscar Wilde said, “everyone else is already taken.”
Set serious goals; determine what you’d like to accomplish. What is your art perfect for? Where does it fit in? Focus and learn about that market. There are so many great resources now: websites, e-courses, books, blogs, consultants, workshops… so many ways to learn, and learning is key. Research your buns off. Talent is awesome, but a savvy professional who fully understands the market in which you are pursuing is going to be the one who finds success.
Living the creative life sounds pretty dreamy but it takes ridiculous amounts of time and patience, not to mention ultra-thick skin. It’s not for sissies. But if creating is what you want to do, it’s worth every scar and callus. And if you’re serious and driven and stay focused, you’ll be amazing at it!
Cleverpedia: Where can people see more of your work?
Beth Logan: Hmmm, it’s all over the place: the best way to keep up what’s out there at any given moment is to follow me on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and my blog. You’ll find links to all of them on my website. Thanks for asking!
Review: Inkspirations in the Garden
First, the basics: Inkspirations in the Garden is a glossy paperback adult coloring book with typical letter-sized pages (8.5″ by 11″). There are 72 pages inside, including 33 traditional pages to color. The pages are quite thick with a very slight glossiness, and in my testing, ink from thin markers and pens did not seep through. Just in case, I’d recommend protecting the next page if you color in the book with markers!
Each page is perforated. Instead of being left blank, the reverse of each page contains a quote and a decorative border (that you can color if you choose!) to match the page opposite. The general theme of the quotes is gardening and happiness; here are a few examples:
“One of the healthiest ways to gamble is with a spade and a package of garden seeds.” -Dan Bennett
“Storms make trees take deeper roots.” -Dolly Parton
“To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.” -Audrey Hepburn
Beth has created a variety of really lovely artwork for this book, including some unique garden scenes, floral mandalas, garden quotes to color, cutesy garden critters, and a few pages with more realistic flowers. The line widths vary pleasingly by page, and a few pages are simpler with larger spaces. Nowhere in the book did I feel like it suffered from the problem some coloring books have, where the spaces are too tiny and the lines too thin to be colored without a lot of hassle.
Inside the front covers are some full-color reproductions of finished pages from the book for your inspiration (or should I say “Inkspiration?” har har), some of which are shown above. The first few pages are a glossy insert with coloring advice, tips for choosing a color palette, and advice for making your colors pop off the page with shading. Everything feels very high-quality!
I had the opportunity to color several pages from Beth’s coloring book, but the one below is one of my absolute favorite pages in the book and the one I’m going to share with you today in my review! I absolutely loved the look of this neatly tiling page of heirloom seed packets. It brought me back to my childhood days of following my dad around the garden as he planted varieties of seeds very similar to the ones shown here.
The other thing I loved about this design? It was like nine mini coloring pages in one! The individual seed packets here gave me clear stopping points if I needed them — and the busier I get, the more I need them! Each individual panel gave me an opportunity to work on my gradients, texture, blending, and shading… in miniature.
I had a lot of fun Googling “heirloom” varieties of plants we are so used to the homogenized versions of. Yes, those purple carrots really do exist! I tried to get a little green streakiness into my tomatoes. And the corn was probably my favorite panel.
I have a number of different kinds of pencils, and used many of them on this page. My primary set of colored pencils are the trusty Caran d’Ache Pablos that you’ve possibly seen me write about before, but for parts of this page I also used my Prismacolors and a sample set of Irojiten colored pencils Tombow sent me that I really should get around to formally reviewing soon. (Whoops!)
To me, the Caran d’Ache pencils felt the best on the page, and gave me the control to do my texture and shading. I love Prismacolors, but the slight gloss to this paper really brought their butteriness out and made them a little harder to control. It was also a lot harder to cover over the Prismacolors to shade them after I laid the color down on this paper. I got some neat texture out of putting down the buttery Prismas in places and then coloring over and around them with the firmer Pablos, which you can really see in the cucumbers and the tomatoes. The Irojiten fell somewhere in between, but since I have a really limited color palette I only really used them in a few of the panels, like the radish.
Overall I was thrilled for the chance to review this book and to get to enjoy Beth’s gorgeous artwork! If you or someone you know is a colorist with a green thumb, they are going to love this book. Not only is there a lot to color here — so you get a lot of bang for your buck — but the whole book is executed in a really high-quality way. You can pick up a copy right here on Amazon.
A huge thank you to Beth Logan for sharing this window into her process, hinting at future books, and offering up advice! And also to the Inkspirations team for hooking us up and making this whole thing possible!
Show your support by grabbing a copy of Beth’s coloring book here:
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