Making Snow with Moonlight Markers

Bonnie Peters (@diamondandwillow) is here with a ‘cool’ tutorial on creating wintry drawings with the Moonlight Markers. Have some fun with these white brush pens on dark paper for chalk ink lettering and designs.

Kelly Creates Supplies: Black cardstock from the Project Pad, Moonlight Markers, Pencil & Eraser from the Deluxe Lettering Kit 

First off, please do not be intimidated by the finished product. It is really only very simple strokes, combined to create landscape scenery. Trust me. Let’s take a look at an easy snowflake design.

The snowflake is a series of straight lines intersected in the middle. Then you can add some dots to the tips, darken the centre lines a bit and add some detail strokes on each stem. That’s it. You can add more or less, because as you know, no two snowflakes are alike. 

For the mountains you can begin with a pencil line first if you’re more comfortable, or just go ahead with the marker, and lightly sketch some triangular mountain peaks.   

Using the side of your marker (not the tip), make some side ways strokes to appear as snow settling in the crevices of the mountains. I kept them all going the same direction. You can add some further down the mountain as well, to give dimension. The white ink in the Moonlight markers dries quickly so you can trace over some of these lines again if you want to make them even whiter or create more dimension.

Using the tip of the Moonlight Marker, with very gentle pressure, you can fill in the sky with small dots to create a starry winter night sky. 

Next I used the Moonlight Markers to create a snowy winter tree.  Again, pencil can be used, but I went right in with light strokes and drew some random tree branches in a triangular tree shape.  

 I imagined the branches covered with snow, which makes them drop down, heavy laden, and more to one side where the wind, wouldn’t have blown them off as much. Here I tapped in strokes to fill in the branches. Start with a few and just keep adding white strokes with the Moonlight Marker until you have the desired shape.  
 Lastly I penciled in my words ‘snow capped’ and traced over them with the white Moonlight Marker. Then I erased the pencil marks once it was dry. You can use whatever words you’d like.

To give you another idea, I took those same three sketches, snowflakes, mountains, and trees, to show you how you can use them individually on a card, with a variety of quotes.

Bonnie always makes artistic drawings doable. Using brush pens for sketching is popular among lots of artists, but we often only think of our pens for lettering. Thanks for these beautiful, dramatic black and white projects, Bonnie!

For more art and lettering inspiration, follow Bonnie Peters on Instagram @diamondandwillow and visit her website http://www.diamondandwillow.ca 

Shop the supplies Bonnie used by clicking these affiliate links below or visiting my online shop http://www.kellycreatesstore.com.