How to draw a bow

Drawing a bow is fun. Don’t worry—it’s easier than you think! How about two hearts and ribbon?

That’s all it takes. My grandmother was a nurse, but she was also an experienced artist—painting, sketching, and formally trained as an artist. She studied and then created just about anything that you can think of. I spent many summers with my Grandma and learned so much from her!

This is one of the most important things she always said:

Unless you are going for a realistic drawing, keep it as simple as possible, and see the shapes in the object you can use. The key to her saying this was see the shapes – break down the object into shapes and then you can draw it. Let’s start off with a how to draw a bow.

Every time I doodle or draw an embroidery design, I break it down into simple shapes. I used her simple technique to create a bow for a mug rug. The shapes are a heart and a ribbon.

Take two hearts of the same size and rotate them so they are on their side with the pointy bottoms together. Like this:

Once you have your hearts done, then you can add some ribbon. The ribbon is a rectangle with a “V” shape cut out of one end and tapered and curved a bit at the other end. You need to do two ribbons for your bow drawing.

Once your bows and ribbons are finished, you can add some detail, such as the knot in the middle of the two hearts—and look at that—they don’t look like two hearts anymore! Add some crease lines on the bow and some on the ribbon, and you are done.

How to draw a bow: important things to remember:

REMEMBER: Your drawing does not have to be perfect! Personally, I think adding your own to a design makes it unique and a lot more fun. You can always do that in your embroidery software if you want to smooth curves and fix the points.

Try to learn how to draw your bow with pencil and paper – honestly, it’s easier than you think!! As long as you try to draw a bow an ribbons and keep practicing, you will get better at drawing. You can even try learning some easy drawing and how to draw a bow on your ipad. Thr ar a lot of graphics programs that are easy to use and make drawing anything a lot more fun

Post your drawing in the OML Embroidery University Facebook Group and we can all get just a little more creative together!

Sue

I am not an artist; I am more of a doodle person… 🙂