Hand Drawing Via Sharpie

We just moved and so I have been on the lookout for sunflower decor to put in our kitchen. Today I came across this blog that showed how to sharpie over a picture you printed out from your computer and then to re-trace it on the back. (Making the back the final picture) It really was easy and fairly fool proof! I have little to no drawing ability myself, but I think it turned out pretty ok.

So I did a search on google and the above picture is the one I settled on. I didn't even bother to download it, just ignored the iStockphoto stuff and printed it off. However, I forgot to do a print preview and when I printed it from the internet it was much smaller than I wanted. Nevertheless, I decided to make the small one my trial run and this is how it turned out:

Not too shabby for a 'free-hand' sharpie picture!

Since I was busy procrastinating from doing the dishes or any other sort of cleaning, I decided to save the picture on my computer and print it off in a 5x8 size. After tracing, re-tracing, cropping, and framing, my final result is:

He is looking great, but slightly lonely so I'll probably add a few more of these later.

Discoveries:

1. The bigger picture was harder to re-trace and cover all of the black lines that seeped through. Maybe this was because I was tired or maybe because it was bigger.
2. Be sure to put an extra scrap of paper behind the one you are working on, it is meant to bleed through, and will probably go through more than one sheet.
3. Pick a picture without a lot of tiny details. Sharpies tend to ink and then spread out (can't remember what that's called... any ideas?) so it's harder to do the fine details. You can see that I skipped the tiny white dots on the edges of the butterflies wings in a few places, and altogether on the smaller one.
4. You might also try this with a felt or super inky pen. However, I would think that it might be harder to re-trace fine lines. Sharpies can (and did!) cover a multiplicity of errors.  

And on a side note... I'm not sure why blogger decided that this last section needed a different color text background.... anyone know how to fix it? Maybe I'll figure it out tomorrow.