MIDSUMMER SKETCHING

 

I love the summer when we can eat outside and especially enjoy our local speciality.

This sketch is in coloured pencils and pens.

A treat on a Sunday is oysters for lunch with a bottle of champagne, followed by some delicious cheese and salad.

Every shell is different and I always keep one or two to draw later.

Last Sunday was no different and I was inspired to get out my watercolours after visiting the annual festival of painters and chatting to Yann Lesacher, an artist who is walking the GR34 around Brittany and recording it in his sketchbooks.

This one is just drawn in a grey pen that looks like graphite and I decided to leave it unpainted.

 

The last one is my favourite, I've pushed the colours a bit but there really is purple and green in the shells. I'm thinking of a way to make textile depiction of an oyster shell....

 

I can't remember if I've posted this one before, it's in my nature sketchbook that gets occasional use when something outside inspires me.  I made it into textile art birthday card for a friend but I seem to have lost the scan.

 

We have a pair of magpies that live in and around our garden and I got quite excited when I saw them starting to build a nest in our silver birch tree.  Each day there were a few more twigs carefully woven into the structure and I was looking forward to watching the new family arriving and being brought up.  I went to England around this time for a fortnight and when I came back I soon realised the nest had been abandoned, it's possible the birds realised they hadn't made a good choice when the top of the tree was blown about in a storm!

 

 

We're all very concerned about the bees and when I saw one lying on the terrace I tried to give it a drink of sweetened water but sadly it didn't survive.  However I kept it to draw on a page where I had already drawn a tulip from my garden.

2018 SUMMER HOLIDAY PART 2

 

We had decided to cross the Pyrenees from coast to coast and here is one of my sketches done on a rare damp morning at a small camp along the way.  This tangled tree was right next to our parking spot and when the sun came out later it gave us some welcome shade while we took our lunch.

 

 

The tree had flowers and fruit at the same time and I enjoyed using my watercolour pencils to capture the fuzziness of the seed heads.

 

 

We only had one stop on the Mediterranean coast at Roses, just across the frontier  in Spain, which has a wonderful bay with sandy beaches and an interesting history.  I sketched and stitched the palm trees just in front of the café where we took our daily aperitif.

 

 

We then spent a week at Argeles Gazost, a wonderful place just south of Lourdes, the famous pilgrimage destination.  The snow capped mountains surrounded the town with a fast flowing river running through the valley.

 

 

This is the view from a high point in the town which I was able to sketch and stitch using some threads and organza I found in the weekly market that filled the centre on the Tuesday.

 

 

We discovered the 'voie verte,' a cycle track made from a disused railway that runs from Lourdes to Pierrefitte Nestalas.  What a fantastic couple of days we spent cycling in each direction and enjoying the views and the cool air when we came close to the river.

 

 

I was totally captivated by the sight of the cold water rushing  over the different coloured pebbles so I tried to capture it in a stitchpic.

 

 

Another view by the river, a clump of poppies caught my eye and soon that became another embroidery and then a birthday card for someone special.

We finished our holiday at St Jean de Luz for a few days then on to Nantes for a couple of nights on the last leg of our return home.

 

 

I didn't have time to sketch while we were at St Jean de Luz so here is one I did on an earlier visit showing the typical architecture.

 

 

 

2018 SUMMER HOLIDAY

 

We set off at the beginning of June only 65 kilometres down the road to Carantec where we met up with Stéphanie, my middle granddaughter who is studying geology at Cardiff uni.

We spent a lovely Sunday together which ended with this enormous cloud that covered the sky and started a 3 hour thunderstorm with torrential rain.

 

We had a delicious crepe lunch and then a walk along the shore collecting pebbles and learning about the rocks from Steph.

The view out to sea was beautiful with perfect blue sky and golden beaches edged with wild flowers.

 

I turned  the sketch into a stitch picture using organza and assorted yarns.

After waiting another 2 days for the weather to clear we decided to go home and re-start our holiday later. We studied the forecasts and  made the decision to go south to the Mediterranean coast where it was a lot warmer!

 

 

On the 8th of June we set off again southwards through the Massif Central with it's lovely views from the A75 free motorway  of the amazing wild flowers and the extinct volcanoes in the distance.

 

 

The sketch also became another stithpic which I worked on for several days when we reached our next destination.

 

 

We made a stopover for the weekend at Millau on on a peaceful wooded campsite by the river Tarn.

 

There was a gang of ducks that came by every day at the same tome on the scrounge for crumbs, quacking and wagging their tails.