SKETCHBOOK CATCH UP

 

Mushrooms are appearing in my garden and along with the red spotty ones a few golden brown oddities that I've drawn life size here.

 

The pine tree in my garden is very stocky with a wonderfully cracked bark.  I sat on the bank one warm afternoon to draw what I could see and maybe one day make a textile art piece from the image.

 

A piece of bark drawn from both sides, still a work in progress.

 

In England visiting the family we went for a lovely walk on Sunday morning and James and I collected pockets full of chestnuts and leaves to draw and we even ate some of the nuts!

 

While I was at Justine's we walked at Winkworth arboretum which is famous for the collection of Acers.  What pleasure to collect all the lovely red leaves and spend the time to draw them;

 

Another Sunday and a walk near the river at Guildford where we found a hop plant covered in fruit.

 

James is becoming a good artist and he borrowed my triplus watersoluble pens to do his own drawings.

 

I sent him a set and a waterbrush of his own before I left to go home.

HAPPY NEW YEAR

Happy new year to you all and I hope you had a good time over the festive season.

I thought I should start the year with a catch up on the latest drawings in my sketchbooks. 

I have finally completed no 41 which I started in January 2017 with these drawings from some photos taken while I was walking with Justine in the Surrey hills in November last year.

The ground was littered with red and gold leaves and the fallen branches silhouetted against the sky were very sculptural, making lovely frames for my photos.

While I was in England my middle granddaughter Steph who is studying geology at Cardiff university showed me some photos she had taken of microscopic sections of rocks. 

I couldn't believe the colours and patterns that appeared.

I asked her to email some to me as I was inspired to try and draw them with a plan to later turn them into embroideries.

I had a lot of fun on the rainy winter evenings using water soluble pens and crayons in my square sketchbook.

As the patterns are very intricate it was very hard not to get bogged down in the detail but I managed to get looser each time I tried a different one.

They look like planets spinning in outer space and as I have just re-discovered my grandmother's black velvet shawl I'm planning to use it as a background when I start the textile versions.

And maybe they lend themselves to some free machine stitching embroidery. 

I'm enjoying my new found love of hand stitching so much there don't seem to be enough hours in the day to do everything!  I've got a bag full of felting supplies waiting to be tried, my ongoing family tree portrait project and a head full of other ideas so I will never get bored. 

We're off on our travels soon and I've already packed some fabrics and threads as well as my sketchbook and pencils to keep me occupied in the winter sun of the Canaries so look out for my next blog when I hope to have some new things to share with you.

AUTUMN LEAVES

 

It's that time of year again when the ground is littered with colourful fallen leaves, at least it is in some parts of the world.  Here by the sea we don't have many tall trees with the kind of leaves that change colour, they seem to go brown and fall off before they go red or gold or yellow!

 

But I'm not deterred, I can still pick living leaves and paint them and give the right impression and not feel left out of all the wonderful colourfulness I see on the television and internet!

 

I went to an art expo last week and had a lovely conversation with the artist about natural dyes for fabrics and we got around to talking about natural pigments of which I have a stash.  My blog friend Barbara Lilian sent me some that she hadn't used and which I had also struggled to use successfully as watercolours but my artist friend suggested using acrylic medium instead.

 

I have a collection of the tiny jam jars you get on the ferry and in hotels so I mixed a bit of matt medium with some coloured pigment and some water and made some lovely thick paint.  I brushed it onto the backs of the leaves I had collected on my way home from my visit and printed them onto different papers.  The top three are on a hand made cotton rag paper, the one above here is a cream pastel paper and the one below is black Ingres paper.

 

Because the paint is opaque it's great on the tinted paper as it stands out against the dark background and also even has a bit of texture which you can't see from the scan.

I got quite carried away with my pigments and on the cotton paper tried another experiment, wetting the paper first then sprinkling the pigments and leaving them to dry overnight then washing them off in the morning before starting the printing.  You can see the effect best in the top picture where I got some mountains and sky, quite by accident!

I finally managed to get about 15 usable images from my efforts which are now made into cards, some for next year's garden party and some for family birthdays, so if you get one you'll know how I made it!

AUTUMN LEAVES

 

I collected a few leaves while I was in England and used the smallest one as a template for this wet in wet watercolour in my home made sketchbook. I had a lot of fun mixing the colours on the paper and want to collect some different shapes to make a larger painting.  I posted it on facebook Artist's Journal Workshop page and got 133 likes, a record for me!

MORE DRAWINGS FROM MY UK VISIT

 

Justine is a keen gardener and has a wonderful collection of dahlias in her garden.  She picked a few to put in my bedroom in tiny coloured glass bottles.  One morning we sat together in her sewing room and while Justine prepared notes for her beading class I drew these lovely flowers with the sun shining through them. 

 

 

Another plant in the garden is a kiwi growing over the wall by Justine's back door.  It has plenty of fruit but they are very small and rather sour to eat but fun to draw and try to depict the fuzzy surface.

 

 

We went for a walk over Leith hill, a well known beauty spot in Surrey which we used to visit when the children were small and I spotted this amazing red mushroom in the grass in a clearing as we climbed a slope.  It is actually only the size of a yew berry and has the same translucence.  I had to kneel down on the ground to get close enough to take the photograph.  The girls thought their Granny was a bit crazy taking photos of mushrooms and their beliefs were confirmed when I found a tall boletus with a slug half inside the underside of the cap and carried it some distance through the woods till I had some bright enough light to take a few more pictures.  I will post the drawing here as soon as I have found the time to draw it.

 

 

 

I was really amazed at the autumn colours in England, well ahead of the trees here in France.  In fact we don't see much colour here by the coast as the salty air dries the leaves before they have a chance to turn red.  I brought a couple back to draw and paint in watercolour as they are so nice to draw round the shape and then use a bit of artistic licence in the colouring. This one here is as I picked it up but there are more pictures to scan later... watch this space!