SKETCHBOOK 41 PART 2

 

One of our favourite meals to have on Sunday is oysters and champagne.  Bob gets up early to go to the village where the local producer sets up her stall and he buys 18 size 2 oysters.  We can trust in their freshness as they are grown on the coast only a few kilometres from here in the river Jaudy where we used to sail when we had our boat.

 

 

It's a very simple meal, we have the oysters followed by some delicious French cheeses and a green salad washed down with a red wine from the Rhone villages.  We buy our champagne from the producer who comes to Perros every year at a very reasonable price, in fact we are off to the annual wine fair later this morning to get stuck into some serious tasting.

 

I have a Japonica bush just in front of the dining room window and I love the way the orange flowers bloom all along the stems, right into the centre of the shrub.

 

The branches have lethal spines which attack my fingers when I try to cut a few stems to draw so I have taken some photos as well because I think this would make an interesting subject for a needlepainting.  I can picture the layers building up and getting stronger in colour as they come nearer to the front.

 

I have an American friend called Starr who lives in a wonderful forest who posts beautiful photos of her environment which have inspired my drawings in the past.  The latest batch have also been interpreted in brush pen and diluted inks.

 

She has a lovely collection of silver birches with interesting barks which she has also painted in watercolours. 

The name of Starr's blog is wonderland woods and I'm sure you'll be delighted with her photos too.

 

Continuing with the woody theme, we have a few tree stumps in our garden where I noticed some interesting growths appearing.  On closer inspection I discovered these colourful fungi so I photographed them straight away as I thought they might get damaged when Bob set out to mow the lawn.  As this blue-green one was about 5 centimetres across I enlarged the photo so I could see the detail more clearly.

 

This orange-mauve one had been growing slowly through the winter and fortunately I caught it at it's peak as it's now dried up since the weather warmed up for spring.

Spring is warming up and there are lots more beautiful plants to draw in and around my garden so keep an eye out for the next instalment of Sketchbook no 41!

FLOWERING SHRUBS PICTURE

 

I finally found the time to complete the picture collage of the flowering shrubs I started drawing earlier in the year.  I think I've managed to draw them all but I had to add a couple of drawings from my folder to make up the 20 I needed to fill the frame.

 

Back to sketchbook no 38 which I keep on the coffee table so I can draw in the evening when I sit down with my aperitif.  This little Hellebore plant came from Lidl and is a delight with it's white flowers turning lime green as they mature.

 

I had wanted to sweep the leaves in the garden for a couple of weeks but the rain was too heavy and the wind too strong and when the sun finally came out they had all been blown away over the bank or into my neighbour's garden.  There were some leaves on the flower beds which the black bird flicked all over the grass again though.

 

On Thursday I walked down the lane to visit a friend and came face to face with a wild boar grazing in a field.  I was disappointed I didn't have my camera with me but I kept the image in my head to draw when I came home later. I must admit I was pretty scared as these wild animals have a reputation for being very ferocious!

My friend Rose Jones sent me a lovely mushroom picture to draw so I decided to try some pointillism, it took ages to do but I think worth the effort!

 

Another friend also sent a picture which I drew in the Triplus pens washed with water.

IT'S SUMMER AT LAST!

 

The sun's been shining here for a few days now and we're keeping our fingers crossed that it will last long enough to feel like a proper summer. 

The hydrangeas in my garden and all over the town are in their full glory in all shades of blue through pink and red to deep purple.  I picked a wonderful bloom the size of a football from one of my plants to draw as part of my flowering shrubs series.

 

These Hypericum plants flower for a long time with new flowers popping up every day.  The leaves have a delicate fragrance when you crush them and parts of the plant are also used as a drug to treat depression.

 

This happy looking plant with silvery leaves is called Senecio.  The yellow daisy like flowers only last a couple of weeks before the dead heads have to be cut off so that the surrounding hydrangeas and hypericums can take up their own space.

 

I've been out and about with my sketchbook, drawing the beach at Tregastel before a nice lunch out with friends.

 

The lanes are full of wild flowers at the moment and I managed to pick a good bunch before the council came along and mowed the verges.

 

We love to go walking along the lanes and paths by the sea at this time of year and I realised that I needed a shoulder bag to carry my sketchbook and water in.  As soon as we got home I had a rummage through the fabric stash and came up with some fake suede and a colourful print for the lining.

 

I measured the sketchbook and the water bottle to make sure the bag was just big enough to carry them without being too large.  I'm really pleased with the result and I've been using it nearly every day.

A NEW CROCHET TOP

 

As a change from sketching and sewing I've been doing some crocheting recently.  I used to love knitting but gave up when Bob announced he didn't like the clicking of the needles.  Crochet however is silent with only the one hook so when I saw a dress on TV recently I decided to have a go again after many years of inactivity.

 

I managed to get a photo of this dress off the television as it was being modelled during the London fashion week last year.  It took me a while to work out how it was constructed and to design my own version of the wheels.

 

Here is the original drawing from my sketchbook where I tried to resolve the armhole shapes and what to do on the hem.

 

After half a dozen variations I came up with this simple wheel which I could crochet in about 15 minutes while watching TV.

 

As I worked  started to join them together in strips of 5or 6 wheels with the aim of joining them longways later.

 

Progress was quite quick and I even took the yarn, a cotton and acrylic mixture, and my hook when we went to England so that I could carry on working while we visited mum.  I think I ended up with about 70 wheels before I finished.

 

I started joining up and designing the armholes and neckline and finished off with a few fill ins to straighten out the curves and the hem.  You can see the result at the top of the post and I've already worn it out a couple of times and got some nice compliments too!

 

 

And finally, the latest of the flowering shrub drawings, a rhododendron, one of several different varieties in the garden.  There is a gap now till summer gets going and the buddleas and hydrangeas start to flower so I'll be back with more pictures then.  My mosaic picture won't get finished for a while, maybe about Christmas time when everything has finished in the garden!

 



MORE FLOWERING SHRUBS

 

Week two of my flowering shrubs and the garden is still looking wonderful.  This pink azalea comes out in time for my birthday every May, there are two plants with one in front of the kitchen window where I can see it whenever I'm at the sink.

 

This is spread 3 from the little sketchbook looking around the garden.  There are always magpies flying around and keeping an eye on us although they are very nervous and fly away even if they see us moving  indoors through the window. 

 

I love this Pieris Andromeda plant, it's over 6 feet tall now and has never been pruned so it's a lovely natural shape reminding me of Japanese gardens.  The leaves have now turned from peachy apricot to pale yellow and lime green.  The flowers came out at the same time this year but they are far too complicated to draw!

 

This ground covering plant was here when we bought the house in 2002 and has been propagated many times as it's a good gap filler and seems to survive whatever I do to it!

 

10 years ago I bought one of these Mexican orange blossom shrubs and it was well worth the money as I've made lots more plants from the original.  They are dotted around the garden and covered in fragrant blooms at the moment.  I pruned them in August last year instead of October and it seems to have encouraged a lot more flowers.  They will need a good haircut later in summer again as they will soon be too big for their spaces. 

 

Another view from the terrace where on the left you can see the second azalea, which has now been blown about by the wind this week and the flowers have started to go brown.  That forsythia under the sycamore tree is a ray of sunshine for a couple of weeks in April just before the leaves open out on the tree above.

 

This is another shrub that came with the house.  It's just inside the entrance to the drive and seems to flower for at least half the year.  It has grown from a small shrub to a tree now and I keep the lower half free of branches so Bob can mow the lawn next to it.

FLOWERING SHRUBS

 

Since we returned from our English trip Bob and I have both been suffering with heavy colds and chesty coughs, totally knocking us out for over two weeks now.  We managed to get the grass cut but that's about all we've been able to do in the garden except sit and wish we had more energy.

 

Fortunately we had a spell of lovely warm weather and I was able to sit in the garden and admire our flowering shrubs which are at their finest at the moment.  So I got out my new tiny tinted paper sketchbook and started to draw what I could see from my deckchair.

 

 

This got me thinking and I decided to count just how many different flowers there are in the garden at the moment and I came up with 15!  Some of them like the Camellia at the top have been flowering since January.

 

I decided to make a new mosaic picture to put in a large frame we have hanging on the stairs with a Dali print in it at the moment.  Not feeling well enough to do anything energetic this seemed the perfect project to keep me amused for a couple of weeks.

 

So every day I've taken a stroll around the garden and picked a couple of flowers to draw or paint.  I've used lots of different coloured papers and media, although the Museum pencils are the favourites being so easy to use.

 

It's quite a challenge to make each picture look interesting and not just 'a flower' and some are more successful than others. What do you think?  Botanic drawings or graphic designs?

 Each drawing measures 13.5 centimetres which will give me 20 in all when the picture is finished.

 

This one was quite difficult as the flowers are halfway down the stem, hidden in the leaves and the peachy pink is a hard colour to mix with crayons.

 

I quite like this one, the flowers are all over the shrub and it was fun to take it over the edges. 

By the way does anyone know the name of this one?  My neighbour gave it to me a few years ago and it's brilliant, flowering most of the year and even surviving serious pruning when it gets too big.

 

 

I'll finish today with the second spread in the sketchbook but I'll be back soon with more pages and flower drawings.