March Sketch

Spring has sprung!

Although you’d never know it from the weather lately. My plan was to use peach blossoms for my sketch this month and the blossoms were making me a bit nervous because they were not opening due to all the cold weather. Finally they did open but they immediately got battered by yet another storm. Still, I was able to find these sprigs and get them staged and photographed. Let the sketching begin.

But here’s something new. Because of the transitory nature of blossoms and the poem I wanted to include this month, I wanted to trace my sketch onto the paper. I often work this way, but rarely in journals. Surprise, this book has sketches on the other side of the paper, making tracing with my trusty light box a bit tricky.

Peekaboo! I see way more than I need to trace.
But I was able to get the essentials n if ailed down.

Many people seem to think it’s “cheating” to use any mechanical or optical aids to begin artwork. Tell that to Vermeer and all the other masters who used camera obscura to trace images on to canvases. What’s cheating is using someone else’s photos. I selected the subject, staged it how I wanted it and photographed it myself. So I own it start to finish.

Getting there…
Done!

Only April and May are left and then I will get my own book back. It will be like Christmas in June!

The Fix Is In

Or I should say on because I’ve just finished spraying this little journal entry with fixative.

I’ve had that same can of workable fixative since 1990-something and it’s still going strong since I don’t use it for most of my drawings that will be framed. But in journals that will be hauled around and handled, fixing graphite or colored pencil is essential or they will smear and/or imprint on the opposite page.

The subject of this drawing is an oak gall found on a local walk. Even folks who know about oak galls are usually not aware that there are so many different kinds. I’ve started a little series to document the ones I find. This one I call a brain gall. For obvious reasons. That’s not its real name, because I’m no expert on the 90+ different gall wasps endemic to California’s native oak population. I call them as I see them if I can’t find out the real name.

Graphite is a medium that always circles back around in my art practice as drawing has always been my first love and pencils are such familiar, reliable, predictable, accessible, controllable and correctable instruments that they are irresistible to me. Sure, everyone wants to paint and watercolors sparkle with personality, but the humble graphite pencil can really shine as an art tool.

Here is the development of the oak leaf:

It’s all about that gall, baby!
But the leaf it’s sitting on deserves some attention too.
I could keep going, refining the shading and tidying up, but I’m calling this a sketch and leaving it as is.

Here’s a snapshot of the stars of the show. I use these clutch pencils each loaded with 2mm leads of various hardness and a rotary pointer. These old line drafting tools are getting a little hard to find in the computer age, but they are my favorites from way back. I don’t get many comments here, but if anyone visits and asks for it, I’ll do a post dedicated to the tools and techniques I use for graphite drawings.

I’ll leave you with my other entry in the Oak Gall series, Red Cone Galls plus a few Silk Button Galls for good measure.

Next up, this month’s sketch for the Sketchbook Exchange Project, then I’ll come back for a few more varieties of galls. The Spiny Turban is a fun one.

To ink, or not to ink…

This month’s sketch was a response to the comments made at our recent Zoom meeting about artists not using this sketchbook exchange opportunity to experiment with tools, techniques, etc.

As with most of my sketches, I began with a rough pencil drawing which I then inked with an 005 micron pen. Then to add the color I used water soluble pencils. That’s the experimental part. I’ve used these pencils before, but not in quite this way and I like the result, especially on this cold press watercolor paper that doesn’t take straight colored pencil well because of the rough texture of the paper.

Now I’m just trying to decide if I should ink the lettering. I’m leaning toward not, to fit in with the rest of the artists in the book, although normally I would ink letters like this.

Below is a picture of the book to date. We only have 3 more illustrations to add: March, April and May, and then we look ahead to round 2. But everyone agreed a break would be nice so I’m thinking of starting the next one In January of 2024.

I can’t wait to get my book back at the end of May!

Sketching Right Along

During the holidays it has been a challenge to keep moving on the sketchbook project, but deadlines are motivating.  Here are images from the December and January sketchbooks:

 

December in the garden doesn’t give much inspiration at first look, and Nandina is one of my least favorite shrubs, but it turned out to be exactly what I needed for this book.
And this shows how my image fits in with the ethos of this particular book. As the project has moved along, I’ve noticed that the books really develop personalities and each book needs something different to carry it forward. Often it’s NOT what I’ve planned to do for the month, but when the book speaks, the artist must listen.
Who knew that something labeled as “Christmas Cactus” at the nursery or big box store could really be “Thanksgiving” or “Easter” Cactus masquerading as Christmas Cactus? This one definitely has all the characteristics of truncata and not bridgesii, which is the traditional Christmas Cactus. This image is on cold press watercolor paper and it shows the difficulties encountered when using colored pencil on highly textured paper. You get paper texture showing through and it’s harder to make smooth transitions. Hot Press Watercolor paper is the current standard for colored pencil drawings, but I still like the Stonehenge in my homemade journals best of all for mixed media sketches like this.
And finally, this is the full book. We are officially half-way through the project. I’ve over-emphasized the fleshy raised area at the center of each leaf, well, because I can in this project and I think it’s one of the things that makes these leaves interesting. Also, I rather like the pointy projections from the leaf body.

So that brings us up to date with the Sketchbook Exchange Project. What will February bring? Ellen Blonder, who comes before me in these books, said it’s like Christmas when you get a new book every month and then it’s like finals week when you are approaching your mailing deadline and don’t have your sketch done. That describes the project very well.

Lab lab, blah

After seeing an enchanting spray of this plant, previously unknown to me, at a garden club meeting several years ago, I immediately determined I needed to grow it for myself and draw it. Research revealed that the name of the plant, which had sounded at the time like a direction in the back court from a tennis partner: “Lob! lob!” was in actuality Lablab, or Hyacinth Bean Plant. Fast forward several failed horticultural attempts later and finally this season I managed to get the dratted thing to bloom but it’s a pale imitation of what I remember as a gently downward arcing blossom spray with several deep pink blossoms measuring 2 inches across set against deep green heart shaped leaves. All of the blossoms I have are borne on upright stems as you see and they are quite small, barely an inch across, with the admittedly heart-shaped leaves being a bit of a sickly looking green. Hm. Well, I am still going to draw this in my journal after all that work, but if I ever attempt to grow this again I will need to rethink the requirements of this plant and check to see if there are some cultivars with showier flowers. I’ll update this post when the journal drawing is done.

November sketch 2022

The sketchbook exchange project proceeds apace. Each book as it comes along with more sketches in it seems to develop a personality of its own. It can be a bit of a challenge to find specimens that fit on the small pages of these little accordion books but this month I knew when I saw these seed pods littering the ground on my morning walk that I’d easily find one just the shape and size for this journal page and I also knew that they’d be perfect subjects for the ink drawing I wanted to do this month. Then I couldn’t help myself and added just a little colored pencil to highlight those fascinating wispy crispy structures curling about in the empty pods. I never had noticed those before.

Here’s an image showing the whole book to date:

I wonder what my book looks like now?

October Sketch

Here’s the sketch in progress.  I noticed the owner of the book had penciled in a rectangle behind her image so I thought I’d add a box behind mine.  This is a favorite technique of Lara Call Gastinger that I’d like to employ more often in my sketchbooks.  She does it with watercolor and it’s the work of a few minutes.  I did mine with colored pencil and it was the most time consuming part of this little sketch.

Here’s the finished sketch and below, the entire sequence to date.  The instructions for artists on this one indicated we could use one or 2 pages, our choice.  I opted for one page since I have had a LOT going on this month and want to get something done in my own sketchbook this week as well.

A big part of this project is encouraging people to work across the page boundaries to build continuity between images, so I thought I’d try it this month.   I’m moderately satisfied with that aspect of the work, but I hope that the next person to work in this book can integrate my image further with theirs. 

I have the November’s journal in my possession already and I can see that even with the same artists immediately preceding me, each book is taking on a character all its own that begins with the original illustration.  It’s fascinating to watch the images build upon one another as they march across the pages and to see how different the sketches are month to month from the same artists due to being inspired by that original image and subsequent entries.

 

 

C’est Fini

Well, the first sketch in someone else’s book is now finished and sent off to the next artist, about a month ahead of schedule.

And this has allowed me to go back to my own personal perpetual sketchbook and get back to work there. This is my first image that adds to something from the previous year since I started about this time last year. There are some lengthy gaps in the year, but I’ll make a real effort to put something in every gap this year. It will be interesting to see if the gaps tend to want to occur in the same places each year.

And here’s the real magic if this kind of work: when I opened the book and saw that mantis sketch from this time last year I remembered everything about the day the boys and I discovered the mantis on our pickle ball net and took photos:

I posed him (Her? Who but another mantis knows for sure?) on a lichen-covered branch I’d collected over at the coast. My journal, my rules. No true naturalist would unite 2 finds collected at such distances from one another in both space and time, but it made for a much nicer image. Style over substance? Sure, but the nature journal police are not welcome here:

Yellow Star-thistle is a noxious invasive weed, but I can’t resist wanting to draw those spiky thorns. This specimen was collected on my morning walk around the River Nine sewage treatment plant last Monday. As Mom used to say: there’s the effluent of the affluent. She did have a way with a phrase.

The other project finished this week was Isabel “Izzy” the doll and her blue jammies. This is a joint project with Penelope.

All in all, a productive week.

But wait, there’s more!

As promised I’m adding a Zinnia blossom to this month’s sketch.

I planted the California Giant Zinnias with the express purpose in mind to use them as subject matter for this project and my own personal journals as well. They’ve taken over the back corner of my yard with their cheerful exuberance after a very slow start. The first batch got mowed down immediately by either slugs and snails or earwigs. A second planting was more successful. Perhaps too successful.

And you can also see that I’ve been doing some embroidery at my drawing table. See the little green origami ort box and my tool block at the back. It’s dangerous when I start mixing metaphors and artistic pursuits. You never know what might happen next. I could put stitches in my artwork or paint on my needlework. Simply shocking!

Sketching away…

Adding to this beautiful initial sketch and title page from Ellen Blonder made me very nervous at first, but then one of my botanical illustration buddies mentioned that if my sketch was, well, sketchier, that would actually help the person who comes after me on the exchange list. I think it was Lee McCaffree who said this. Thanks Lee! That simple thought was a game changer for me.

Remembering that while people had 2 months to create their initial pages, we are more likely to have just 2 weeks to get future sketches done and in the mail if we are to keep this project on time has helped me get back to basics and do what I love to do: walk out in my yard and sketch something that’s there that no one would notice if I didn’t sit down and draw it.

So here’s a branch from my Crape Myrtle that’s setting seed. Next I think I will add a zinnia blossom. I grew California Giants this year and they are giants! Here are a few posing with my vintage Kamaka Ukulele.

Of course the true giants are my 12 foot tall sunflowers! But they won’t fit in a 4″x 6″ sketchbook.