Sketchbook as a Reminding Tool

As you know, I enjoy layering things in my sketchbooks - because I like to keep my notes and drawings in chronological order and also because it is a nice way to revisit things. Speaking of revisiting - I realized that I rarely flip through my old sketchbooks, but when I do, it is a lot of fun! I was planning a video flip-through of my winter sketchbook and found these pages. They were little experiments that were happening at a large table filled with beer glasses, teacups, snacks, art supplies, and sketchbooks, bunch of friends talking and working next to each other.
I kept some parts of the larger pages showing to share my joy from all the color conversations that are happening on this page. It reminded me that I have this ochre ink I wanted to play with more, that I am still working on mixing a dark purple, and I promised my friend a gouache stick and I find sculls challenging, macabre but also fun to draw!

 

Spring Garden In a Pot (Table Gardening) - Part 2

This is the second part of the visual story of the table garden (here is the first). 

Despite the fact that I was fascinated by the number of flowers and their day-to-day progress, there was a surprising amount of frustration with this little garden for me! First - it changes so often that you need to allocate a significant part of your day to document it all (which is impossible :) And it is always a tricky thing for me to choose which flowers to paint when there are so many in one bouquet. I hoped to make one large painting with "everything," but did not get to it. My only hope is to find a similar garden-in-a-pot next year :)

Spring Garden In a Pot (Table Gardening).

I love following flowers on a day-to-day basis, and every spring, I get some sort of bulb to grow, and this year, I got a whole little garden of bulbs to follow! It was a marvelous adventure, impossible to draw (at some point apart from a two hyacinth flowers there were 6 tulips and over 20 daffodils - all miniature and all sitting in a 6" pot on my table). But I got to draw some of them! Today I was moving the bulbs into "summering" storage and realized that I never shared any of these sketches - so here is part one of my selection  :) 

Another Vase I Made!

This vase has lots of things that I would do differently today but I learned a lot! See some notes around it :) I names it honey skep. 

Two Very Different Sketches from One Great Place

I got to sketch at the Allied Arts Guild this week and went with a plan and a friend. While catching up I completely abandoned my plan (without realizing it) and ended up drawing people at work in a really cool workspace. In short, it was a great sketching outing that needs part 2 to go back to my plans!