Apple-Pine

My oak leaf hydrangea dry flower

A few weeks ago, I wrote that I am admiring my oak leaf hydrangea flower, and since this beautiful dry flower is still on my desk, it kept popping up in my sketchbook:

Sketchbook Experiments With Friends

One of the amazing things that happens when I go to the magical forest in the Santa Cruz Mountains is that I always get to make lots of experiments in my sketchbook! Now - I enjoy experiments any day, but they require time, space, a special playful mindset, and are best performed with a good company to laugh at some results and push others further. Plus lots of tea and snacks :)

And all of that was in abundance last week when Suhita Shirodkar and I went to see our friends Gay Kraeger and Elyse Fairweather. Fantastic company and ideas of such different, amazing, and caring artists propelled me to a place where I covered a whole bunch of pages with marks and came home on the wings of many more things I want to try! Here are some of what I made and kept in my sketchbook after a day of work:

Pride of Madeira

I went to sketch a dogwood tree in bloom (because according to my sketching calendar, it was time, but they were long gone! But California spring got completely mixed up, and trees are covered in leaves, and there is not even a hint of flowers!

Roses are in peak at the moment, and Pride of Madeira (Echium candicans) is getting there too - so I planted myself near familiar towers of purple-flowered inflorescence growing like humongous candles on a sage-colored bush, and started to paint. Soon, I discovered that I forgot my small brush for details, my original sketch was done with water-soluble ink, and an anthill was right next to me, plus it looked like it was about to start raining. But at the end, this sketch happened, and I safely made it home :)

My Running Watercolor Kit Fell Apart!

I took my tiny pocket watercolor kit on a trail, and when I was midway through my sketch, it fell apart! My search for a replacement turned up some results, and I can also fix this one with some duck tape (but the cute image on the cover will not be visible) or go towards a luxury option of demi part toolkit palette.

Virtual Traveling (with Street View World Tour) - Underwater!

On the first Thursday of each month, a bunch of people meet online to do some virtual traveling and sketching. It is called Street View World Tour and is hosted by @herbcoil and @ronkiponk, and sponsored by @gageacademy. I am a huge fan - and try to attend every month. And this month I was a presenting artist - for the second time! The first time I took everyone to draw the city where my family is from, Kharkiv in Ukraine. And this time I took everyone underwater! A fantastic group of people with whom I shared my enthusiasm for sketching while scuba diving visited Japan, Australia, and the Caribbean.

Images below are from the demo I did: three takes with three different material sets to illustrate how my sketching might go underwater, and we did a warm-up sketch before and two longer sessions after - all the time chatting about different materials, challenges, and adventures that one might encounter while scuba diving and drawing!