Glorious Godwood Trees

On one of my bike rides, I found lots of blooming dogwood trees and picked this particular set of two - with a carpet of tulips and daffodils under it - for a special little outing. 

I was in the middle of an experiment with several materials at once right before this outing and ended up with very little ability to plan this sketch - which means I ended up with several separate vignettes stitched together. 

Now that I look at my sketches from a few days ago, I have to run and catch some of these flowers in my sketchbook again!

Magnolia Season - Part Two.

I wrote about my adventures of sketching magnolias at the peak of their season in March. The season is over in the sense that the trees are no longer stunning bouquets of pink that make you stop everything and rush out to look. But they continue to bloom somewhat, now flowers are hidden by the leaves. As the summer comes, I will be looking for the next stage in the magnolia saga - when large, heavy-petaled white flowers of the largest Magnolia trees - Magnolia grandiflora. And after that - magnolia seed pods! 

However, I got a few sketches in before all the greens took over - here they are.

Reading Notes: Zen of Drawing

Continuing a "Reading Notes" series on this blog to share some of the things I read.
One of the facets of my reading life is reading "eye candy" books - these are books that get to look at images - and not necessarily read all the text. Some of these books I stumble upon myself, and some are recommended to me directly or indirectly. A book I wanted to tell about was mentioned by an artist I admire and it was described as a "when I am in a rut I open this book and all of a sudden my enthusiasm is back and I am eager to draw". This description made me very curious and I got to the library right away. 

The book is Zen of Drawing (Drawing What You See) by Peter Parr. 

Many books in the field of sketching are lessons in sketching illustrated by collections of works of multiple artists. This book also goes through a whole bunch of "ideas of what to learn and how to use it". From tools of the trade to an interesting approach to describing a vocabulary of movements and marks one makes when drawing and how to apply them. However, this book represents the works of one artist only - through many years of sketching (25-30 years I think) and covers many media that this artist is using throughout all the years. It is a celebration of doing many different things and not sticking to one "tried and true" medium. We follow works in graphite, colored pencils, direct watercolor, ink brushes, mixed media,  and drawing on an iPad. It is a retrospective - and I enjoyed looking at it as such and tracing changes that happened with time as well as parallels of the same voice - in different mediums, through series and experiments. 

If you have a book - or several - that bring your enthusiasm back - I would love to know - as always, both comment and email work :) 

A Blooming Cacti!

My friend found some incredible blooming cacti and we had a lovely lunch & sketch outing drawing them! 

Surprising for me was the length of the flower itself and how much space you can see. Star-like stigma was especially beautiful! Also - how much fragrance do these flowers carry! (still sneezing :) I did not see bees but I believe they are the main pollinators - though judging by the amount of space a small pigeon also can be tempted. 

The most challenging part was judging colors in a very bright sun - so I picked a few markers and pencils and was disciplined about not using everything I had. I really liked little super-furry cacti babies on tops of the plants - they looked like a good reason to come back to this corner :) 

Virtual Traveling (with Street View World Tour) - Boats throughout the world!

On the first Thursday of each month, a lovely group of people from all over the world gets together to sketch from the google street views. This month we were drawing boats and a guest artist was Nina Johansson - whose careful weaving of the ink line was very therapeutic and her demonstration of varied line made with a custom fude nib in a popular TWSBI pen - was a pleasure to watch. We looked at boats in Stockholm, London, and Hong Kong and every single drawing below challenged me in a new way. I am not brave enough to sail in any of these based on my drawings - but I am braver about the general idea of drawing boats after this hour! 

If you are not familiar - A Street View World Tour is a fun, no-pressure gathering hosted by Jenny Adam and Eleanor Doughty via Gage Academy. You can learn more about these monthly free events and about these locations at the links above. 

My previous participations include a trip to Kharkiv, Ukraine where I was the guest artist, Drawing Sky Holes, Kenya, Boats, Night Life, Hawaiian Foliage, Light and Shadow, and Japan, Ohio, Arizona and Taipei, Convenience Stores Around the World, Castles, Portugal (I am quite sure that I participated in a few more but I am not sure I ever posted about them - will try to find and add to this collection!)

On My Table: Beginning of April 2025.

I have a bunch of tips for you on display from my monthly "on my work table" collection:

1. Make-up removal wipes are removing ink from my fingers much better than just paper towels or even wet wipes. I am not sure what is in them and I stumbled into this solution by accident - but the results are in: if you need presentable fingers after an ink incident (or a regular painting outing in my case) - make-up removal wipes are quite useful!

2. I got an ink bottle gifted to me - and for a few days, I tried opening it with the regular tools (soaking in water, intensive cursing, and a rubber sheet wrapped around the cover). However, I saw that Andrew James was using hot water to open his watercolor tubes and decided to give it a go - worked like a charm: just pour hot water on the lid! 

3. Over the years I collected a wonderful range of pencils from different manufacturers. But choosing which ones to use when I see them all in one place is a task that takes up too much of my willpower. So my solution is: I make a palette of 3-10 pencils and carry them for a few days, and then I change them up. The trick is to make the choice super quickly and then live with those choices and use whatever colors you have - but use them actively. And then - when you look at the results of what you did - ask what worked, what did not, what colors you missed, and which ones you want to keep in the next set. Also - keep rotating through them all - so many new color combos are in store! 

4. Gouache - both traditional and acrylic - is quite expensive. But there are some colors you might be using way more than others - a good example is permanent white. For me, it is also golden ochre and ultramarine :) Getting a larger bottle for those "high use" colors will save you some money - for example, Schmincke has 250 ml bottles. 

That's it for now - illustrations to all of these and more are in the image below! Feel free to drop me a line with your solutions to these problems (and secret tricks in general!)