Things I Made and Grew Inside Them.

I made two pots and two saucers for them and grew these petunias in the pots. 

They were gifts to two people related to each other. And both had a mix of glazes applied diagonally but it is visible better on a pink and blue set.

I suspect that saucers might have a more interesting life than the pots (after all, they are food safe! and both receivers of these gifts are very inventive people), but we will see :) 

In the orange and blue sketch, the flowers were actually very magenta-pink, and I think I sketched them in true colors, but I cannot find it at the moment. However, it was a period in my packing for Toulouse when I thought that I might survive with just two pencils and an eraser. 

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 was my second time when I was able to make a closed form on the wheel (you make a cylinder and then you make sure that it has no opening at the top). I let it dry some and made a hole for the entrance to the vase. This clay is gritty, rough, and strong, yet when completed, this little piece looked very gentle. I put some grasses from around my home in it before giving it as a gift to a friend :)

My Radish-Growing Update

After devouring my first radish, I was looking forward to the continuation of the season. But it proved to be quite short! The second radish was pretty cool and deserves a few of portraits (I used thicker gouache with this one and tried different techniques of applying paint while waiting for lunch time). But since then, we had a heatwave, and I believe the rest of my plants promptly decided to "bolt" - meaning they now have beautiful flowers and no edible root. The Internet is full of ideas about why and what now, but I think I will enjoy drawing beautiful plants instead of beautiful roots. 

I Grew My First Radish!

I am an aspiring gardener. I find it that gardening is a great exercise for the patience muscle, and a very rewarding experience for someone who enjoys looking at plants and tinkering with things! I sowed some seeds of radish in the fall and watched this pot being soaked by a series of wet winter storms, while little leaves started to grow, and then bigger and bigger ones. And then one morning, I saw my very first radish poking out of the ground. If you do not know, radishes stick a bit when ready to harvest. I pulled it out right away and shared it with my family - right after I sketched this beauty! Now, with the next one (almost ready to be gathered), hopefully I will be patient enough to sketch it still in the ground and then on the plate. At least that is my intention. 

I planted about 12 seeds, some did not make it, but quite a few did - so get ready for a spring series lol :)

Send me your favorite ways of eating radishes! I am also researching some interestingly-shaped and unusually-colored ones to try growing next :)

Admiring my oak leaf hydrangea flower

Oak leaf hydrangea is a deciduous shrub that can grow to be as tall as a small tree, has gloriously multicolored leaves, and strong cone-shaped panicled of white flowers that dry on the bush and winter in their warm-colored glory among cinnamon-colored bare branches. Recently, I saw that a squirrel tried to bite one flower off. Now - to be fair - I did not see it do the deed - but it was doing something in the corner where the shrub grows, and later I saw that the only thing that was still attaching panicle to the branch is a thin stripe of bark - so I cut it and now am enjoying it as an object to sketch. I decided not to press charges against the squirrel because I am actually happy to have this object to draw :)

Fall in the Garden

The fall in our little garden was abundant! First of all, an ipomoea (aka Morning Glory), which I've been trying to get to bloom for quite some time, suddenly decided that perfect timing is in... November!

Chrysanthemums got super leggy, and I even cut some to put in a handmade vase.

And our eggplant-in-a-pot pushed out two more fruits! (They were tiny but very pretty and tasty).

My Own Nasturtiums

Nasturtiums (aka Tropaeolum) are one of my (many) favorite flowers. Between their gorgeously round leaves and endlessly overlapping stems are flowers of the shape that sends me back to the drawing board almost as often as irises do. And of course, their fiery colors are amazing! I searched this blog and realized that I had not posted my nasturtium sketches by themselves even once. But now I have my own plants to refer to! It took forever to grow them from seeds, and out of many baby plants, only a few survived. But they are of three different colors and are still blooming! (Hopefully, it will self-seed and I will have these beauties to remind me to go back and draw them until I like the result!). 

Two Last Figs of the Season

I thought that we ate the very last fig - and it was everything I wanted from a fig: sweet, colorful, unexpectedly complex inside, shiny in some places and matte in others - in one word - perfect end to the season. And then - a few days ago, while I was checking leaves for signs of fall, I saw another perfectly ripe (and quite small) fig!

Notable Eggplants of this Year

I am a big fan of eggplants - the color, texture, shape, and, as I found out this year, leaves and flowers - all are beautiful, unexpected and inspiring! 

This year we had a very first eggplant plant (in a pot) that gave us several gorgeously purple and star-shaped flowers that were looking down, and then a lovely berry (did you know these are berries??), even though someone tried to eat before us (see sketch below). 

Then my Dad scored stripy eggplants and was super excited to hear that I've never seen anything like that. And then I got a present of an eggplant with a nose! What a year!

We learned how to make a super tasty Baba ghanoush - before we learned how to spell it :) I should probably draw the recipe before the season is over and we stop making it. 

First Figs!

The very first fig was, possibly, a little underripe. With the second one, we waited too long - it started to get all wrinkly and mushy. But the third one was just right!

Watercolor and gouache and some pencils and pen and ink. 

A Complicated Fig Tree Situation

We planted a fig tree! In the short three weeks since that day, we went from having a bushy little tree with ten little figs on it to a beautiful stick with a few leaves (most of which are still green) and five fruits. Some of them are growing by the hour and getting darker and darker - so not all is lost (I think :)

Here is how it went:

Amaryllis Update in Nine Sketches

Growing an Amaryllis from a bulb was our first project together with my Mom since my parents arrived in California. I wrote about it in December and then in January, then Amaryllis appeared on the first page of my Sketchbook 155 and now I collected the remaining amaryllises from my sketchbook - up until the day it went to live on its own in the wilderness! Some of these were made with gouache, some with watercolors, some with acrylic markers, some with ink and flex nib pens, some were painted with fingers or scratched with knives. Some notes to accompany sketches.