Apple-Pine: succulent

Showing posts with label succulent. Show all posts

Succulent Garden as and Answer

When in doubt about what to draw, if I have limited time or am still jet-lagged, there is an answer to "what to draw": succulent garden! Gouache in my new Etchr Hot Press Sketchbook - gifted by Etchr as one of the sponsors at the USk Symposium.

Grateful: Two Bouquets and a Friendship

My friend gave me two bouquets: one for me and one for my Mom. They were a perfect gift: I got to draw them, looking for similarities and differences. I brought one to Mom, and it was a conversation topic for several days: discussing flowers within, colors of those flowers, if they need more water, if some of the flowers should go, and what we will do with the succulents later. Thank You!

That color swatching was my attempt at thinking about what materials and colors I should take with me to Toulouse :) The choices were changed many, many times :)

Urban Garden: Two Sketches From The Same Spot

I sat down to paint an urban succulent jungle on a street in San Jose. It looked like a place where one can spend a vacation drawing plants. It was perfect. But also overpowering. I cut some stencils and made a plan, but got so overwhelmed by everything green that I saw that the only way for me to keep going was to start another sketch on the same spread of the sketchbook and keep switching back and forth. Luckily for me, there was a Jacaranda tree available for sketching - first one this year!

Stanford Cactus Garden and Eucalyptus Tree

Somehow I managed to live near Stanford University for many years now, but never got to visit the Cactus Garden there. It is also called an Arizona Garden and is quite old. There were many things to draw, but the time was limited, so I think I would call this a reconnaissance sketching - I will be back to draw an old Joshua Tree and all the textures of many interesting succulents! I quickly put this sketch together from a shade of a tree where I could observe a plant being simultaneously eaten by a hummingbird and a squirrel.

And of course, an eucalyptus tree is always a reason to stop by and sketch!

Rogues in my garden.

We are having a lovely wet winter so far and I found some rogue visitors in my garden: mushrooms are growing on my succulents!!!

Internet was full of helpful suggestions like "may be a sign that your succulents need better-draining soil or a less-humid environment" or "That means the soil microbiology is super healthy" or "Mushroom won't harm your plant - but it is usually a sign of soil that is too organic. That may be a bigger problem". There was also discussion as to how to get rid of them and if.

I decided to sketch the situation instead of continuing down that rabbit hole on the internet :)

Gouache on toned paper and blooming san pedro cactus.

The other day I found a blooming san pedro cactus - It was over 6 feet tall and had dozens of flowers (mostly closed during the day).

I had just a few minutes but toned paper allows me to paint with gouache very quickly.

Wonderful Nova paper from Stillman & Birn is now my standing choice for the toned paper and I had some black pages tucked with my pocket gouache kit.

Later at home I taped the sketch in my main sketchbook with some washi tape and added a protective layer.

I often add a layer of tracing paper over my gouache sketches because of two reasons: it protects the sketch and also semi-transparent surface allows me to have a second take on the composition or just plain doodle some more over existing sketch - in this case I drew a few flowers with a brush marker.