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!

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 :)

Virtual Traveling (with Street View World Tour) - Urban Gardens

I missed a couple of months this summer, but was happy to be back for the October Street View World Tour! This month, we were drawing urban gardens, and a guest artist was Isabell Seidel. As we watched her weave a pattern of shapes on the page, a conversation about how she started using more flat brushes came up, and then a topic of mixing greens came up - an evergreen interest of mine! A subject of viridian green and how to survive having it in the palette was dear to my heart :) It was a pleasure to look at the urban gardens - what a great topic and such interesting places we visited!

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, Boats around the world, and Hawaii (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!)