One for you Gallery Chick

Because the blossoms are still flowering and because I love them so much I decided to dedicate another page of my sketchbook to them. I also thought they deserved some colour this time. So.....Gallery Chick, these blossoms are for you.



I did an outline sketch using pencil, then went over the top with watercolours. I think I'm beginning to enjoy using watercolours, and maybe with few more sketches I might just love them... it is a very forgiving medium.

Blossoms!....It must be spring.

I was a bit shocked to see that the Cherry blossoms around town have started flowering in the last two weeks. I love the blossoms and tend to have a small branch displayed on my kitchen bench for a month or so every year....but I am sad that winter is coming to end. It seems to be such a short season in Australia, and for me spring marks the beginning of the long hot season.



The street where I grew up was lined on both sides with cherry blossoms...in my memory they stretched all the way from my house to the town centre. I like the little pink buds, then the mass of colour as the flowers unfurl and finally fall and carpet the ground around them. It has always amazed me that a tree with such a glorious and delicate flower could be so drab when in full leaf. I guess you can't be perfect at everything....and I am just happy that I again live in a town that celebrates spring with blossoms.

Detail of a Central Park footbridge

A few years ago I visited New York and spent quite a bit of time roaming the streets, parks and galleries of Manhattan. I think like most visitors I was really taken with Central Park....what a wonderful place to have right in the heart of such a huge city. I visited New York twice at Christmas and once in late fall. Consequently when I was there most of the trees had no leaves, and there were no flowers to speak of. I actually really liked the washed out sepia tone of Central Park in late fall. In the afternoon glow is was quite magical and I though sort of old world, like looking at an old photograph.

It may be because of this pretty stark landscape when I visited that I noticed the little details in fountains, bridges and buildings so much. This weekend I decided to draw a section of bridge that I took a photo of on one of my trips, it had lovely concentric and intertwining circles.

I would normally use pastels for this sort of picture because I love the very flat and vivid colours that dry pastels produce. I haven't yet figured a way around the "no smudgy media" rule....so I pulled out a box of coloured pencils and gave it a shot. I think it'll be a while before I do that again as it took an awfully long time to colour in the two page spread. But, it was pretty miserable weather outside and it was nice and calming to sit at the kitchen table and colour-in. I like to draw with orange, the colour just seems so cheerful to me....so I drew my bridge in this colour simply because it makes me happy.

Cyclamen nouveau anyone?

This weeks entry is a bit of departure from my normal stuff...I don't think I pulled it off, but it does look very colourful next to my Stink Bug!

Two more things to add to the list of things I love are 1) art nouveau and 2) plants that are tough! The Canberra winter is not cold by some standards but for us Aussies Canberra is probably the coldest city we have....we even get into sub zero temperatures...Wow!

I love cyclamen, not only because they come in what I think of as very glamorous colours, but they show those colours in the depth of winter which makes me very happy. I bought one from the markets a couple of months ago and it is a champion - I leave for work in the morning and it is all covered in frost and white....and when I return home it is a deep red wine colour and looking spectacular. Grins!

I don't know if art nouveau and cyclamen are a match made in heaven, but I gave it a go anyway. I used acrylic paints straight onto the molskine page....it held up to the paint pretty well. It didn't photograph really well though....the pics that were in good focus also had a lot of flash glare.

I'm looking forward to the sketch crawl (and Canberra Sketchbookers get together) this weekend....expect to see the results in my next post.

Up close and personal

Many moons ago I used to work as a pseudo entomologist....I used to spend hours collecting, sorting, identifying and photographying the little critters....and as you can imagine I spent most of my work hours staring down a microscope. One of my favourite tasks was to pick and identify bugs from out of pitfall traps. No I don't think I'm mad! Let me explain. Sometimes leaves and seeds and flower buds would also have fallen into the jam jar sized traps and when I looked down the scope my whole vision was taken up with this beautiful miniature world suddenly larger than life. It was most amazing, and often incredibly beautiful, to see in absolute detail things that I would never normally notice.

I have since moved onto other work but I still have a bit of a fascination with bugs. I have also always appreciated the incredible skill of biological illustrators....so my second sketch is a bit of a homage to both. The bug in the picture, and I mean a hemiptera (sucking insect) not just generic creepy crawly, is a Stink Bug. I was tempted to put on a scale bar, but since I've taken too much artistic licence in the drawing, I resisted. In real life it would be about 8mm long....very small eh.



I based the drawing on a photo I took with a microscope and digital camera. The drawing I finished using a felt-tipped pen.