Monday, May 4, 2009

Nature observation while killing time ;-)

yard nature

We all have those bits and pieces of time that would otherwise be wasted...waiting for a phone call, or for someone to arrive, or time to leave for an appointment, or sitting in a parking lot or que. If I've got my sketchbook, I'm never bored, and I often learn something about my environment.

Here is the result of several days' waits--we couldn't leave to go on a daytrip until we got an important phone call, so I drew the dried sweetgum or liquidambar fruit that pave our street in the fall--that's the spiky ball at upper left. The redbud leaf was nicely simple, in contrast.

You can learn more about liquidambar here.

Now that it's spring again, I dug out that page and added the new buds from the sweetgum, at lower right. When it leafs out, I'll find it again and add leaves, too...no reason you have to finish a page all at once.

The trick is finding it again when you're ready to add to it!

This was done with an .01 Micron Pigma pen with black ink, on cold pressed watercolor paper.

9 comments:

  1. Those sweetgum bud have been hitting me in the head these past two weeks :) Love it!

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  2. LOL! They are really pretty--I'd never taken time to really look at them at this stage. Glad I had a bit of time to fill!

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  3. Nice sketch. That's a good reminder that we don't have to do it all at once. But, now the finding of it later is truly a different challenge.

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  4. I remembered it was the first page of a recent journal. ;-)

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  5. Ohh. Recognized that Sweetgum pod right away. Aren't they crazy little dangle-balls?

    I think I need to make a "Reminder" list on the inside cover of my journal. I always forget to go back to fill in!

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  6. I've got lots of pages that never got quite finished, too...and thanks, all!

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  7. Lovely drawings! Those sweetgum balls are not an easy thing to draw, either!

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