May flowers

May is flying past! What with weeding, digging, transplanting, etc. it almost seems like there's no time to enjoy the garden. Every now and then I stop to really look at the blossoms and record them in my journal, always with my old standbys, watercolor pencil, pen and ink and often with touches of white gouache. I hope you enjoy them!

More and More Flowers

I'm trying to carry on my normal and busy life but every time I turn around there's another flower blooming and I grab my sketching tools and sketchbook! I know the laundry and vacuum will wait patiently, as they have done so many times before.

Spring Flowers for my Sketching in Nature Journal

Spring is tumbling along with new flowers blooming every few days, and, like last year, I'm having trouble keeping up! The flowers on these two journal pages were all done with a combination of Derwent and Albrecht Durer watercolor pencils, pen and ink and white gouache. The pieces of the little skeleton drifted down out of the trees with a clump of leaves and it seemed fitting that I added a little "old" along with the "new."

Snowy flowers

We woke up to a fresh layer of snow on the morning of April 18th. I think I jinxed the weather by putting the snow shovels away last week! I had to shake the snow from some of the flowers and I brought them into the house to thaw so I could sketch them in the afternoon.

Spring Flowers

After a long and bitterly cold winter, spring has finally and definitely arrived. The lawn, garden and woods are strewn with the first wave of blooms and it's a welcome sight. I sat outside for a bit and sketched some of them on site, then gathered the rest to take indoors both to sketch and enjoy in a pretty vase.

Trillium Forest

It's a bit early here for trillium to bloom but there's no hurt in dreaming! I often have difficulties painting a strictly transparent watercolor painting so I sat down with a couple of truly inspirational books, Cathy Johnson's "Watercolor Tips & Techniques" and Claudia Nice's "Landscapes in Watercolor and Pen and Ink" and gave it another try. I think I'm finally headed in the right direction, with their help and a bottle of Aquacover to reclaim my lights.

Fox Squirrels and Gray Squirrels

March 1st has always been a day I look forward to -- my unofficial first day of spring when I feel confident that I can put the worst of the winter weather behind me and anticipate the spring flowers pushing through last year's layer of damp leaves. Alas, this year's March 1st was still covered in snow and the temperatures were far from being springlike. But the birds sang on and the squirrels foraged under our bird feeders, blissfully unaware of my unfulfilled expectations.

A very cold cardinal

Although the weather should be improving this week, the last few days were the coldest of the winter. With fluffed up feathers the birds flocked to the feeders and this cardinal paused outside my bedroom window long enough for me to snap a photo. I did this sketch in my moleskine with Flame Red and Sepia FW ink and a crowquill pen, Derwent watercolor pencils and Winsor & Newton gouache.

Image to go with my post - A walk in the snow!

A walk in the snow

I hope all of you in northern climates are keeping warm! We had several days of terribly cold weather, twenty below zero F with the wind chill, but it finally warmed up enough so I could wander around outside a bit. I used a crowquill and my new bottle of FW transparent sepia ink for this sketch, and added white Winsor & Newton gouache for the snow.

New Contributor Introduction - Sandy

This is my first contribution to the Sketching in Nature group and I'd like to introduce myself. The main medium I've worked in for many years is gouache. For a full size painting (a full sheet of watercolor paper) I spend anywhere from six to ten weeks. For some of my botanical studies, done strictly from life, I work off and on during the plant's life cycle and if I happen to miss a phase I put the painting away until that phase comes around the next year. Needless to say, after doing that for many years I began to look around for an alternative way to record the things around me that didn't require such a committment of time. That's when I was lucky enough to run across Kate's watercolor pencil workshop in early 2008. I will never give up gouache because I'm an addict when it comes to detail, but I've also developed a love of watercolor pencil and pen and ink. I had to give up art entirely for well over a year because of near blindness, and as my vision began to return and I reconnected to the internet, what was one of the first things I ran into? -- Kate's Journaling class! What an inspiration she and my classmates have been. Starting January 1st, 2010, I began a journal dedicated to nature subjects and these three images are selections from it. I've enjoyed browsing through all your posts here and I'm looking forward to seeing more.