SILVER BIRCH BARK

 

Silver birch is my favourite tree and when I saw a piece of the bark on the ground in the woods as we walked to the port one day I had to pick it up to bring home to draw.  I left it for a few days for it to dry and for the bugs to crawl away and then got to work first with a fine pen and then my favourite coloured pencils in my home made sketchbook.

SUMMER SEED PODS

 

I took a stroll around my garden and gathered a few seed pods, I love the pale blue green of the poppies and the pink edges of the sycamore wings.

 

The nigella seed pods are a delight with their feathery leaves and lime and maroon seed heads.

CANDLES IN THE WOODS

 

In our part of the world one of the native wild flowers is the Navelwort, which starts growing it's round leaves with a navel in the centre early in the year.  In late spring the flowers appear and as it prefers the damp shady soil in the woods they flourish and seem to last for ages.  We see them everywhere on our walks, especially as we favour the cool places during the summer and I was reminded of candles as they glowed in the fresh greenness.  I sketched this yesterday in memory of my sister whose birthday it would have been.

HUNGRY DUCKS

 

We've just spent a week in a log cabin in Surrey, England.  There was a pond on the site with several families of mallards who came every day to beg for food.  The tiny ducklings were so adorable but moved so quickly, following their mother, that I had to copy their markings from the photos I took to be able to colour my sketches!

LAST PAGE IN MY SKETCHBOOK

 

It's always sad to come to the end of a sketchbook that's been with me for several months and this one in particular has become one of my favourites as it's filled with lots of different papers giving me a new challenge every time I turn the page!

SPRING IN A COFFEE CUP

 

At last the weather has warmed up and we're able to walk down our favourite lanes without getting covered in mud!  The lavoir de Mez Gouez, close to our home, is a delight at the moment, the ground is carpeted with white oxalis and purple violets so I brought a few home to draw after putting them in a pretty pottery coffee cup.

PINK CAMELLIAS

 

The camellias are blooming all over Perros-Guirec at the moment and filling our lives with such wonderful colour.  These are in my garden on a huge shrub by my entrance so they can be seen and appreciated by all who pass down the lane.

SPRING FLOWERS

 

The narrow lanes around our home are full of colour now with huge clumps of primroses, stitchwort and fumitory, with the celandines and violets just getting started.  I love using my Canterbury pottery wine goblet to display them in.

PEBBLES ON THE BEACH

 

The beaches on Tenerife are dark grey volcanic sand with large pebbles at the top and along the outcrops into the water.  In one area the whole beach was covered in these stacks and I enjoyed watching children running around collecting different sizes to make their own piles.  Luckily the tides didn't come far enough up the beach to topple them!

MORE TENERIFE PALMS

 

I've got some wild paper colours in my new sketchbook and this raspberry pink is quite gorgeous. Don't you just love the contrast with the orange!

YELLOW FLAGS

 

I'm still working on the January challenge on the Artist's Journal Workshop page on Facebook. The subject for day 28 was flags and my mind immediately thought of the floral variety, far more interesting than the other sort.  I had to copy the picture from my field guide as they are a long way off from blooming but at least they give us a splash of spring colour in the depths of winter!

A STUDY IN BLACK & WHITE

 

I've been taking part in the January challenge over at AJW and here is one of my interpretations of the subject for day 16.  This is a view I see almost every day through my kitchen window.

HAPPY NEW YEAR 2015

We woke up to a beautiful frosty morning on the last day of 2014 and I was attracted to the actions of the horses in the field opposite our house.  They were working hard scraping away the ice on the grass to get to their breakfast.  Before long the sun melted the frost and the farmer arrived with a big bale of hay.

AUTUMN COLOURS IN BRITTANY

 

Our garden is full of wonderful autumn colours but they are mainly on the flowers rather than the trees.  The azaleas have started to bloom a couple of months early and the hydrangea is holding on to the old flowers now tinged with maroon and mauve.  It's surprising how many more shrubs have carried on flowering long after they should have gone into hibernation.

AMETHYST DECEIVER

 

My sister-in-law in England has been looking out for mushrooms for me to draw and here's what she found yesterday, an amethyst deceiver.  I love the way the leaves surrounding it seem to reflect the mauve of the fungus.

DELICATE MUSHROOMS

 

It's been such a dry warm summer this year that the mushrooms around here are rather late appearing, although I did see a clump of the red spotty ones that I normally collect a specimen from just too late as they had been destroyed by somebody kicking them over.  These very delicate specimens were growing in the grass at the campsite we stayed at recently near Mont St Michel.  They grew in a day in the grass and were very pretty to draw with their pleated tops and pale mauvy grey undersides.

SPIDER SURPRISE

 

I've just spent a week or so in England visiting my daughters.  Justine, the eldest is a gifted gardener who grows some beautiful dahlias amongst other things.  I gathered a lovely bouquet to draw and imagine my surprise when this tiny spider appeared and started to weave a web.  I managed to sketch 3 different sides of it as it worked and the drew the flower afterwards. The body, only the size of my little finger nail, looked a bit like a skull from one angle and was a translucent, creamy green colour, does anyone know what it is? 

WOOD PIGEON'S EGG

 

The other day while walking in the woods I picked up this pure white egg and identified it as a Wood pigeon.  The birds must have been encouraged by the lovely autumn weather to have another brood of chicks. I copied the bird picture from my field guide as they are rather elusive, always hiding in the treetops!

RED ADMIRAL BUTTERFLY

 

During our lunch in the garden a short while ago, I noticed this butterfly on the grass.  When I looked more closely I saw that it was dead so picked it up to keep to draw later.  In half an hour the wings had folded themselves right back and I had to carefully prise them open to be able to draw it.  I decided to pin it down so that it stayed in the same position and it's now carefully stored on a piece of foam in an old hair gel pot.

A WEEK IN A LOG CABIN

 

We've just spent a week staying in a log cabin in England with my mother in law.  The site was set on the hills behind Hastings in East Sussex in the south of England.  We were close to the edge of the hillside with these tall trees growing up from lower down the slope and we could just see the sea in the hazy distance. How lovely it was to wake up to the sound of birdsong and to watch the squirrels and rabbits playing and feeding just outside our windows.