Opening to a Moment
It’s been more than a month since my last post, due to lots of travel and having to play catch-up between trips. It’s been amazing, and I do have some sketches to show later. For now, though, it feels really good to be home. I am spending time reacquainting myself with my own garden and natural habitat on the Salmon Creek.
This past week, I’ve woken with the early light of day and sweet birdsong… With coffee in hand, I headed outside to sketch. I selected my young fuchsias as my focus: they had developed new buds. Every day, I squatted down and sketched a new version of it, the leaves, singly and in clusters, their growth pattern, and the way the flower buds danced in pairs from the end of the stem. My new book, Shrubs to Know in Pacific Northwest Forests, by Edward C. Jensen, Oregon State University Extension Service, has been instrumental in helping me identify and describe the leaf shape, arrangement, and vein direction, which later enabled me to draw parts of the basic plant without having the actual fuchsia in front of me. (I hope that learning sticks with me.)
Fuchsia Studies
The process of painting and sketching outdoors brings new challenges, and I’ve been figuring out what to bring, and how to be comfortable for longer periods of time, as opposed to squatting down on my heels, which I can only take for about twenty minutes. In future posts, I’ll show you my latest plein air set-up, which is my current solution for greater comfort (which translates to more time painting) while outdoors.
Beyond that, July is World Watercolor Month ~ Check out the official prompts here:
Doodle Wash World Watercolor Month Prompts
See you soon!
#WorldWatercolorMonth