Laurelines

Midcourse connection/my last garden sketch*

Midway through 2006 --- time to reconnect to the goals I set for this year.   My main goal was to become more fluent in drawing,  increasing my vocabulary of images, subjects, mediums, gestures. I've devoted one sketchbook a month to a different topic,  with a page for every day of that month.  With the drawing posted here, I've completed six sketchbooks.

*the last sketch in 'In the Garden' month, done in gouache, acrylic and pen.

There have been times when I wish I hadn't committed to this---days of boredom, of stress, of muttering  'not ANOTHER interior/garden/tree/landscape/people, food sketch!'  Still, I've never really thought of reneging. It's not so much the dailyness of the project (scores of people make daily paintings and drawings), as the limits involved in sticking to one theme for a month that I've chafed against at times. But that is how I grow---by working within set parameters, especially ones I devise. I couldn't do this if someone else had told me I had to!  I don't know if my skills have improved, but I do know I've done all sorts of drawings I don't usually do and that can't be bad.

The greatest benefit has been how deeply connected I feel to my world, as a result of going out there, week after week, sketching. I've seen so many new things, even things I'd looked at a million times!  When I sketch a subject, it becomes mine, at least in part. I cathect it, I invest in it, I mint it in my own currency. Luckily, this process takes nothing away from the person, place or thing in question---but it adds so much to me.  I didn't expect it, but I feel more alive and alert---and grateful--- as a result of this project.   

I've tweaked my original topic list.  July will be still lifes. August will be animals, I think. September will be a broad topic, 'Out and About'---I want to limber up for October, the month I'll spend drawing in Paris. So far, I've enjoyed Exteriors and Landscapes most, with People a close second. 

I won't reassess until the end of December. If you have any comments or observations or questions, I would really love to hear them.  It has been my great privilege to have your company on this quirky Laurelines journey.

As this is a holiday weekend, I may wait a couple of days to start the next topic.

Raised beds, bottle tree

Malevolent spirits are lured at night inside blue bottles on a bottle tree.  When the sun's first light touches the glass, the evil beings are destroyed.  Bottle trees were found in rural, primarily African-American, communities in the southern United States.

This bottle tree, underplanted with okra, is part of a collection of historical plantings placed in raised beds at the North Carolina Botanical Garden.

Please click on image to larger view.
 

Hydrangea heads

I've just come back from a day and a half out of town. Am running out of time in In the Garden month, so here is drawing number 28---two more to go!

  I've been using an old sketchbook I have, a Fabriano's Artist's Journal, filled with lovely colored papers. At 4 1/2" x 6 1/2", it's smaller than my normal sketchbooks, so sketches go faster. Colored pencil, pen, gouache. Colors really glow on this paper---what fun!

I'm about to complete the first half of my 2006 art plan and will do a mid-year assessment on Friday. Hope you'll check in!

Spiky flowers everywhere

There's this blooming garlic (the flower heads are HUGE, the size of grapefruits) and a Stokes aster I'll post later today.

Updated with drawing of Stokesia:

New garden update

Five more days left in In the Garden month and I'm being rained out of my planned sketching session at the nearby botancial gardens. This morning, though, I tidied and transplanted and weeded, and took these photos:

They can't count as sketches, but I know some of you are interested in the garden's progress.

Please scroll down on the lefthand middle image. 

Necks of geese, balm for bees

I've been out of pocket or out of socket--- or something--- for a couple of days, with other business to attend to.  How lovely to return to sketching flowers in my garden.

Drawing with a Sharpie white poster paint pen on paper painted in acrylics was something I came up with last year, when I was studying color. It is such fun to do.  (You can see last year's drawings,  if you want to, in the 2005 Plants and Flowers album at left.) Here's a little twist on the original idea: gooseneck loosestrife in blue and white and white and blue.

Bee balm, aka monarda, is another of my favorite spiky flowers, though these petals look as if they're idly flailing about, instead of making a purposeful statement.

Done in colored pencil first, at right, and then in watercolor, with a twitch of Crimson Pigmy barberry thrown in.  Bees move fast--you've got as much bee information as I could get in 3 second intervals.

I draw the line at the unibrow

Sparky's Self-Portrait Penitence continues and I must eke out another one, or suffer the consequences. (Don't ask.) So here I am, as Frida Kahlo, adapted from one of her zillion untitled self portraits.  She had monkey forebears, too, evidently, so I felt right at home, in this particular pictorial space, flanked by Cuz and bird.

Drawn in large Moleskine, with Faber-Castell Polychromos. The  Moleskine paper makes the pencil marks all smudgy and waxy--I felt almost as though I were drawing with oil pastels. Odd.

We're having a heat wave...

a tropical heat wave. It isn't surprising, the temperature's rising... ---up to 95 F today. Ick. Well, the cool May and June days were wonderful while they lasted. Let's hope my little neonate plants won't get frizzled, sizzled, and fried. 

Cretacolor Aquamonoliths used here, as well as in Moreton's garden below.

Abby and me scribbled with Sharpie pen.

In Moreton's garden

My best friend Moreton's garden, two doors down, is such a fun place to be. There are lots of places to sit, lots of pots filled with bright plants, and two charming dogs (one is VERY funny-looking, a cross between a basset hound and a German shepherd, Daisy is lowslung with a big head and heart.)  Moreton is an interior decorator and a food writer, so you can imagine how colorful and lively her garden would be. Wait, you don't have to imagine--here it is, at least in part!

Back to the garden

I mentioned before that I love spiky flowers and I do--I love how exuberant they look, as if their petals were scores of little arms, flung upward and elsewhere in an outburst of thanks and praise.