I have started drawing this summer, and am enjoying going out and finding bits of nature to draw. The different grasses above are from the meadow at my brother's house in Vermont. (Double-click on the image to see more detail.) I was inspired by an exercise called "Find a Child":
Even without a child at hand, the core of the instruction in the exercise is clear: slow down, look closely. I spent a good bit of time at my brother's drawing. I tried both pencil and Pigma pens, and found I liked the pens best. I will be taking a workshop in the fall where I'll be doing printing on fabric, so I am wanting to build up a body of images that I might want to use.
When I came back home, I turned to my own garden:
Some dried coreopsis and baptisia leaves:
Then I added colored pencil (a dried lily bud and lamb's ear):
It interests me that the drawing can be effective (in the sense of giving a feel of the actual subject) even without me being able to be in control or precise:
Then I went out and bought some Derwent Inktense pencils--you use them like colored pencils, but can then go over them with a watercolor brush to get something like watercolor (here rudbeckia triloba):
In addition to these nature drawings, I also played with some line patterns as possibilities for printing on fabric:
All three of the above consist of an element repeated horizontally and then vertically. This is obvious for the lines in the middle drawing. The top one is a row of curved humps. The bottom is a series of the Hebrew letter "tet."
