Graphite and colored pencil.
Botanical study – twig with lichen and moss
drawing
Ballerina in Black
Pencil and watercolor ~ practicing figure drawing. While I was working on this, George Michael’s song with the lyrics “I’m never going to dance again, guilty feet I’ve got no rhythm” (Careless Whispers) was playing.
Colored pencil on black paper
Broken Florida Fighting Conch Shell
Drawing in my art journal
Botany ~ Art Journal
“Botany, the science of the vegetable kingdom, is one of the most attractive, most useful, and most extensive departments of human knowledge. It is, above every other, the science of beauty.” — Sir Joseph Paxton (using pseudonym Peter Parley) in Peter Parley’s Cyclopedia of Botany (1838).
Sketching in pencil and painting with watercolor and Bombay India Ink ~ in my art journal
Bees in Pen and Ink
“Bee to the blossom, moth to the flame; Each to his passion; what’s in a name?” ~
Helen Hunt Jackson
Playing around with my new glass dip pen and Dr. Ph. Martin Bombay Indian inks. August Bees ~ this is my first time using the pen and new inks. Fun!
Here’s what the glass dip pen looks like! To use the pen for this drawing, I simply dipped the glass tip about two-thirds of the way down into the ink, straight from the container. I tap the tip against the container to get rid of excess and then twirl the pen around a little as I draw to control the flow. It’s fun to play with thick or thin lines, which you can create depending on how loaded with ink the tip is. If I made a big blotch of ink by mistake due to having too much ink on the pen, I spread the area out with the unloaded pen tip. I also used a fine tip sable brush to add small hints of watercolor.
Now I need to paint a big Owl to put on the glass sliding doors of my Artist’s Loft as a couple of birds have flown right into the glass lately and we need to prevent that from happening again.
At the Ringling on Sarasota Bay
Last week, Aunt Linda and I went to The Ringling on Sarasota Bay and enjoyed beautiful views and touring the grounds. This mixed media (watercolor, pastels, gesso, and graphite on 140 lb. cold-pressed paper) shows one of the many lovely sites we saw that day.
“Oh, look – a person!” ~ and a couple of patterns
Girl in Cape – I sketched this around dinner time, unusual for me; I don’t draw or paint many (I can count them on my right hand) people.
And these are two fabric designs I created using my paintings from this morning (they’re both available on products, like pillows and tote bags and more, over at my Society6 shop).
I’m super thrilled with how the two patterns above came out. I’d love to do more of this tomorrow. For “Pretty in Pink,” I merely scanned my artwork into the computer and rearranged the flowers on a background in the same color as the paper I drew on. For the second one called “What All The Girls Like to Draw,” I used black ink after I painted the flowers and shapes to add more interest, then scanned in the computer and rearranged, added a few more black dots here and there, as needed.
Enjoy!
My bird for today – updated
A little quickie. Wasn’t planning to paint anything or sketch today, but I was inspired by Laura’s blog post and Jill’s blog post to draw a bird on May 8th – so here’s mine. I outlined the silhouette of a bird on a branch in graphite, then I used my Fantasia watercolor pencils (dry on dry) to add hues of yellow, green, blue, purple, orange and pink. I decided this would be a very colorful bird. Dipping my paint brush into clear water, I work the dry pencil areas on the paper to give it a “painterly” feel, here and there adding a little pan paint as needed. No background. I always do backgrounds, but this being a quickie exercise, I decided to leave the background undone, so as not to compete with the very colorful bird. Happy Draw a Bird Day!
P.S. Updated – after showing this to my father, the artist (see my “About” page), he told me to put some blue in the feet to separate them from the branch – so I did.
Sand Salt Moon 
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