Everything Changes/Goodbye Summer

Hey, where did the summer go? Seriously. I painted this before heading to Turkey for a week of swims in the Med (which I am deeply grateful for, for sure). The holiday ended, in my case, in a stinking summer cold which meant I was indoors for 10 days watching the sunlight dancing in our London garden. 

A few more weeks of answering emails and next thing I know is I'm packing for a ten day vipassana meditation sit in Herefordshire. Reluctantly. I wanted to bail and seriously considered a last minute cancellation. 

So much time away. So many things to take care of, so much to enjoy and do as an illustrator, as a social media trainer, as a wife and friend. So much on in London.

I got on the train though. And, by the end of the ten days, I was super glad that I did.

I wish I could say it was a time of thoughts landing as softly as autumn leaves on the forest floor, that ten day sit. In the interests of full disclosure though, my mind was more like a bucking filly, clanging into every thought, kicking and rearing at every unpleasant sensation for most of the time. Nothing special about that, I guess.

So much wildness in the mind is revealed when all else is stilled, when life is lived with an inwards focus, sitting in meditation for many, many hours a day as is the programme on mediation courses in the tradition of U Ba Khin and SN Goenka. Unpleasant sensations abound, to put it mildly.

But there are breaks, respite is possible. The woods are my place to soften focus, to loosen my grip a bit. As I walk in the heightened state of sensory awareness that slowly arises on about day 3 or so, I find there is something new to see each time.

Small things: the moss among tree roots, tiny scratch marks around mouse holes in the ground, a pale spider, backlit in the early morning sun, waiting, just waiting in absolute spider trust for the next sustaining moment to unfold.

Tiny, slow changes also, things I'd usually miss completely: over the ten days, small patches of yellowing leaves turn here and there, the beginning of autumn. Apples ripening.

Time to let go of the summer, smilingly, as our meditation teacher, Goenkaji, would say.

Of course, there are also wonderful moments: long, deep, spontaneous in-breaths, the gentle blessing of Hereford rain on the roof of the meditation hall. Space between interior conversations expanding, softly. The capacity for healing opening up, compassion and joy arising as thoughts began to land more gently. 

Thoughts that gradually lose their importance and sense of permanence, no more and no less worth clinging to than the yellowing leaves floating onto the woodland floor. Everything changes, all in a flux, all in a flow (in Goenkaji's words).
 

More information on 10 day Vipassana sits in Herefordshire and worldwide is here - do feel free to contact me if you're at all curious to know more. It's the best gift you can possibly think of giving to yourself all year. Of that I am sure.

The joy of green

I'm working on a lovely commission for animation company room60 at the moment, who specialise in animations for landscaping and the environment amongst other things. 

The project is headed for TV broadcast eventually, but for now, the work for me is all about greens and more greens, seeing as my end of the bargain is supplying the plants for use in animation. Simple.

So fun, to have a list of plants and paint them, one by one -  a meditation in the possibilities of watercolour within a limited scope. I love that I can say today I got paid for painting...moss.


As for the greens, here's a list of hardworking ones, in case you feel the urge to illustrate a garden sometime soon. I must say I can recommend it.

Hooker's green
Sap Green
Olive green
Oxide of Chromium
and plain ole' blue and yellow mixes with a teeny smidge of red or orange thrown in. 

Which of the illustrations are your favourites? I think for me the page with the lilies below and the grasses. Love the grass action in the second photo. Let me know what you think, and please tweet or share on facebook if you enjoyed reading this.

New drawing and new friends

This is a drawing I made at Walworth Garden Farm's botanical drawing class in South London earlier this week. When I heard about it I thought it'd be a good way of getting out of the studio and into some more experimental drawing and to see a new garden besides. Walworth Garden Farm is a few blocks down the road from Kennington Underground Station - one of those secret London gardens filled with bees (there are hives), quiet shady places amongst the spring blossoms and inspired planting. 

It was so fun to go back to basics with no pressure at all to produce a masterpiece of any variety. Illustrator and workshop teacher Karen George took us through a range of drawing exercises and also generously shared her own sketch books with us. I loved that we did warm-ups, I hardly ever do those any more.

It was so great to choose from someone else's pile of materials - boxes of potentially new ways of mark making and drawing materials that I wouldn't normally go for. I decided to step away from the watercolours, as I wanted to play around with other ways of adding colour.

On the second day, we were handed secateurs and told we could pick anything we liked from the lovely flower garden and greenhouses - yay! I always love these spiky guys (forgot to ask what they are - anyone?) but a leaf study is a not a Thing of Joy in my books.

I went for a burst of yellow happiness - forsythia, instead, and  began by doing a biro contour drawing before adding pastels and chalk pencil. The Euphorbia got added in afterwards.

It was so lovely to be drawing in a group, to chat and have tea and not get too serious about it all. If you fancy signing up for the next one, you can register for email updates on the website at Walworth Garden farm. Next up is a wooden spoon carving course, which should be loads of fun too. 

My bi-weekly screen break - helping out at St Mary's Secret Garden

When I first moved to Hackney five years ago, one of the first things I did was to look up a community gardening project so that I could keep a connection to flowers and plants and the changing seasons. I found the delightful St Mary's Secret Garden and have been volunteering there ever since. 

Sometimes, I ask if I can take some flowers home to paint. These ones almost painted themselves onto the page, I was so inspired by the mad flaming floppiness of the Rudbeckias and the general late autumn messiness of everything. Flowers from a florist are just not the same.

Besides the flowers, I get so much out of volunteering at St Mary's, where I work with adults with learning difficulties and mental health issues. 

Last week I planted onions with G, who suffers from debilitating bouts of depression in between stretches of great joviality. It took us two hours and we planted three rows, but it isn't all about hurrying to get things done in horticultural therapy. 

The white fly settling like teeny snowflakes on the cabbages, the  soil cold and wintry, bursts of exuberant song courtesy of P, a client with a great love of dancing with his rake rather than actually gathering up leaves, and G taking great care with each tiny onion - we had a good time out in the garden. 

Much as I love to be painting in my studio, I treasure my day at St Mary's.

How to keep bees happy - Gardeners' World illustration

This was for Gardeners' World magazine recently, in the July issue which featured gardening for bees. It was a lovely commission, so many of my favourite plants and flowers to paint all in one go, and in enough detail that they are identifiable. 

Pretty intense to work on - watercolour drawings of plants flew onto the page, then to the scanner and then whiz bang wheeee into layers in Photoshop. After that, more tweaks, a couple of add-ins and some changes here and there and many cups of rooibos tea in between.

Still, now I have some idea of what makes a bee's heart happy, and a new appreciation for these furry guys and their patrols of the among the flowers in our back garden, sometimes until late into the summer evenings. 

And a new appreciation, too, for my wacom tablet...

nasturtiums snaking through the garden

I'm so happy with all the surprise seedlings that came up in our garden this year. Nasturtiums, feverfew, lemon balm and poppies all germinated from the lovely compost we got from St Mary's Secret Garden.

There's definitely something to be said for buying compost from an organic garden tended with love - if wildness and weeds are your thing. 

Plenty inspiring to draw, for one thing. I couldn't not draw these guys, I so love the leaf shape and the snaky thing they do.

There were huge drifts of nasturtiums in the garden of my childhood in Cape Town, and I loved hunting for the special ones - the dark reds or wildly flame patterned oranges - to add to the bunches my mum would pick and arrange in a tangle in a glass vase.  

Funny that we never thought to save the seeds, but I guess to us they were just weeds growing on the edge of our sprawling garden, not so much ornamental flowers in specific colours. 

Marker pen on paper plus digital drawing.

in the christmas spirit

I love the long stemmed boxes of half-asleep Amaryllis that appear in flower shops here around Christmas time. 

They aren't a feature of Christmas in South Africa, where I'd be more likely to raid some lipstick red flowering gums along the road(on a hot Summer's day of course) for a table centrepiece at Christmas. 

Still, proper Christmas is of course a winter thing to most people. These guys are made to flower in the winter months, and I can see how the exquisite red brings warmth and cheer indoors.

Wild rose hips

I picked these on Hackney marshes a few weeks ago and brought a few tangled, hairy sprays into my studio. 

Who knew rose hips smelled so good, they have a kind of orangey apple freshness going on. Partly explains why they are used dried in tea, I guess. And jelly, and, in Sweden so I read, in soup. 

And as a treat for pet chinchillas. It says so in Wikipedia, it must be true folks.

Still working on leaf painting, but for now, this is how my leaves look. 

I looked through a most worrying selection of how-to books online on greens and leaves, books on botanical illustration and the like, and there certainly are some authoritative publications around. Do this, don't do that, never mix these and so on. Like I said, worrying!

Might be better to keep looking at flower painters I love, like Elizabeth Blackadder's work. 

Still, in the end, the only way to improve leaf painting is most likely to um, keep painting leaves. What say you, any ideas?

new card design

My sis asked me to paint a card for a friend, who is a lover of, amongst many other wonderful things, flowers and fynbos, the indigenous vegetation of the Western Cape, in South Africa.