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.

out of the woods in photoshop

This was coursework - I've just finished seven weeks of a Photoshop course at City Lit.  My first ever image done entirely digitally, though incorporating scanned paper bits and pieces and hand drawn outlines for the shapes. 

It's a pretty big thrill to feel confident using the software at last. As opposed to stumbling around the layers palette, stuck, or taking endless time on getting at things that I now know might take a simple click of the magic wand tool.

The course was geared towards designers and illustrators, so not too much of that retouching malarkey. OK in its place, but not so much for my kind of work.

I'm looking forward to finding natural, playful ways of introducing Photoshop into illustrations, particularly the collage images I sometimes do.

Let me know what you think in the comments below.