A bowl of ripe plums

It has been a fair while, friends.  Particularly if we aren't waving over to each other on Instagram already. 

Still.

Here's a watercolour peace offering for a hot summer's day in Hackney. Started left handed with willow twigs, finished right handed as best as could be given the wily qualities of watercolour , of shifting light and shifting goalposts.

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...

Happiness on a stem

The sun has been a stranger around these parts again. Damnation!

But the daffodils are out. 

Cheap as chips in the shops, and slowly, sleepily beginning to flower in the parks and the churchyard near where I live. 

Happiness on a stem, said a woman also considering the flower stand in Tesco's. 

Yep. That's about right. Might as well buy a couple of bunches at a time.

goodbye, february

The sun has been a stranger this February, maybe we'll see more of it in March. I'd like that. Though I do like a good misty morning walk, even if it is freezy cold. This was taken a few days ago along the Lee Navigation canal in Hackney, my breathing space fifteen minutes walk away.

At our meeting earlier in the month, my illustrator friends could barely contain their mirth when I said I was painting cabbage leaves. Rude companions one and all!

Sprout tops not cabbage leaves, to be precise but still. To practice my greens you see. Laugh if you will, yes yes.

I learned a lot, not sure I totally love any of these, but it's nice to see development and progression from 1 - 4. I painted slowly, building up layers of translucent washes for precision. I do find it pretty damn tedious, this way of working, really, having to wait for each layer to dry properly and planning the colours. At least the greens and I are on speaking terms now - mixing them from scratch and adding a bit of cadmium red is the thing.

And just as well I got cosy with greens, since I was asked if I do planting plans recently. Well, I do now.

From that happy result to... a more um, digital looking sketch on my new drawing tablet below. Obviously still a long way to go, but I'm looking to integrating all of my working methods by experimenting, having fun and keeping an open mind.

Goodbye February, I'm a bit glad to see the back of you.

pottery fragments

I seldom leave anywhere remotely historic without scratching around in the dirt, hoping for a shard of pottery of glass to add to my collection.

I love how these are tiny clues to stories of dinners and teas, arguments and celebrations. I wonder who washed them and who filled them with tea or hot food, lovingly cooked or otherwise. 

Did anyone take comfort and delight in the finely painted leaves embellishing their saucer as much as I loved discovering the remaining piece? 

I found the green leaf shard half buried under a thorn tree near a modest old farm ruin, once very remote, in what is now a rest camp in the Karoo National Park.

What thoughts did the bearer of the red feathery painted cup have over early morning tea in the Welsh mining village situated meters away from a blast furnace and a stinking ironworks? Did the delicacy of the porcelain offend them, or was it a relief to have something pretty in the hand?

I'll never know, but I love finding these fragments and wondering.

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.

shy

Here's one that got away before we left for South Africa. Thought I'd post it anyway,  and it'd be a pity to let that go to waste as a lost little jpeg icon on my desktop. So, in celebration of experiments and tentative sketches, here she is. Belatedly for Illustration Friday 'shy'.

Longing is good too

Back in Hackney this week, where the mercury dipped below zero this morning and the windows are streaked with fat droplets of  condensation as they slide down the panes. 

This was painted somewhere in the Karoo outside Laingsburg. Wonderfully hot and dry and vast and ancient, those scenes unfolding along the road. 

It all seems more than a million miles away, though I painted this last Wednesday. In the car, heading home after a trip to the Baviaanskloof and little Karoo via the Breede River.

Oh, places of my heart.

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?

more wildflowers

The poppies and nigella in the top watercolour are perhaps not really so much wildflowers, not here in Hackney, at least not without the help of a pack of wildflower meadow mix.

I did the painting outside, on Midsummer's Day at the wonderful St Mary's Secret Garden in Haggerston. 

It's a community gardening project that is my midweek break from studio life. The new ecominds garden there is full of lovely flowers at the moment, so much so that its hard to stick to just wild flowers, but a narrowed focus is probably no bad thing for productivity and concentration. 

Do you have a favourite Summer flower?