Nature Journal: The First Colors of Autumn

The Autumn colors have begun to come in. I spent an hour with a grand old Sugar Maple tree recently, recording the sights and sounds of the season in my nature journal.

I'm reading Kristin Link's new book, Discover the Art of Field Sketching.  Kristin has inspired me to sit with my nature journal and record what I see, hear, & smell in the moment as I make sketches.  It's a simple & grounding process that brings a page alive when you read it later.

 

I hope you get a chance soon to capture the present moment in your nature journal!

The Importance of Value in Drawings

Tonight in my Pencil Drawing Workshop, we will explore light & shadow in our drawings.  As a person who is drawn to color, I'm always amazed at how important light and shadow is to creating the illusion of 3 dimensions on a flat piece of paper.  

You can see how powerful value is when we turn a color image to black & white. Taking away the distraction of color helps to make the light & shadows apparent.

It took me years to really see shadows, to notice how they often have lighter and darker portions, and to see how light -- in this case, sunlight shining through a window on the left -- bounces off of the white part of the bowl and reflects onto the right side of the two pears on the right.

Here's an illustration of how light falls on a ball.

Seeing shadows on the ball helps us to see light & shadow on more complex shapes.

Remember, you don't have to get all of the values exactly right.  

Try giving your drawing 4 to 5 values, from brightest highlights to darkest darks.

Remember; you're not a camera, and you don't need to be perfect!  I encourage you to play around with seeing and drawing shadows.  

Making a few drawings focusing especially on values will help you to develop the ability to create depth in your artwork.  

I find that art created simply for an "assignment" like this feels less precious so it's easier to focus on the process of drawing.  You notice more, discover more, and learn more as you draw.

Happy Creating!

A Morning Hike with my Nature Journal

On a recent hike in Raccoon Creek State Park, I stopped to sketch a favorite sycamore tree.  The autumn light filtering through the forest caught on the white bark of the sycamore, setting it apart from the dark, shadowy hillside beyond.

Just 15 minutes of sketching deepened my experience of walking in the woods.

The day before, I had been helping David to photograph our friend Joe's artwork.  Looking at my drawing, I can see the inspiration Joe's work imparted.  I admire the way he captures the life in a tree, and the way he sets off a subject by sketching in the shadows behind it.  

Without being conscious of my decisions, I was drawn to sketch the shapes the sycamore tree  highlighted by the dark shadows behind it.

I now realize that I had what Julia Cameron calls an Artist's Date on the day I helped with David's photography project.  And, Joe's artwork directly inspired and improved my artwork.

Anytime we take ourselves out to see something that fascinates us, to see another person's artwork, or to experience beauty in some way, the encounter affects our creativity.  We may feel inspired.  We might create in a new way, or even take on new subjects.  I find that it's always worth the effort of fitting an artist's date into my life.

What artwork or beauty would you like to see?  I hope you put it on your schedule and have an artist's date of your own!

Drawing My Favorite Things

I have two Black Cherry trees on my hill that I love to look at and draw in any season.  Sometimes, when I go out with my nature journal, I try to find "something new and interesting" to draw, as if drawing old favorites is bad or wrong.  My Hobgoblin (inner critic) shouts that these favorite subjects are unimportant, and overdrawn.

Yet, often artists develop their craft by working in a series, taking one subject and drawing it in different seasons, in different light, with different materials, etc.

I recently read some wisdom from artist Louise Fletcher, who reminded me that the things we love are important to our art, even though other people might not appreciate them and so we feel they are unimportant too.  

We often downplay the beloved subjects our muse is just begging us to draw or paint. For me, it's scraggly weeds, little treasures like acorns and leaves, and these two Black Cherry trees.

Emboldened by Louise Fletcher, I sat in the grass Saturday and let myself revel in the beauty of these tree friends.

I used only a black colored pencil, studying the wriggly branches and the light and shadow in the scene.  A flock of starlings swooped through, so I included them in the drawing to express this season of flying leaves and migrating birds.

Simply sketching a favorite scene like this one brings me joy. As I draw, I observe closely the way the tree limbs twist and branch, the way the leaves flutter on the wind, and the shapes and shadows of the brush around the trunks.

 What do you love that you may have overlooked as being unimportant?  I hope your favorite subjects get to be the center of your creativity!

Art Journaling with Inks

A couple of chilly days and the way my big Sugar Maple tree is beginning to change colors gave me the first blush of viscerally knowing winter's coming. In winter, I miss being able to walk freely around in nature and sketch without my fingers numbing.

I decided to work in my art journal to express these feelings through art.  That's the beauty of art journaling -- you can let things out onto the page, perhaps make discoveries about your thoughts and feelings, and then move on.

I created a page spread for my board book art journal with Black Walnut ink, India ink and touches of white acrylic ink, reminding myself that winter has beauty, too.  I worked on a package insert with information in a variety of languages.  You can see other art on this paper in this blog post.

Sometimes as you create freely, a symbol or word will rise up.  For me, it was a heart with a + inside that showed up in an accordion fold insert.  I find the more quickly I create, the less I overthink and the better I like the result. I wrote what spilled out -- advice to my future self.

I glued the insert down to the edge of the page.

Here's the finished result.

I'm still not looking forward to winter, but I have put my feelings into my art, and I've chosen to try to live in the moment and relish autumn's beauty.

What have you been thinking about lately? Is there an anxious thought working on you that might find release in an art journal?  It's worth a try.  The only cost is time and a few art supplies.

Wishing you healing energy from your creativity.  

Mark Making Experiments

Igor Adameyko, Gerd Günther, Wim van Egmond, Benedikt Pleyer

Last week, in an email from the New York Times, I discovered this gif of microscopic life.  You can read the article here: Videos of Microscopic Life

I'm getting ready for the start of my Pencil Drawing Workshop at the Community College of Beaver County, and we'll be talking about mark making.  I find images like these spark new ideas for me.  After watching this gif, I quickly filled a page in my sketchbook.

Practicing making different marks is a good way to keep your hand in drawing practice, to exercise your imagination, and to generate new ways to express texture & shading.  Different types of marks make your art more interesting.

Look at the way that varied marks create texture and vitality in this drawing by Vincent Van Gogh.

Wow! Van Gogh's landscape fairly vibrates with life!

Though Van Gogh used a lot of straight lines and cross-hatching, look at how vibrant his Portrait of the Postman Joseph Roulin (1888) is.

Let's try our own mark making, inspired by the video of microscopic creatures.  I hope you'll join me and sketch your own version of this!

I started by holding my pencil -- a 7B -- at the end to loosen up my lines.  Try it!

I loved this little character, and made lots of loopy lines to create a second one.

After blowing out a candle, I noticed the way the smoke rose up, wobbly and curly.  It inspired the swoopy lines at the bottom of the page.  I smudged the soft pencil marks to make them more smoky.

For more control and different marks, I hold the pencil closer to the tip.

But I'd never get the long, flowing lines of these branching marks by holding the pencil that tightly.

Next step -- now try a page of marks that imitate Vincent Van Gogh's.

For a touch more inspiration, here's a link to a wonderful YouTube video by Ed Lax of a simple mark making exercise: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZVim6ECWss

Happy Creating!

Watercolor Sketches on a Lake

Over the weekend, my husband and I rented a pontoon boat at the Raccoon Creek State Park Boat Rental.  The weather was gorgeous and sunny.  

As we motored slowly around the lake, I made slapdash sketches of the scenery.  Above is the boat rental seen from the water, with colorful kayaks stacked up along the shore.

The sunlight and cloud shadows created beautiful effects on the trees and forests surrounding the lake.  The distant hillside was in a cloud shadow, while sunlight shot through the near trees on the left.  Days when the lighting is dramatic like this, I love to create art that zooms in on these high contrast areas.  

In artworks, areas of contrast attract the viewer's eye and create visual interest.  You can capture boldly contrasting values and colors to create a more dramatic composition.  

For instance, greens and yellows dominate this painting of the boat rental.  The red & blue-violet kayaks along the shore catch the eye because they contrast with the colors around them.

When I started painting these two scenes, my only goal was to play with my paints for the joy of it. I simply was present in the moment, exploring with my brush.

Trusting the process and going out to sketch, you make discoveries, try experiments, and find new ideas to explore.

As messy as these sketches are, I love them.  They represent a snapshot of the afternoon -- an escape to the lake with David on a gorgeous afternoon.

 Sketching in this way can foil the inner critic's voice -- you know, that voice within us that demands we make masterpieces.  

Our job in sketching is simply to "take notes" on the scene before us.  We are focusing on ways to represent what we find fascinating in the world.  We are not bound by reality.   As artists, we are not cameras!  We can omit parts of the scene, change colors, remove trees, or whatever we want!

Remember: When you are sketching, your job is to explore what you find fascinating.  If you do that, you have succeeded, no matter what your sketchbook looks like to anyone else.  

I hope you'll take lots of opportunities to make sketches this autumn!

Happy Creating!