The Love of Tiny Things in Nature

I find myself drawn to the tiny things in nature like small flowers, acorns, insects, & fungi. 

I spotted these beautiful shelf fungi on a recent walk through the Widlflower Reserve at Raccoon Creek State Park and snapped photos with my phone.

Back in the studio, I made a light pencil sketch on a piece of watercolor paper, using the photo above for a reference.  I added layers of washes.  After the first washes were dry, I added some pen and ink marks with my fountain pen

I added more watercolor details using a small round brush.  And, I used a bit of white gouache for highlights here and there.

I finished the 5"x 7" painting with a few colored pencil details.

Realizing that tiny things inspire me helps me to focus my art on the things I love.  

I enjoy hiking in the park, snapping reference photos.  The paintings I make back at home feel like a celebration of my time in nature.  They capture a memory of a place I love.

What do you love?  What inspires you? 

I hope you paint or sketch it to deepen your enjoyment of it.

Happy Creating!

Nature Journal Update

I've been working in this nature journal lately, loving its brown pages.  

Brown pages have a magic trick that lets you use dark and light media to show highlights and shadows, quickly creating depth.

Here's a flip through of my journal over the last few weeks. On this page, I used colored pencil, ink and watercolor to sketch a colorful grove of sassafras trees.

Autumn is a great season for collecting treasures from the land and bringing them indoors to sketch.  I picked this apple from one of our trees.

Maple keys and squirrel-chewed hickory nuts make interesting bits to study.

I taught a nature journaling class for the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in October.  We went out on campus and found loads of things to sketch.

And in my favorite park, Raccoon Creek State Park, I found a quiet log in the woods where I sketched this lake scene.

Even indoors on cold days, you can make observations in your nature journal. This is an entry about moving my potted plants indoors for the winter.

The trick to filling pages in your nature journal is simply taking the time to sit and observe what's going on in nature and your life.  

Use any art material you like, and record what's interesting to you.

 Happy Creating!

If at First You Don't Succeed, Try, Try Again!

It's the season of Plein Air painting, or painting outdoors in the fresh air.

Inspired by this scene on my farm, I set up my watercolor paints & pochade box.

I started with a sketch in pencil, added India ink, and then layered in washes.  

But when the painting was done, I didn't like it! Too many details competed with each other to attract your eye!  The background trees were so detailed, the whole thing looked like camouflage.  I tried to simplify the background by laying in a darker wash, but the result was cartoonish.

Of course, there are parts I love, like the little greenhouse and the dead tree, but as a composition, it just doesn't work.

As hard as that is to accept, there is power in looking critically at your own artwork.  When you see precisely what you don't like -- too many details -- you can create another painting and fix that problem.

Here's the second version of this scene.

I worked quickly, sketching in only the greenhouse angles lightly with pencil.  I abstracted the background trees into light and dark patches, and took out the dead tree because it competed with the greenhouse. 

When you're painting with watercolor, having a plan going in helps tremendously!  And when painting landscapes, the first step is to abstract all of those details, and pick what is most important to you -- what draws your artist's eye?

Allowing yourself several paintings to develop your ideas is freeing.  

Harsh self judgement is a lead weight on our creativity, but looking at our artwork with a discerning eye for what we love and what isn't successful gives us the power to improve.

Remember: Every painting teaches you something.

Do you have a painting that didn't work?  Why not make a plan for how you'd like to fix it? Hard won success feels uplifting and leads to more discoveries.

Happy Creating!