ICAD Week 6: Nature Sketches

Index cards 36-42 from week 6 of Daisy Yellow's Index-Card-a-Day Challenge 2012.  

In this week of ICAD, I fulfilled my promise of last week to do some more nature sketches.  The nature sketches in cards 1, 2, 3, and 5 above are watercolour pencils and Pitt Artist Pens, while the sketch in card 6 is of some of the pens and pencils that were sitting on my desk (I decided it was too hot to sit outside that day!) and were drawn using Pentel Slicci gel pens.  The first three nature sketches are my favourites of the week, I think.  I never used to like my sketches or drawings, but I am becoming much more confident in my skills these days and I really like how these ones turned out.  The leaves in card 2 were copied from a field guide on trees, but all of the other sketches were drawn from life.  The flowers in card 3 are called Calibrachoa, and they are growing in bright colourful mounds in two pots we have on our deck.  I would highly recommend them if you are looking for a colourful, fast-growing annual with lots of flowers.  The sketch in card 5 of the chair on our deck was actually the most difficult of all the sketches.  Chairs really are more complicated to draw than you think; they have so many lines going in different directions.  Flowers and leaves are much simpler!

As for the other cards, the blue spiral mandala in card 4 was drawn on a day when it was very hot and I wanted to draw something with cool colours and shapes.  This one reminds me of water swirling around.  Finally, I'm not sure where the final card came from.  It is not my usual style at all, and I don't usually work in that many layers.  It started when I wanted to tear some pieces of paper and glue them down.  I did that, then I added some watercolours and then some doodles in a brown marker.  Then the whole thing was starting to look so busy and awful I decided to just cover most of it with some neutral-coloured, translucent acrylic paint.  Finally, I used a black paint marker to highlight the flower shapes and called it done.  I'm not quite sure yet what I think about it, but I'm really liking the multi-layered look.

There are less than 20 days left of ICAD now.  I'll be sad to be done, but I'm also looking forward to moving onto new projects as well.  I'm thinking of perhaps writing a poem a day for two months after this...  Regardless, ICAD has taught me a lot about my own artistic style and has encouraged me to have more fun in my art.  I feel more comfortable simply playing around and trying different things rather than trying to make every piece of art perfect.  Once again, I highly recommend trying it out yourself!

[See all ICAD posts.]