September 14, 2024
I loved this afternoon! I’ve been really trying this year to do something for myself every week. This week I decided I was going to pack up my supplies and sit at the park and sketch and paint. This was my view which was pretty great.
I always love treating myself to a drink. This weeks was an Iced Caramel Macchiato from Starbucks with extra caramel drizzle. I brought my paints with the intention of painting but realized when I got to the park that I didn’t have water…
Because I was working with markers I didn’t feel like coloring in the whole pages of sketches and I ended up liking it. It gave me some ideas of things that I want to explore later. The image below is a loose sketch of poppies, playing with stripes and color.
Another sketch playing with loose flowers, colors and mixed media (markers and pencil crayons).
September 16th, 2024
We have “seasons” where we go on more walks around the neighbourhood. Some seasons we’re walking the block every day (sometimes multiple times a day) and some seasons we’re not out at all. Summer was a season where we honestly weren’t out walking the block very often. Most times I opted to take the kids to the park or a trail. However, now that we’re going into Fall and Parkers wake windows are quite lengthy I find myself gravitating towards these walks again with the kids.
On this afternoon I took some reference photos of some flowers along our walk that I wanted to try sketching or painting at a different time.
September 17th, 2024
Every time we go to the park we pass an apartment building with these pretty yellow flowers at their entrance. Took a photo so I can try sketching later.
I always love this balcony on the way to the park. I have this idea to create a background pulling colors of the planters with some flower sketches overtop.
I’m always looking for ideas on what flower to sketch or paint so I started a page in my sketchbook that pulls all the flowers I’m learning to draw. As you can clearly see on the right page my flowers are looking a lot better but my animals need some serious work.
I was doing a lot of experimenting with these “still life” paintings and I liked them but I found myself gravitating towards these loose, messy paint and sketches of flowers so I started revisiting that idea.
September 18th, 2024
The whole family came down with the bug. Usually we would go for a walk or visit the park. We always make a point to leave the house at least once a day and do something outside but today was an indoor and survive kind of day. After the kids went to bed I did sneak in a little bit of time painting and working out some ideas.
The page on the left was continuing on my train of loose paintings of flowers - these are peony inspired. The page on the right is a scene from Ponyo that I was interested in. It actually gave me a lot of ideas. The lines are created using Gouache in a more water-colour fashion and the boats were drawn in with markers.
September 19th, 2024
One morning while playing with some play dough with my daughter while my son napped I realized that when you spell “mom” with a little tweaking you create a series of hearts. I took this photo (again as references) so I can maybe do something with the idea for later.
Another walk on a sunny afternoon. There is a house in the complex that always has a. beautiful garden that we like to stop and admire. He’s got these vibrant red and yellow flowers that I wanted to try sketching and then I noticed the flowers and black planters off to the side and I thought the juxtaposition of the flowers to the black plastic was interesting.
These are probably some of my favourite spreads in my sketchbook. During the day I don’t have a lot of “alone time” to sketch or paint but I do have access to regular paper and crayons. So when my daughter is drawing I’ll sketch something out. I wanted to experiment with continuous line drawings so that’s what I did. I did a turtle because we’re in a huge turtle phase with my toddler and a jelly fish. I then had this cool thought to combine something I had done the previous night with the continuous line drawing and the page on the right is a test run of the idea.
September 20th, 2024
The bouquet painting on the right is inspired by an actual bouquet of flowers I have that my husband bought me for our anniversary. It’s one that I have experimented with over and over again in my sketchbook. All with varying techniques to see what I like and didn’t. This was the loosest painting that I had done of the flowers and I changed the vase slightly because in reality the vase is a similar color the flowers. The greyish florals and the single purple floral are Daisies, the top burgundy red are Carnations, and the pinky florals on the bottom right are Roses. I combined what I had been liking with my still life studies to create something looser. This was also a challenge because at the time I was working on these Parker was waking up every 20 minutes after bedtime so I was often doing this in the dark so I didn’t always know what the color mixing was going to look like.
