Clockwise from top left: Dahlia, Black-eyed Susan, Daylily, Geranium, and Nasturtium. Plus a tiny unidentified flower in the lower right.

Impressive variety for late September, but then, my parents have a very impressive garden. I’m a grateful beneficiary of their dedication to the garden and of their encyclopedic knowledge of plants, and I’m pretty sure they get credit for growing all the flowers that appear in my paintings across this site.

Campanula flowers, at various life stages. Fun fact: campanula is Latin for “little bell” (at least, so says Wikipedia).

September 20, 2015.

There really is something comforting about the control you get with pencil, though, so it seemed appropriate as a starting point for digging back into art. I also don’t plan to sell pencil sketches, so the medium is a bit more intimate. I have done quite a few paintings for sale recently, and while I very much enjoy sharing my art, that was not the purpose of this exercise. Just to make sure that I had eliminated any thoughts of making a drawing that might sell, I picked a quilt I made in high school as my subject. I really enjoyed getting lost in the folds of the quilt, and very much enjoyed getting back to pencil.

Not a polished sketch, but good practice in teasing out a range of values. More posts to follow!