Sketchbook Tour Summer 2021

Welcome to another sketchbook tour! This summer I didn’t really have a lot of time and energy for sketching on the side, so there’s a gap in my sketchbook in July and August. But there are ways to finish a page in a satisfying way even if you can’t sketch very often.

I’m still fighting with my paper at the moment. As some of you know, I like to use otherwise unused paper for my sketchbooks, and currently I’m going through a very unpleasant batch of different papers that I feel impact the quality of my sketches in different ways. Maybe it’s the particular mix of papers, or maybe I’m just rusty, I don’t know. Either way, I’m happy when I can finally use something else to sketch on.

Here’s the video version of this post:

Sketchbook Tour Summer 2021 (field sketching - flowers, butterflies, landscapes, birds)

Watch this video on YouTube.

Sketchbook Tour Summer 2021 (video) (Sorry about the subpar audio quality in this video!)

Let’s go back to the end of May when I did a quick sketch of the different chili peppers on my balcony, still green and unripe at that stage. Since then, the plants have grown a lot and the have ripened into all kinds of beautiful colors. I tried to take a look at all the different shapes and forms, and the interesting blooms that different chili peppers have.

A large part of this sketchbook tour will be the pages I made for my last class Drawing Ideas for Summer, so let’s start with this page of field flowers. I remember the beautiful sunny days back in June when I selected the different species for sketching, and it was a great pleasure drawing all of these different flowers. Poppy, chamomile, phacelia, spearwort, clover, and crane-bill.

I also did a demo for how to draw tree shapes, a short outtake of the video lessons ended up on Youtube, too.

Other lessons showed an approach to tree and leaf portraits and how to sketch different insects.

I also showed how to sketch small landscapes with a limited palette, and a quick approach to sketching maps.

And one of the final outtakes from this class shows different tricks to sketching white birds on a white background.

After that I mainly had time for composite pages that I worked on for several days. For this page of butterflies and a fox, I worked from different photos and added elements to my page bit by bit. I’m not sure the fox is a good addition, but at least it has similar colors.

We had a very rainy summer, so it was a great year for my veggie garden and for the plants in general. These sketches were done around the area of my community garden.

During July and August, we hiked a lot locally in areas that are a paradise for all kinds of butterfly species. While I didn’t have a lot of time for sketching, I focused on identifying the species new to me I observed during these hikes. I got a new butterfly ID book this year to really be able to learn about our local species. Drawing helps me a lot because it forces you to look very closely at patterns and individual features, especially for all the little blue butterflies that all look similar and are hard to identify. I added to this page bit by bit whenever I had spotted a new species, so I worked on it for quite a few weeks.

On the other hand, there are pages like these that seem to fall apart. I’m trying to show more unfinished pages like this so that you can see that I don’t end up with pretty pages all the time. Although I’m certain that the page could be saved with a few notes and structural elements.

And the most recent sketches are a few loose flower studies and equally loose landscape studies. Again, I’m not entirely happy with these sketches due to the paper, but it was good to take a closer look at some of the flowers that are from the same meadows as the butterflies.

And that’s it for this summer sketchbook tour. I hope you enjoyed it. All in all, while it was necessary for me to take a break from sketching to manage my energy (see the last post for details), I’m surprised I still ended up with quite a few pages, and even a few that I really like. What I had planned for and what didn’t happen at all was plein air landscape sketching, but it was also a very rainy summer over here. Most of the sketches in this tour weren’t done on site, but later back at home, sometimes just because we had to hurry on our hikes to avoid rain or storms.

I’m a bit sad that the summer and the butterfly season is over now, but autumn means that soon there will be all kinds of nice color transitions in nature and more opportunities for bird watching. And I still have a lot of butterfly photo material to go through and study on colder days.

What was your summer like? What have you been sketching recently? Feel free to share!