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Sketchbook Tour Summer 2022 – small collections, wildflowers, slow drawing

tridentata botanical portraits

Welcome to another sketchbook tour! In this one, I will share what I’ve been up to in my sketchbook since June 2022. I started a new sketchbook back then and took a longer break during August, so it’s only one quarter full – somehow I enjoy taking my time for drawing lately, and don’t want to rush a sketch just to fill a page. I know a lot of sketchers work very fast and spontaneous, and as much as I love that and used to do that, right now I’m focusing on slow and steady drawing.

Let’s see what I have come up with.

Here’s a video version of this sketchbook tour:

Sketchbook Tour Summer 2022 - small collections, wildflowers, slow drawing

Whenever I start a new sketchbook I like to reserve the first page for random warm-up sketches. In the past, I often painted really small landscape and weather scenes. In this sketchbook, I decided it might be fun to start a kind of small collection – a drawn overview of what I might find in my pockets at the end of a day spent outside. Of course I didn’t draw all the elements in one sitting, instead I added them bit by bit, whenever I needed a warm-up. The sketches are mostly of small items like snail shells, feathers or seedpods. After finishing them, I often felt more motivated to continue sketching. Now that the page is filled, I might have to reserve another page for warm-up – maybe the last page of the sketchbook? With autumn arriving, there will definitely not be a shortage of small items to pick up in nature.

In June, I was doing regular excursions to nearby meadows and forests to hunt for orchids. May and June are the best months for these elusive plants, and I’m happy to say that I found ten different species this year. On the left you can see one of my studies. The small sketches on the right are what I like to call botanical portraits – a small scene with a bit of surrounding plants and grasses. I found I really like to include a bit of the surrounding habitat into my flower sketches. How I painted these two sketches will also be featured in an upcoming class, I’ll keep you posted!

More orchid sketches and an interesting beetle on the left (not the most successful page composition I ever did), and a small landscape with a heron on the right. That site was supposed to be a pond, but turned out to be just a big mud hole with water buffalos in the back (the farmer drove by and called them for me, but they left quickly when they found out I had no food). So I was left with the landscape itself.

Another page of wildflowers and butterflies and seedpods. This has really been a huge portion of what I’ve been drawing this year so far. At the end of June, most orchids have disappeared and I had time to focus on the rest of the flowers in the meadow. I also tried filming while sketching butterflies, but this didn’t go to well – I will have to try again in the next season. Seedpods, on the other hand, are wonderfully motionless and patient when you draw them.

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I’m still trying out different approaches with my landscape sketches, but I feel I need more time and maybe more focus to figure out what I really want to do with them. I keep getting asked about a landscape sketching class, and I promise it will come at some point, but I have to be content with my own sketches first. And for this year I hope you will be busy with the wildflower sketching class that’s coming soon (including some of the flowers form this spread) plus there will be the run-through of my Sketching Fundamentals class starting on September 26 – there’s no better way to get a good grasp of drawing than 8 weeks of intense training and feedback from me. Learn more about the class here.

By the way I really like how the composition of this double page ended up.

August marked my big summer break, and that meant a different pace when being outside. We went on lots of small hiking tours, and I had no time to sketch in the field. But I was happy to work with photos, still having the fresh memory of a place, and from time to time I simply picked a flower from my balcony.

I haven’t completely forgotten to draw animals and birds, so here are a few. I was delighted to discover tree sparrows during the holiday – instead of the more common house sparrow these ones have a brown cap, not a grey one, but they’re both incredibly loud and quarrelsome. We also watched deer on one of our tours, in an enclosure so well adapted to people, and then what I believe might have been a young toad.

I also tried to include a few of the buildings we saw – the one on the left is actually an old castle if you can believe that, and the one on the right a slightly newer castle that only looks good in this sketch and from afar – lots of chipped paint and nailed up windows that we didn’t expect based on the brochure. I also met an interesting wild bee species and we found autumn crocuses on the lawn of the semi-wracked castle.

And the last page is a rather spontaneous page of food sketches – these are some of the peppers and tomatoes from my garden this year. It was a very good year for these two veggies, although the drought dried out most of my kohlrabis, beans and leaf vegetables.

It’s September now and I’m looking forward to the colors of autumn, another round of the Sketching Fundamentals (learn more about the course here) and getting back into drawing and painting more. What was your summer like, what have you been up to?

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16 thoughts on “Sketchbook Tour Summer 2022 – small collections, wildflowers, slow drawing”

  1. Jean Kennedy Hubler

    Love this tour. I also appreciated your pep talk. I needed that.
    We just finished hosting a big family and friend gathering so I am a little exhausted. I am looking forward to getting back to practicing drawing and painting. I love the fall in the Pacific North West. I am hoping the rain will come and put out some of the wild fires. The smoke holds me back from hiking but I can draw from pictures. Thanks for all you do.

    1. Thank you Jean! I guess we all need a pep talk from time to time. 🙂 I really hope you will find some energy for sketching, and that those wild fires will be stopped by the rain.

  2. These pages are absolutely beautiful and capture perfectly the delicacy of wild flowers, seeds and fruits. Thank you so much for sharing them.

  3. Warm-up sketches on a designated page or two – what a great idea! So much to like about these sketchbook pages. I particularly like the ones where the top half are landscape and the bottom half individual flowers. “Paging” through gives me so many ideas of how one can arrange things on a page for best impact. I can’t get over how beautifully drawn and colored that pink orchid is near the top of the post. Thanks for sharing!

  4. Jennifer Ann Chambers

    Hello again Julia, it is springtime in Australia, and I am observing many plants in my garden coming into flower now before the heat of summer arrives. I am a beginner and love that you can simply take small items like a leaf or a bud and focus on them – one at a time – and since I am a new retiree, the idea of sketching and painting at one’s own pace is highly appealing. I have also started my own sketchbook. Thank you for sharing yours. Your video blog is inspiring, and I am also following some of your beginner/fundamentals classes. I feel like I have made a new friend. Thank you.
    Jennifer

    1. Oh Jennifer, spring is such a beautiful time! I found that focusing on small items and taking a bit more time helps so much when feeling overwhelmed or just starting out (or getting back into sketching). Thank you for following along and being a part of my classes, I really appreciate it!

  5. I love your little landscapes. I keep a nature journal and would like to incorporate more landscapes into it. Thanks for the sketchbook tour. I love your work.

    1. Thank you Mary! I found that these smaller landscapes are quicker to finish and less intimidating, that’s why I like to do them!

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