Welcome to my next sketchbook tour. It’s been a while since my last sketchbook tour, and now the summer is already over. So what did I sketch in the summer of 2023? Flowers, big landscapes, and a few more things.
Here’s a video version of this sketchbook tour:
Remember the final entry of my last sketchbook tour? An architectural study in ink with the rest of the page still empty? I just filled it with summer flowers. I think at the time I was collecting ideas for a new class about sketching botanicals, and I was enjoying the diversity of summer wildflowers around me. I like the loose brushwork on the rose’s leaves.
Another page of mostly wildflowers with a close-up landscape thrown in. I tested a new gel pen on the white bits of the purple bellflower (not a fan) and got out my fountain pens for a bit of inked linework. Pure ink drawings are a lot of fun and I should just do them more often. As always, the purplish pink of flowers is hard to get across on paper – the lightfast magenta pigments are just not vibrant enough.
Even more flowers and an unfinished landscape sketch that I shall paint at some point. The right side with the poppies was the start for my course on sketching loose but precise flowers – I had a lot of fun documenting the life cycle of this poppy over several days.
Another page with flowers, on some days I just get carried away with my mechanical pencil. I sometimes wonder if I should even post these unfinished pages, but then again these sketchbook tours are meant to show a variety of studies and experiments, not just perfectly finished work.
And more flowers, this time from the botanical garden. Again I don’t love the parts with the white gel pen and the overall treatment of the oleander flower, I think it’s too heavy and dark. But then again I love the loose, light pomegranate sketch a lot. On the opposite I turned my page for a larger landscape study, also in the botanical garden. This shows my slow transition from really small, quick landscape thumbnail sketches to larger ones that are more focused on linework.
I’m a bit hesitant to show yet another page of botanical sketches, but I quite like this sketch of willowweed.
During my vacation, I only did three sketches, all of them larger landscapes. I returned to this view several times with different light situations and I think I learned a lot about drawing small houses nested into hills.
The last page with florals for this sketchbook tour, featuring a cyclamen I bought for my plant shelf and two garden flowers. I really enjoy simplifying the watercolor aspect of sketching currently, somehow drawing keeps me better in the flow of things, and watercolor means I have to wait for layers to dry.
The last page of this sketchbook tour features two scenes from my vacation – a monastery and the botanical garden in Karlsruhe. I didn’t have the time to sketch so I took a lot of photos, and it’s fun revisiting those places. It’s always a bit hard to get the lighting right when working from photos, it’s something that I’m still figuring out as I practice.
This is it for this sketchbook tour, I hope you enjoyed it. What have you been drawing this summer?
Lovely work. Thank you!
Thank you very much!
Julia, These are just beautiful! The detail and range/depth of color bring them alive. Morning inspiration for me here in the west of U.S.A. Thank you!!!
Thank you so much Janet!
Beautiful! I particularly like the wild rose at the beginning. I love these tours of your work, thank you for sharing them with us.