On a Roll

It seems that I've got the outdoor watercolour sketching bug! Yesterday was POURING with rain, but today it cleared up and was beautiful and sunny. One drawback though: the heat evaporated the moisture on the plants & ground, and made the atmosphere quite muggy, so the watercolours took a wee bit longer to dry.

I'm still captivated by the beautiful merging/blending colours of ripening fruit, so here are some more sketches done along that theme.

Feral apple tree by side of the road. The passing traffic caused the leaves to be in constant dancing motion, and the branches to sway.


Some of the later-ripening crabapples (another tree has almost completely ripe clusters all over). This one is more in the shade and in competition with other shrubs & bushes, though.


While the fruit is definitely the most flavourful of those we have growing feral, the cut-leaved variety of blackberries are the most vicious, with back-curving thorns that dig deep and bite hard.


Here's a very late blackberry flower (it was just about the last one on this plant):


The clouds gathered around lunch time, so I headed back inside. Later in the afternoon, the sun shone forth once more, so I decided to head into the veggie patch (a.k.a. "deer Fort Knox"). I experimented with a new pen, but it's not water-proof, so it kind of smudged ink into the painting of the sunflower. I let the sketchbook face-plant in the moist dirt by accident, so there is some serious interaction with nature on this sketching page! I also had the delightful opportunity to do some sketches of a native bee working very hard at collecting pollen.


Another native bee of the same species came by and totally laid into the first one, who got knocked to the ground and lay stunned. I coaxed her gently onto my finger and got a great sketching opportunity while she rested. Here's the close-up: