Spring sketches

I started doing a drawing a day in 2013 and have continued since. This year I am trying to focus it even more by doing a botanical drawing a day to capture the changing seasons. If you follow me on instagram you may well have seen these, but I thought I'd share them here and on Facebook too.

I love the colours that Spring throws at us - this pink!

And purples!

And this yellow! - this last one I drew really fast, and let the pen run off one page and onto another - a lot of fun!

Spring is around the corner!

My favourite thing to do at this time of year is to spot signs of spring. Little bits of green that hold the promise of longer days.

Spring is Springing

I love this time of year as everything slowly turns green and comes into leaf. 

For my Drawing A Day this week I've been looking at different tree species - drawing their buds as a sketchbook study. I'm a bit of a tree geek and love how you can play detective and work out which trees are which. At this time of year the buds are one of the ways to identify the species (as well as the bark, remaining seeds and silhouette). I'm hoping to draw a few more this week and build up my collection. 

I also really like being able to tell what time of year it is in my Drawing a Day book when I flick through - maybe one year I'll manage to do a whole year as a nature journal...

Here is the process...

These studies are the starting point for another project I'm working on... but that's for another day!

Spring is springing!

I love this time of year - I look for new signs of Spring everywhere . Today I was excited by new Elder leaves, one Red Campion in flower and Hawthorn coming into leaf! The world is slowly turning back to green from brown. 

Time flies

It is almost a week into February already! Although I may not have posted this week, I have still been drawing...

Some beautiful blossom, found on the grass (so I could take some home to draw in the warm) on a particularly chilly day...

I went on the train a couple of weekends ago, and challenged myself to draw something at every station we called at. Luckily the train arrived early and so I had a head start with the first drawing before departure! The rest of the sketches were even more hurried, which was quite fun.