FOLLOWING A LINE

Until last year I worked mostly in dip pen and ink from my own photographs in a very plush, intense style.  The more intense the more I liked it.  These pieces took so long to do, plus I felt that I should be working more from life, so with these 2 combined aims in mind I spent a lot of last summer working directly from life in my garden drawing the flowers (mostly sunflowers) I had grown from seed or young plants from garden centres.

I have continued this practice and now it's more my instinct to see pattern and line and to follow the impulse of a line more than delve deeply into the textural rendering of a piece.

I did say at the end of last year that I would not buy as many plants or seeds as last year as growing them, protecting them, standing them back up after a gale force wind had knocked them over, was so time consuming.

But then instinct again has taken me by the nose and here are this year's fresh crop of nasturtium, which I have grown from seed (a new one for me)...

...and sweet peas and a carrier bag from Wilko (where I bought the seeds).

Inspired by the recent trend for adult colouring books I have toyed with the idea of producing a few images to colour in myself.  I have produced a few of these, but I've not done anything commercial with them yet.  I did have a play with a Ginkgo leaf yesterday, drawing it repeatedly and thinking how to arrange the shape imaginatively on the page.

The Ginkgo leaf fell out of a book where I'd pressed it.  I can't remember where I picked it up from.  If ever I read that there's a Ginkgo tree in a garden I have to find it.  I love the delicate, fluttering leaves of the Ginko tree.