Armed with this Good Idea I treated myself a Stillman and Birn zeta sketchbook and pondered upon some kind of direction. I've decided to try to find things that catch my eye, maybe from the hedgerows and fields, or from the veg patch, greenhouse or garden. I'm anticipating a lot of foliage! In case I'm incapacitated, or the weather is too awful to contemplate venturing outside, I have a collection of bits and pieces to fall back on - feathers, pine cones, seashells etc. Maybe when the weather improves I'll take the journal outside. We'll see!
The point of this exercise is to take my time with these studies. My usual modus operandi is fairly rapid pen and wash sketching, which I love doing and feels very fresh and lively. On the workshop I found I also enjoyed the discipline of really looking at the subject very closely, so this is about making time to do more of that. And maybe it'll improve my general sketching and drawing too...
So, the first couple of pages. I started off with a small collection of empty snail shells that I found on a very wet and muddy walk around the fields...
And the next page was the last few chilli peppers from the greenhouse...
Of course there are loads of other things I'm aiming to do, such as more linocuts (a series perhaps, with an actual theme to it), lots of sketching and drawing generally, and maybe this year I'll actually get outside and do some plein air painting...
