Surprise in my Flower Pot.

Some time in August we had an organizational zeal: re-planted flowers, added fertilizers, cleaned a few boxes of dried moss, lichen, sticks and rocks and added seeds into our bird feeder. Some spilled soil was scooped back into my hanging flower pot and new things started to grow... first it looked like tall grass, later we recognized millet :), some things grew and were gone before we were able to identify them but my favorites are tiny sunflowers! They came out in early December and are still hanging in there - even though we had some below freezing nights and I stopped watering anything for a while...
Life finds a way :)

Stray Sunflowers - Maree

“The gaudy leonine sunflower
Hangs black and barren on its stalk,
And down the windy garden walk
The dead leaves scatter - hour by hour.”
- Oscar Wilde

(Helianthus annuus) Native to the Americas - done in my Moleskine Nature Journal - 8" x 5"

Driving past Happy Acres, which was a field study centre and is now known as "Woodland School", on my way to Magaliesburg (Gauteng, South Africa), I passed these Sunflowers on the verge of the road. There are often stray Sunflowers showing up in front of the Cosmos, due to stray seeds falling from trucks passing by. If the sunflower is almost ripe, I often stop and cut one down, taking it home to my Cockatoo, Danny, who just loves to pick the seeds from the head.

3-Minute Exercise - Maree Clarkson

"Is mastering the art of self-creation as important to you as learning another language?"
~ Steve Chandler


"Sunflower" pencil sketch and watercolour in Moleskine large sketch-book

A simple, 3-minute exercise. The Moleskine sketch-book is beautiful to sketch in, both for pencil and ink work, but doesn't take watercolour very well. However, I did manage to get
in a few quick strokes of colour for this short exercise.

Vacation Posts - Laura Gillis

Well, I am back from the oddest vacation ever.... things were crazy before I left so I haven't posted in a couple of weeks so this is kind of a long post for me.

Our plans were to go to Mueller State Park in Colorado (west of Colorado Springs) for a little cooler weather and some hiking and relaxing... we got quite a bit more than we bargained for.

We got to the park on Sunday and the weather was fabulous so we got set up and got our chairs out to relax and then a dark cloud rolled over us. Then another and then another which dropped sleet on us. After the sleet, came the rain and snow.... for three more days! The bad part was that we didn't get to go on any hikes but I did get a few sketches done from the window of the pop-up trailer.

On Monday we found out that my Grandmother had passed away. This was very sudden and quite a shock. (I still can't believe it a week later.) The funeral was scheduled for Friday in Louisburg, Kansas.

Louisburg is 4 miles from the Missouri border and a long, long way from where we were, so we broke camp with the snow still falling on Wednesday and started on down the road.

Whoever it was that said Kansas was flat has never driven across the state on I-70! Kansas is really a beautiful place. The state flower is the Sunflower and there were fields of them drying and almost ready for harvest. A field of those giant sunflowers is really a sight to behold.

Thankfully, the weather cleared up and everything was beautiful for the services for my Grandmother on Friday. I will really miss my her... she was a little 96 year old ball of fire... She loved my bug sketches and she was known to whack bugs with her cane to stun them and save them for me to paint into my journal. Quite the woman.....

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The first three sketches were in my nature journal with the Hemp paper with ink & watercolor wash. The sunflower sketch was done in a generic journal with a Pilot ink pen. I like to have a bigger journal with cheap paper to sketch in while we are going down the road. It is the only way I can seem to stay awake! (Don't worry, I am not driving!)

Coreopsis - Cathy Johnson

We headed off to Parkville on Saturday to take advantage of the gorgeous day (and yep, I did put the wrong date on this!)--the field near the tiny town of Mosby was golden with flowers! Joseph stopped the truck and got out to pick one for me to study more closely...

This is the flower my mom used to call Tickseed Coreopsis, but it's not quite like the Coreopsis lanceolata, the petals don't have that serrated leading edge. I can't find one that's exactly like, but I think it's clocer to Coreopsis palmata, according to one of my favorite online flower finders, the Missouri Flora webpage. Neither ONE of these should be blooming still in late August and September, according to Missouri Flora, but then it's been a very strange, cool, damp year...

If anyone has a better I.D., please let me know!

I like the effect of watercolor and ink on this page...and of course yellows are as difficult to capture as ever!

Sunflower Tea Party

The 'Sunflower Tea Party' was on. A threesome would be the term for this. The big one was all in a clamor about proper manners during a tea party. Come to find out this all stemmed from the 'Tea Parties' of April 15th. So, with a little re-educating them we proceeded with the sketch. They are great subjects aren't they?
I never tire of these beautiful specimens and their special place in our landscapes. This process of watercolor, using positive/negative painting, is always fun and works my brain. Anyone who said painting didn't demand thinking just hasn't been in my world. The process again is healing to me. I used an analogous palette for the most part. Of course I used my artistic license to change anything the subject told me to change. How much more fun can this be. Happy painting!