nature

Plant form – Honesty ripening no.2

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Plant form - Honesty ripening no.2

Continuing my current series of ink work this is the second plant form study of Honesty (Lunaria), seed head ripening. These self seed around the garden and I feel are a useful addition in the early summer with the white or purple flowers. The tender green seed pod discs evolve picking up purples, pinks and reds as it matures to its end of season form. The silver translucent remains now stand, having shed the brown seeds.
Wikipedia has interesting information for the origin of both names – Lunaria and Honesty but there many other names this plant is also known by.

Saltmarsh sketch

Image | | jennyhillartworkandwords

Saltmarsh sketch

I have been trying out some materials, Caran D’Ache Technalo water soluble graphite pencils and SAA soft pastels), for use in a 30 minute demonstration at the SAA ‘It’s all about Art’ event at The Business Design Centre, Islington, London .
When I was at Cocklespit beach last week I used these materials for sketching research that I will take for my demonstration. Hopefully it may encourage art show visitors to enjoy the freedom of working outdoors, directly from nature.
As an estimate this sketch took about 20-25 minutes.

Plants growing in the shingle at Cockle spit beach

Image | | jennyhillartworkandwords

Plants growing in the shingle at Cockle spit beach

This is visual research for images and ideas for development in ink and as you can see, pages from my sketchbook. Two early mornings outings this week to St. Peters Chapel and Cockle spit beach with the intention of drawing seashore and coastal plants flowering and seeding. But other subjects also caught my eye and were too interesting to not draw if only as a sketch reminder to return another day for further study.

Ink art work – Seed head – endings and beginnings

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Endings and beginnings 

This year I have discovered fluidity and permanence of colour with acrylic ink. This is a joy to use enabling me to create in a fairly short time scale, a further range of artworks on the theme of Seedhead – endings and beginnings.An exhibition space in a very sunny library window during the Burnham Art Trail 2012 required lightfast colour and light weight artworks. More work was developed and exhibited in the Summer of Art marquee at the Sparks Will Fly festival in Hylands Park and later in the Maldon Art Trail.

The black drawn element of the artwork is Indian ink, again very lightfast and permanent. Due to the application of medium this may appear to be a print but it is a painting using watercolour techniques and masking out with poster paint to place the indian ink.

I have found this is a good route for freeing up my output, making some of the backlog of ideas out and visible.