November snow!

It's been an unusually cold November, so far. We've already had snow and single digit temperatures. I'm ready for the more typical weather we are expecting next week, which will allow me to get outside in the yard again!

I'm not teaching classes this month. I had a long list of things I wanted to get done during my "break," but what has happened is that I have been spending a lot of time making art! I have a backlog of botanical artwork that needs to be finished, and I am getting things done for our next Great Plains GNSI show at Lauritzen Gardens next year. While things are not going as I had planned, I am really pleased with how things are working out. I'm also coming to the conclusion that I just want to maintain this blog as my social media outreach at the moment.

I am working on several acrylic paintings for our show of plants and pollinators. After lots of drawing and colored pencil work, I am enjoying using thicker paints and brushes again. This morning, I finished a painting of a flower fly, and started work on a monarch caterpillar (I love those)!

And I've continued working on a horticultural history project for the Sarpy County Museum. This has been a fascinating research project, and I hope to share more about it at a later date.

Here is a photo of the flower fly painting before I finished it- the wings on the fly and the disk flowers are unfinished. At this point, it is about halfway done. When I first get the thought that I am almost finished, I know that it really means I have reached the halfway point, and it was definitely true for this one.

unfinished Flower Fly, © Camille Werther 2019

Lauritzen Gardens Exhibit

Exciting news! I belong to the Guild of Natural Science Illustrators, and our Great Plains Chapter is having an exhibit of natural science illustration at Lauritzen Gardens in Omaha in November. I am so thrilled to be a part of this group of wonderful illustrators. If you would like to see beautiful illustrations of the natural world, be sure to check out our exhibit! More details will follow.


As you can imagine, I am hard at work getting artwork ready for the show. I will be sharing some of my book art and calligraphy from my exhibit in Louisiana over the next few months. I had meant to share more over time, but didn't get around to it. While I am working on other things, this would be a great time to do it!

A New Look

Hello, everyone, I'm back! Thank you for sticking around and reading the blog. Other formats for sharing are fun, but honestly, this is the only one that allows me to go into detail, so I am recommitting to the blog. I'll be making some changes over the next few weeks to update the look and focus. And I hope to share some exciting news, soon. (I love it when people share exciting news! It's so interesting to see what makes people excited or happy!).


You might have noticed that I added a subtitle below the name of the blog. I'll be sharing a lot more about geometry and nature here in the future. Geometry gets shortchanged so often in school, and I believe that is a great loss. It acts as a language that underlies seemingly disparate fields, from space science to fine art.




Great Dodecahedron

There is great beauty in Geometry.





Inside of Great Dodecahedron Model

I made this model following instructions in Magnus Wenninger's book, Polyhedron Models. I got the idea for photographing the inside, though, from Alan Holden's Shapes, Space, and Symmetry, which is still in print.


The inside looks like a flower. Such is the beauty of geometry, and it is a very good example of how geometry underlies much of the natural world.


Thanks again for visiting!


Milkweed Progress

Yesterday, I decided to stop in and check on my favorite milkweed patch at a local park. There were a few flower buds trying to open, but for the most part, the buds were still tightly shut.

Next to a patch of crown vetch, I saw an Eastern Tailed-Blue butterfly, and got a picture. They are so small (almost as small as my thumbnail!), but I love the muted color of the upper wings and the bluer underside of the wings.

I am also trying out a new sketchbook. I thought I'd like the mixed media paper, but I'm finding it's not ideal for my pencil work. I think we artists hope we can ask one paper to do everything, but in reality, that is an impossible request! It is a very nice paper, but not ideal for what I am asking it to do. My Pilot Kakuno fountain pen is fine when writing on the paper, but I generally use that to take notes on the opposing page. I'm still a pencil gal. After trying to fiddle with the resolution and contrast of my scan, I can see why a lot of sketchbook artists have gone to ink with watercolor wash- it is harder to share pencil drawings.

But I sketch primarily for myself. I have always used my sketchbooks to inform my formal paintings. And I love pencil. I was the first thing I picked up almost 30 years ago, and I still love the way graphite glides on paper, and the feel of the wooden casing. This sketch was done with a 2B, which is a bit of a concession for me to share online. In the past, my primary pencil was HB, because I love the silvery tones.

Here is the page. The watercolors did not want to scan well, either. I didn't scan the opposing page with all my notes. There I recorded things like color notes, absence of milkweed bugs (at least that I could see!), and the smell of yellow clover nearby.

New Beginnings

2017 has begun! I have been away from the blog for a while, making lots of changes. I hope that you will enjoy them. First of all, as I hinted last fall, I am going to use this blog to focus on nature and art again. This is where I am happiest: the intersection of my professional life, and my heart.

I painted my studio the grey color I mentioned. Everything is off the walls, and I am enjoying the peaceful color. The next stage is to decide whether to add curtains that are patterned, or bamboo blinds. Pictures to follow.

Thank you for reading, and sticking around through the break. I hope you will enjoy the blog's new look!

Studio Colors

The past few weeks have been busy, and one big, pleasant diversion has been the question of what color to paint the walls of my art studio. I've narrowed it down to a grey-green or a creamy white, based on both my subject matter (primarily natural subjects) and north-facing lighting, filtered by a large tree.

Both colors make me happy, frankly. And I am considering painting one wall a neutral grey, so that I will have an additional backdrop against which to view the artwork. A whole room in neutral grey would be too difficult for me to work in during the winter. It would feel too cold!

Do you have a favorite wall color for your studio? Feel free to share it with me!

Experiments

I am working on a special project that will require some black and white artwork. Because I love textures so much, I decided to start exploring a graphite rubbing technique which has the feel of childhood art projects.

It is very tactile. I love the relaxing feel of using graphite this way. I was curious whether other dry media would respond as well, so I started to experiment.

These are some of my experiments using charcoal, conte, Sumi ink, water-soluble graphite, colored pencil, and chunks of graphite. The seeds are silver maple keys.

I really liked the vine charcoal. It looks smoky, as you can see in the middle of the above photo.

In the end, I chose colored pencil and graphite mixed together. It is not a straight rubbing technique, since I manipulated the image quite a bit after doing the rubbing, strengthening vein lines and outside edges and adding shadows. I think it retains the textural look.

 

Stretching

Today was the kind of cold, rainy, grey day that forces you to stay indoors, even if you are anxious to go outside.

Fortunately, as the days get longer, my indoor plants are responding with flowers.

For a while now, I have been trying to decide how to move forward with sharing more of my drawings. Pencil drawing comes naturally to me. When I pick up a pencil, I am not thinking about how the tip will respond on the paper, or how the line will look. I just know... from many years of practice.

But pencil is difficult to reproduce. If I want to share natural history drawings, pen is a much better choice, even though I think the look of pencil is more lifelike.

So I've been playing around with pen drawings. I am stretching into territory I don't want to enter, really. But art that is real involves some risk. Sometimes you have to just try it.

Today, stuck inside, I picked up the Lamy pen that has been giving me headaches. I have been struggling with it, wishing I had a technical pen (which is on my list to try next, because I think it will be much more suited to my style!). The problem is not with the pen. It is with my tendency to press hard on the nib... with predictably disastrous results when you are discussing fountain pens! But today, somehow, I managed to lighten up a bit. I even managed to get a blind contour drawing of my African Violets done without feeling as though I had unleashed a squid full of ink at the paper.

I'm using a very dark brown ink by Sailor in the pen. I still don't care for stark black; my eyes rebel while I am drawing if I use that on white paper. Interestingly, when I spilled a bit of this ink, the color was bluish black. The stains on my fingers were black. But the ink is definitely a dark brown, a sepia to be more precise.

It is water-soluble, so I have more options to explore.

All in all, not a bad rainy day project. And I am still exploring reductive drawing, and enjoying it very much. More on that to come.

Snow Day and Materials Testing

The sun came out today! Even though it is still cold outside, the Groundhog Day Storm is over.

I made sure to soak up the rays. The warmth felt good!

Plates of orange-buttermilk scones welcomed my family when they finished shoveling out. Lots of coffee and tea, too.

I am finding my graphite watersoluble pencils, in combination with a travel sized waterbrush, to be indispensable items for my sketch kit. As I work with them more and more, I am really drawn to the range of values I can achieve, in spite of the water. Also, it gives a painterly look to my value studies. Here is one I tried today:

On the right is a hawk that I see frequently at Fontenelle Nature Center. I omitted his cage from the sketch. He is injured, and I think he cannot be released into the wild. But he is stunningly beautiful. (So is his next door neighbor, the Barred Owl). This is a quick value study I did from a photo I took last week.

On the left is a previous composition sketch of cattails in a snowbank.

The new raptor exhibit out there is looking great. I can't wait for it to open.

More Studio Tests

More materials testing! I've decided to devote all of January to testing materials, since I have developed some new interests.

I have always loved tonal drawings. Leonardo's sfumato is something that I hope, one day, to be able to achieve in my own drawings. With this in mind, I picked up a block of olive green Derwent XL graphite to see what it could do. I liked it so much with the pear subject that I think I will go back and get the rest of the colors!

It is hard to show in a reduced size picture what this looks like in person. It's very moody, very smoky. I like it a lot!

Here is another set of testing. Quite a boring page, but I'm including it because it shows some of the playing around with materials that I do before I settle on a way of working. On the left, I drew a block of green, and sprayed it with water. It didn't budge, so I then dropped water on in large droplets. Nah. Didn't work. Then, I tried a color block with drops of  isopropyl alcohol- something I use frequently in my watercolor and acrylic paintings. Still no movement, so that was abandoned. Then, I dipped a brush in water and dragged it over the block and attempted to paint with it. It was hard to get anything to show up- quite unlike my watersoluble graphite pencils. I abandoned this idea, too.

The next test was drawing a small landscape, just like I did with the pear. This was better. The detail was lost in the photo, though, so I'm not including it here.

I think I liked the graphite block best for the still life of the pear. But I really, really liked it for that!!! I am going to try a few more experiments with different papers. I think I also preferred the sketch paper I used for the pear to the drawing paper used for the landscape.

I'll be posting more testing throughout the month of January. Thank you for reading, and stay warm!

Pen, ink, and watercolor trials

The past couple of weeks have been a time to reevaluate my artwork, decide what is working, what is not, and, therefore, what I want to change. It's all part of a New Year's assessment, and a commitment to myself to draw more frequently.

A new sketchbook purchase didn't work out as well as I had hoped. The multimedia paper did not absorb enough of my fountain pen ink to prevent smudging (though it was great with Microns). I think I am going to end up back with my tried-and-true sketchpads that I've used since my college days.

Here are some images of the trial-and-error process. When you see pretty sketches in a book or online, you don't usually see all of the preliminary testing that allows an artist to draw in a certain style. Every component is a variable, and must be tested together in various combinations. For me, my variables are: sketch paper, type of ink or pencil, pen nib width, and watercolor.

In this picture, you can see my favorite way to test materials. I draw a little clover flower, which allows me to see how much tiny detail I am capable of getting, and then various lines and squiggles. I then wash over the lines with water or watercolors to see what happens. On the right hand page, I included some pens that I knew were not waterproof (like the Flair), as a reference. Sometimes I like the look that these pens produce.

In this picture, you can see some of my favorite fountain pens. From left to right is a Pilot Kakuno, a Lamy Safari, and a Pilot Metropolitan. I have other favorites, too. These are just the ones that found their way into the photo because they are so colorful. The Metropolitan pen is loaded with Herbin Orange ink that matches the barrel color almost exactly, and smells absolutely heavenly... it's scented like orange blossoms. This is my new favorite for notetaking.

I think I've settled on the Kakuno for when I need a lot of detail. The Fine nib does produce a very fine line, as you can see in all of the mosquito drawings on the page (click to enlarge). The mosquitoes are a bit of a joke. The Kakuno's packaging is entirely in Japanese. I took a photo of the instruction page, plugged it into a language translator, and was told that it was a fountain pen of mosquitoes! Pretty funny. There must be a subtle nuance of interpretation of one of the kanji. One of these days, I need to learn Japanese.

The Lamy is my favorite for general sketching. I seem to get a lot of line variety with it. On this paper, the Sailor Nano black ink doesn't smear too much.

That's an inside peek at the beginning of my New Year materials testing. I'm also testing different brands of acrylics, and water-soluble oils. More on those later!

Time for art!

Today was a lovely day spent with family. In addition, I had time to spread a bit of acrylic texture around on a few canvases to get them ready for painting. Opening up jars of paint and holding a palette knife or paintbrush brings me great joy.

I love that beat up old brush. It gives me textures that I can't get with a new one. The canvases on the left were gessoed. The one on the right has been spread with acrylic texture medium to prepare it for painting.

My paintings are taking many days of prep work, lately. It is a little difficult to hold on to the spark of delight that led me to want to paint each scene to begin with. I guess I've been spoiled by my acrylic paints. Oil painters deal with this all the time, unless they only paint alla prima.


I also had a chance to do a bit of sketching today. In my Christmas stocking was a Lamy Safari pen, so I have been trying it out. I am able to get a bit of variation in my lines, which was not the case with my fiber tipped and technical pens. I'm going to load it with a more water-resistant ink and see if I like it combined with watercolor. I've never been an ink/watercolor sketcher before (always preferred the softness of pencil!), but ink shows up better when you are sharing sketches online, so I'm giving it a try. And I love the raspberry color of my new pen!

Art, Fall, and Life!

Lately, I feel a bit like this little one:

I am finding a lot of ideas for art projects, and storing them away for winter. I've learned that part of caring for my artistic self is to spend as much time outdoors with a sketchbook now, while I can. The weather has been beautiful, if a bit warm.

Bigger projects can wait for when it is too brutally cold to set foot on a hiking trail.

I have also been experimenting with monoprinting using a Gelli plate. I don't have the results yet that I am looking for, but will be trying a few new experiments over the next few weeks.

Rough Sketches of Bird Behavior

I will get back to the Prairie Journal later. I wanted to show how rough some of my observational sketches are, day-to-day.

Why show the scribbles? These are *not* Art. But they are examples of how keeping a regular sketchbook or journal can prompt scientific questions. It can also help you work through some of those questions, and is an important record of what you are seeing.

If I draw something, I remember what I see much more clearly. The artistic and the logical, scientific side of the brain are working together. The scientist wins most of the battle in pages like this, though. I need to get the information down, fast. It is too easy to forget details.

Here is one of my field journal pages as an example. I was looking out of the back window, and I saw four woodpeckers (Northern Flickers) in the yard. That is unusual: I usually see only one at a time.

Sorry about the red glare!

Two of them put their beaks into the air and began to bob their heads and move them side to side. It looked like a dance. I grabbed the sketchbook, scribbled down their positions in the grass, and made some notes. I always include a date, and usually include a bit about the weather. I didn't try to get a realistic Yellow-shafted Northern Flicker drawing down. Just the rough shapes, and a record of the motion.

The next step was to comb my books. What were they doing? They flew off in separate directions after doing this dance, so maybe it wasn't a courtship dance. I found nothing in the first three books I checked, and then found in the Birder's Handbook that it probably was a courtship dance. I noted that, and the reference.

This then prompted further questions. Why now? Shouldn't I have seen this in the spring? It seems strange for the end of summer. Maybe there is time to raise another brood of Flickers. How long does it take to incubate the eggs, and fledge the young? Where are they nesting? These are questions I still need to research, and in the case of the nest, observe to try to find out.

Because I have this rough scribble, I can use this as a jumping-off point to learn more about the Flickers. Maybe someone else has observed this in my part of Nebraska in August. And, if not, here is a record! I sometimes look back through my field journals, and can see trends over time.

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Birds and other animals can be tough to sketch, especially when they are moving. The end result is worth it, even if you think it is too rough. You can always go back later and do a detailed drawing based on what you have learned. Think of this as information-gathering, and keep it in a separate field book, not where you keep your artistic drawings. That helps to separate the two.

Starting a New Journal, Part 3

We now have a page decorated in watercolor, but it still needs something to draw a reader in. I decided to use Copperplate calligraphy to draw a heading. I'm still learning Copperplate, and am not an expert in that hand by any stretch of the imagination! And this is drawn with a pencil, then overdrawn with a colored pencil. It is good enough for this, though. I have the look I was trying to achieve.

This is one way to approach that first page: using calligraphy, watercolor paint, and a page design. Of course, yours will be very different, but it is fun to see how other artists work.

For more inspiration and variety, here is a sampling of a few recent page designs that I've done. The astronomy journal on the bottom left is still in progress. It needs more contrast, and I will probably add inks.

You can tell from the cow design that I am playing around with different lettering, too.

Next time, we'll discuss content... thank you for reading!

Starting a New Journal, Part 2

We've traced the rectangle from the right hand side of the layout onto the first page of the journal, using a light box. What next?

I would love for this rugged looking journal to have a formal feel inside, but not too formal. I decided to make it look like a more contemporary version of an illuminated book. I decided to use a watercolor sketch of my new favorite wildflower, and to have it break through the rectangle, for a contemporary look. I'll also plan to use watercolor, because I love splashing paint around, and this Ingres paper can take it.

The next step is to draw a flower sketch in pencil. I decide to use an arrangement of grass leaves next to the flower that is a bit Art Nouveau and decorative, rather than realistic.

And then it's time to splash paint.

On the side, you can see a test strip. It's always a good idea to test your paints on the paper that you will be using, as each paper reacts differently. I like to collage these in, or use them as a bookmark, by adding perle cotton to the top.

There is more to do before this page is done. Stay tuned!

Starting a New Journal

Opening a new journal and staring at a blank white page, with many other blank white pages behind it, can be an intimidating feeling.

Over the next few weeks, I'll share some ideas on how to get started. Remember, these are just ideas. Your journal is just that... yours! If you have a gut feeling about how you want to proceed, go for it. Don't worry about messing up. Worry and fear will make you freeze, leaving you with blank pages and an empty book, which is not what we want. Keep in mind you can always slice out the first page with a hobby knife if you really don't like it.

We'll start with that very first page. What are you going to do with it? I admit, with almost 30 years of nature journaling under my belt, I've only just begun to think about page design. In the past, my journals were just resources, field notes that I took to give me something to go from for more finished work, or a record of beautiful days spent outdoors. Very few people ever looked in my field journals. Now, I find that the world of art blogging and sketching is encouraging me to think about sharing these sketches, which means they have to communicate something to others, not just to me. And they should look good on the page, ideally.

So, with that in mind, I'm going to share the process of designing pages for a few new journals. We'll start with my Prairie Journal, housed in the Lewis and Clark-inspired journal that I wrote about a while back.

The journal has a rugged look. I thought it would be a very interesting contrast to have a more formal interior. With that in mind, I turned to Dubay and Getty's Italic Letters book for instructions on how to lay out a Canon page design. This is the design used in the late Middle Ages to the beginning of the Renaissance, and it has a wonderful feel to it. There is something indescribably beautiful, I think, about the way this page layout looks.

Notice the geometry? That's probably why I love it.

I traced the text area in red ink to make it easier to see. The next step was to place it on a light box, with the first page of my journal over the right hand side of the layout.

Next time, we'll look at how to get started after tracing the rectangle.

 

Wildflower!

I found the wildflower I was searching for: the purple prairie clover, Dalea purpurea! For more about where I found it, and the other flowers that were flowering on the prairie today, see my other blog, NE Digital Daybook.

I will be using this flower as a theme in my artwork, since I now live in a prairie state. I chose a clover as a connection to my Irish ancestors, who were also once strangers far from home. And I chose this specific clover because the color is so beautiful. Local guidebooks also mention the strength of its stems. So how could I not love beauty, strength, and symbolism all in one flower? But wait, there's more! It was collected by Meriwether Lewis, too!

I set out today with a sketchbook and camera, but when I broke out the sketchbook, I was swarmed by black flies. I remember reading somewhere that Lewis and Clark complained about them. Anyhow, it became a photography-only trip. I will have to work from my photos, and the mental notes I took about the plants to paint them. So much for plein air sketching!

Have a beautiful evening. The fireflies are everywhere here!

Poetry notebook visitors

This is one of the hazards of keeping a poetry notebook in an artist's sketchbook, I suppose.

I think I just can't resist picking up a paintbrush. Even when I am writing, I still see things in a concrete way. The wooly bear caterpillar I saw the other day inspired this flight of fancy.

I won't show the whole page because the poem is not going well. This is the only pretty thing on the page, flying and crawling under a pile of scratchouts.

Maybe that's really why it's there.

Poetry and Art

I have a dear friend in the frozen north who is a wonderful poet. Yesterday, the two of us "discovered" Anne Porter's poetry on the Writer's Almanac website. (Incidentally, today's featured poet over there is Ted Kooser, another one of our favorites!) Porter's poetry is simple and beautiful. It was also interesting to learn that her husband was the painter Fairfield Porter, and her brother-in-law was Eliot Porter.

When I was 11, my parents gave me a copy of Eliot Porter's  In Wildness is the Preservation of the World. To say that this book had an influence on me would be an understatement. I still have my treasured copy, and pull it out from time to time. It is fading, but retains its beauty. I think his photographic vision shaped my love of nature, conservation, and my own artistic viewpoint.

It is interesting how often poetry and art seem to intersect, at least in my wanderings.