This Week's Visual Journal

Week 16 of 2024

This week’s been marked by the incredible display of native bluebells in our local woods. For 3 years now I’ve tried capturing a little of its magic. And as I’m waiting to get started on a very big commission, I’ve been granted an extra week or so of solo artist dates and self-motivated sketching. So as well as mark making and playing with materials, recently I’ve been keen to shift from sketchbook to larger pieces and I thought this week would be a perfect time to get started. I’ve been in touch with a few artists who have managed to make that shift successfully and I’m hoping to persevere with this in coming months.

After studying the landscape and playing with my materials a lot, I came to the conclusion that just playing in a similar way on the canvas would be a wise move too! I took a couple of canvases that a friend gave me years ago and some old acrylics and oil paints which we’ve had in our craft cupboard for years too and just got stuck in. I think I’d like to attend a few oil painting workshops to get my head round a few techniques and pointers to take things further but on the whole, it was a very enjoyable experience.

One of the highlights of being in the woods was hearing, then seeing a bird of prey flying over the trees. It has a very distinctive call so after having been back to the woods with my boys, we were all able to identify it thanks to this fabulous Woodland Trust website. So without the shadow of a doubt, we were in agreement that wed seen a common buzzard. And this then helped me add details to my drawing for today.

Here’s the Timelapse of the process of this week’s visual journals. I wanted to capture waves of bluebells, ancient woodlands, a bird of prey, and a close up botanical stem of the native bluebell (different from a variety which we inherited in our garden).

Later today, I will also be sending out an introductory video to this process video to my paid subscribers with a sketchbook tour with some materials chat on the bluebells, as well as drawings of a Bologna From Home zoom meet-up I co-hosted with Olga Ptashnik.

Hope you’ve had a great week! And if you live in the UK, I hope you get to see the bluebells.

xx