Cecilia Louise

I think both my first drawing and this last one turned out pretty well. The photos are poor quality since this is a chromebook camera but at least it shows the general shapes. I would like to work on the dry brush for the feather textures in particular. I feel it will be a useful tool once I can do it better. The moss was surprisingly fun! I did pointillism rapidly so they blended a little and it captured the look pretty well, I think. The leaves were a challenge, as far as placement, colour, and the veins go. I had fun placing everything on the page using negative space to double check. This course taught me so many new techniques! I am so happy to learn them as it will improve my drawing/painting/nature journaling skills. Thank you so much, Liz!

I've done all of these techniques at other times except the dry brush. Wet on dry is what I do for most of my watercolour paintings, and I love wet on wet for sunsets, sunrises, in fact any sky works beautifully for this method. I need lots of practice with dry brush but once I am better at it I think it'll be perfect for delicate texturing like fur, hair, leaves, pine needles, feathers, etc.  I will be using that a lot!

I went to the woods close by ~5 min walk away. I had been there lots of times, just quickly walking through, so it was amazing to slow down and see the woods come alive! (This was in May. I found out about these discussions after that, so I am filling in things retroactively.) I wrote down a list of all the birds I saw/heard, and there were so many! One, a black-and-white warbler, perched on a branch directly over my head. It wasn't afraid at all. The reason why it was extra special...it was a new bird to add to my life list on eBird. Most observations are easy for me, but I have a hard time describing the smells of the woods (like decaying leaves, new leaves coming out, rotting wood, etc.).

1. I love drawing, but I also love writing, so something that combined both seemed like the perfect thing to do. I also want to get better at sketching birds and filling in with watercolour. 2. I was really inspired by the one that had the "fill in a whole page per month" idea, because that way, over time, you can get a really good idea of what it looks like where you live at a certain time of year. 3. Right now, I don't really have a different idea, I just want to try various methods until I find the one that works for me.

Using negative space to find the distances between things is coming naturally, but shading correctly is posing more of a problem to me. Or, maybe it's not the shading so much as shading but also retaining details while doing so. Once I shade something it all seems to get blurred and the details aren't crisp and clean like they are in nature. Finding and using negative space has probably been the most helpful technique in this course so far. It helps a lot when something looks wrong but I can't tell what. 

I love how gesture drawing captures movement perfectly. Even if the drawing is pretty messy you can still clearly see the energy moving through the subject. It forces you to really look at what the animal is doing rather than drawing what you THINK it's doing. Because there's a big difference between the two!

It was pretty easy. I've been drawing for quite a while using photos and other drawings as a reference point. The overall shape was fine but the beak and the correct angle on the head was kind of hard for me.  I probably wouldn't have noticed the turns and curves of the branch and would have tended to make it more streamlined. This would make drawing from nature look not quite as realistic so yes, I have to work on that!