Travel Sketches

Well I had great intentions to do lots of watercolor and sketching on my trip to the Antarctic. However, I was way too busy hanging out with penguins and seals, and barely had time to do any sketching. Oh well. I plan to keep working at it now that I am home, and hopefully I will have some penguin sketches soon.

A park across the street from our hotel in Buenos Aires  

M/S Expedition - our home as we explored the antarctic 

Sketchbook Skool

I've been doing some lessons from Sketchbook Skool, as I want to get better at sketching and painting. Especially on my travels I hope to do more sketching.

To practice, I've been working from some of my travel photographs.

One of my favorite beaches, Manuel Antonio (Costa Rica)

A lovely doorway in Santorini (Greece)

 

I have a lovely little watercolor notebook that I plan to bring along on my upcoming adventure and I aim to fill it with simple drawings and paintings from Antarctica. 

Swan

Rhinoceros

 

 

"Rhinoceros, often abbreviated as rhino, is a group of five extant species of odd-toed ungulates in the family Rhinocerotidae" - Wikipedia.

(I enjoy the phrase "odd-toed ungulates", I need to figure out a way to incorporate this in daily conversation)

On my last trip to Africa I completely fell in love with the rhinos. We got to see several rhinos in several national parks, and we even got to approach a group of rhino on foot, and sit with them for a while. They are huge, amazing animals on the brink of extinction and it was wonderful to be able to sit quietly with them.

I want to practice my sketching and get more confident, especially being able to sketch animals and landscapes from my travels, so today I sketched this rhino. And I am rather enjoying this odd-toed ungulate.

little green sprigs

 

she believed she could

 This week I was inspired by Patti Ballard's mini lesson in life book to play with a different style of collage than I've been doing lately.

forging ahead

playing with india ink

 Played with india ink today. Some fustrations. Some lessons learned. Mostly just happy with this little collage.

Surprising Yourself

I was feeling uninspired and didn't know what to work on, I forced myself to just sit down and doodle something. I had some random photographs from my trip to Uganda laying around on my desk, so I just started drawing an elephant. Much to my surprise, instead of the cutesy and doodley animals that normally come out, I had a (somewhat) realistic looking elephant on my page. And I quite liked him. And now I'm feeling inspired again. It's a lovely feeling when you can surprise yourself.