Oops, September has already arrived and I thought I had a few more days before jumping into a new and busy month.

But first… sketches!

This month, I collaborated with Karst Goods, sharing my experiments with their woodless watercolor pencils on stone paper.

Then, I virtually traveled to Hawaii with Tj Marston, drawing sea life:

Then I followed Emma Carlisle’s exploration of rivers with images that she used as inspiration for a new book “Time runs like a river”

One more from Tj’s challenge. I couldn’t finish them all, but having lovely references is always fun.

One in the category of “drawing out loud”. Testing ideas, didn’t feel it.

A wildfire painting in the sketchbook, inspired by the disasters in Greece. Sometimes art is my therapy, getting things out of my system.
But rather unexpectedly, this piece reached a few people who were dealing with the destruction of their surroundings, messaging me that they felt this one. Art is an invitation for connection. Some kind of language for when we run out of words.

Back to Hawaii and the not-so-clever choice to open a package of a brand new art material during a drawing session with fast timers.
I thought I’d have a relaxed session by deciding on a limited palette and materials, but then I opened the bag with Artgraf putty. Spoiler alert: I made a mess.
In no time my hands were so dirty that I was finger painting like a toddler by dipping my fingers in water. Strangely enough, this worked great on the Karst stone paper. Despite realizing that my plan went to hell, I did have a great time. And I will certainly experiment more with the putty, but probably not when timers rush me, and perhaps on bigger paper.

Emma invited us to a flight session with her dad and gosh planes have a lot of buttons and weird angles!

Harriet’s dad showed us around his garden with vegetables and fancy ducks.

And then there was golf.
I didn’t anticipate how difficult the movement would be, how challenging the carts are, or how interesting golf can be to draw!

Note to self: don’t focus so hard on a head that you forget about the size of the body…

I want to practice drawing more dogs:

So, that’s it for August!