One of my hopes in trying to learn watercolor is that I learn to be more free in my drawing style. I've always been a little a.r., which, consequently, also caused me to be reluctant to just sit down and draw. Teaching art has been very good for me in this regard, because as my blog subtitle suggests, I preach to them all the time about making a practice of regular sketching and drawing, and yet, I've been guilty of neglecting this wonderful exercise. I always envied the artists whose journals I perused and found page after page of wonderful sketches, drawings, ideas, collages, etc. I always felt like I had to have a big block of time to accomplish a drawing. I'm a big advocate of drawing from life, too, and so how could I draw without subjects?, I said. But Hannah Hinchman, the wonderful nature artist/journaler, helped change my mind on all that. Her books "A Life in Hand" and "A Trail Through Leaves" are wonderful guides as well as inspiration.
Anyway, so here I am, trying to loosen up and let the watercolor flow, let the pencil glide, and the pen go freely. The tree branch is an illustration from my head, and the dragonfly is actually an 8-minute drawing I did with my 7th grade class one day a couple of weeks ago. I cut it out and glued it on to this page because I didn't want to lose it. I have a dead dragonfly, along with various shells, leaves, sticks and other small heavily textured items to have the students do 5-minute drawings. Mine was 8 minutes because I liked it so I gave it another three minutes to fill in a few details. I added the color after I glued it to the page.
Today Katy had to stay home from school because she was sick, but when we got home I found this little watercolor laying on the coffee table next to where she was convalescing on the sofa -- actually, she was pretty miserable at that point with stomach cramps -- but I'll spare you the details.
