Flowers

My walk on Sunday took me through the rose gardens and they are looking very beautiful. The roses in our garden are pretty good too - but not a patch on the public ones. It's late for roses but the weather has been so cold and wet it is not really surprising. 

The walk was very windy and I took a shortcut to avoid the long exposed stretch by the lakefront. I do not need a mouthful of brown mucky lake water. Pam, scary beaches in Australia are the ones with waves that knock you off your feet and rips that drag you out to sea - it is hard to tell from a photo but that beach had plenty of them! I do not trust a beach at all, especially the suspiciously flat patches, which have currents that can drown you quick as you like ... Uck. But much better to walk along than dodgy coffee-coloured artificial lakes.

Anyway I took inspiration from these flowers and drew another bouquet on the new bamboo paper I bought in NZ. It's lovely - I can't really tell the difference from ordinary cotton paper except it is a little smoother. This picture wasn't a very wet wash one, so perhaps I will try that next time and see how it holds up.

This is a different take on flowers - the background is a wet wash with salt for the white kind of bits. Then draw the flowers in marker pen and basically colour it in from there! I do like colouring-in, it is very soothing after a hard day of work. Even the drawing is quite meditative, although there is no botanical accuracy in those flowers.