Nature Friday

Rain.

Go to work in darkness.

Arrive home in darkness.

I have seen flowering blackthorn from the train window half way between the south coast and London.  It always seems to put on an early show; white and 'bridal' against the still bleak grey/brown background of fallowed fields and denuded hedgerows.

My Nature Friday offering this week is another autumnal one - a leave picked up walking home one night and savored for its mix of colour - green and yellow.

It has been pressed in my diary since then and, remarkably, retained its colour markings.

On 22 January I started a little 'challenge' which I found in the blog 'Not Afraid of Color' - a year's worth  of prompts for a daily sketch (having prompts might make me stick to it).  I hand write daily and like to doodle about with a pencil but have never been able to devote myself to practicing looking at and seeing well enough to draw carelessly.

If you have seen someone draw 'carelessly' you will know what I mean; capturing an essence.

This week I arrived at a prompt to draw an autumn leaf.  Ah - I have just the thing, and taping it on the opposite page I proceeded to create an outline.  The delicacy of recreating the shape, and tracing out the veining with a freshly sharpened HB pencil, struck me for its laciness and I refrained from going on with any of my normal heavy-handed attempts at creating depth and shadows.  There is little of me in this  vignette, all nature's beauty and design.