Ready for a Creative Adventure? Join me in my Watercolor Nature Sketchbook! (Plus visit our cats!)

[Music] hi everyone Diane here welcome to my channel hope everyone's well and feeling ready for the adventure that we're going to go on today I'm thinking of painting something in my nature Sketchbook um which I haven't visited for a little while with you although I have been actually visiting it myself and I've done quite a few pictures in here over the time that uh we I've had it so haven't ignored it and um have in painting birds and learning how to paint birds from um John M laws who um whose book I recommend and copying some of his pictures in order to to fill up this book here uh you'll probably recognize these if you've got that book it's a very good way to learn and then of course we did this I did this torus a little while ago and a snail this and this uh I was quite pleased with this one um and uh yeah these are pictures from challenges that we've been doing over the last couple of months so um you might be interested to see them this is the view from my window actually it's not a monk I haven't actually got a real monk there but it it's a statue of St Francis which I sketched I haven't painted it I just left it in ink and uh that's my dog sitting at his feet and he has a little basket in his hands and it's often got Birds standing on it it has water in it and there's our bird feeder behind him and uh yeah so that was fun to draw and then this is some pots that are in our garden as well you don't have to go far I don't even have to leave the room to be able to find something to draw um today I'm thinking of um doing something on here can't quite make my mind up what to do and I was flicking through this book which is an older book um which you might be interested to see if you can track down I'm sure it's not in print anymore but I'm also sure that you could find a secondhand copy somewhere by Sarah Hollis um it's not a book I turn to very often I have to say uh because it's basically about preparing things from herbs and I don't really do that much although I do sometimes now this was published in 1995 and if I can find it online I'll put a link to it um in the description below the video but it does have some nice um drawings paintings and photos in it as you can see that's um uh this is honeysuckle here and Herb Roberts which is very very common here where we live um Roseberry Willow herb that always makes me think of my daughter who loved the name of this plant when she discovered it on one of her walks when she was a little girl and brought it home and said Mommy Mommy Mommy what's this what's this what's it called and I said it's called um I don't know let's look it up and it Gres all along the railway lines in England um along the embankments along the railway lines and that's its name Rose B Willow herb it's a good name isn't it nice long name she's always been interested in nature and plants and things like that and she started when she was about two to ask questions about what was this called and what's that called and so on and so forth um yeah we've got some actually talking about Tam in and seeing this the Fox Glove uh plant if you go to our little um Channel called from the garden if you type in at you know that um curly thing from the garden and go type that into the search box on YouTube and it'll take you to our sister Channel which is where tamin puts all her film of all the things that are going on in our garden which at the moment is mostly rain um and that she's got a very very good little snippet of bees going into the fox gloves earlier on in the year and going in for the pollen and nectar and you know buzzing around this very very nice little bit of film which you might like to see if you're interested in flowers and bees and the like um yeah so this is quite a nice book isn't it I think there's some really good ideas in here and this here yeah there's the Fox Glove again makes me think I might want to paint that again I don't know though cuz that's quite a long Endeavor it's got quite a lot of flowers on it hasn't it and would take me quite a while to do and uh yeah this is I think this is looks like um fennel or something or Dill could be Dill yeah okay so what am I going to do this is a very good question flicking through this book looking for something to grab me and [Music] um pictures of [Applause] gardens some nice roses there aren't there we've got some lovely roses like this and they're not dog roses uh um pink pink ones though well they are very similar actually maybe what I'll do is I'll go and get a little bit of Rose I'll Brave the rain and come in with some Rose and we can have another go at that well maybe maybe not because we've done roses before not that long ago and it is raining rather a [Applause] lot well I think I'm going to do a Roseberry Willow herb why not seems appropriate and I think I'm probably going to have to turn and turn it this way it's nearly finished this book it's nearly finished actually what I'm going to do I'm going to put it like this on an angle and I'm going to do it long like that and I should put my book in front of me up there [Applause] yeah okay so we'll start off by drawing it I [Applause] think or shall I start off with the paint I tell you what I think what I'm going to do I'm not going to do that I'm going to do something different I'm going to find a biggish kind of brush this one here and I'm going to find my pette of Pinks which I keep handy at all times and it also has some green on it too and then I'm going to I stand like an American when I speak like that don't I so I'm going to take some pink with a little bit of uh this one here which is soft white Warm White so this is um shell Pink by Hine and this is warm white by um Michael Harding and I'm going to paint some pale flowers at the top like this and I'm going to add more pink as I go along and drop some pink into the ones that up [Applause] there and then we're going [Applause] to just come down the [Applause] page I was looking at a book earlier on in which the author attempts to describe the way that you can paint petals by using um certain kinds of brush Strokes which is very very difficult to do it's not that it's difficult to do brush Strokes to make petals but it's very difficult to describe how to do it I think and I think honestly [Applause] the best way is to actually just go ahead and do [Applause] it you can't really describe it you have to just go ahead and do it don't you okay so we've gone all that way down there like that and now I'm going to just mix up some sort of golden brown like that for the stem which is in the [Applause] middle okay and we might want another one down here I think just for the it's not in the picture and maybe a small one here for the sake of artistic balance and then we're going to switch to Green um well actually what I'm going to do is sit down for a minute and I'm going to make this a little bit darker a little bit thicker and then we'll switch to green and we want a yellowish green really Golden Green [Applause] and we've got these brownish greenish leaves down the [Music] [Applause] bottom let's find my um there's it [Applause] [Music] g we need [Applause] some padone gold [Applause] so I'm just picking up the paint pointing the brush and then just [Music] dragging like that very difficult to say it but not that difficult to do [Applause] it and I'm making up the colors as I go along using some lovely greens and golds so we'll pop some more green into the stem and there's a few leaves up here as [Applause] well I'm just going to get my book and have a closer look at the picture [Applause] so we need to attach and then we've got little little leaves coming out like that [Applause] [Applause] we bring a little bit more brownish down into the stem and up here we need to do a bit more [Music] [Applause] attachment just lots of little more or less don't have to be particularly you know any anything really just something like that I'm starting to feel cold my hands are going cold luckily I don't have much more to do here [Applause] uh but what I do want to do is I want to do some centers in these flowers and um yeah it should be kind of golden I think that's what they actually have and they kind of come out [Applause] and up here just a few and there's a few kind of just pointed [Music] things at the top there [Applause] and if you wanted to you could of course uh take some darker brown or reddish brown and you can put some veins into your leaves down here so they look more Leaf likee okay and you can put them up here too if you wanted to but you don't want too much detail and then basically really I think that is probably as much as I want to do with the rose Bay Willow her I'll just show you in a bit more detail how little detail we have done and yet that's quite effective isn't it so why don't you give that a go this is the book that I used that's the photo or the painting that I use as my inspiration and um I'll put all the details about all the paints and everything that I used in the description below so I'll let you go and I will see you again soon so bye for now everybody bye-bye [Music] [Music] is