Blacking out the background and the addition of some collaging

Paper cuts of leaves in my garden – starting to play with the shapes in Photoshop

Natural ink drawing of a young chilli plant

More natural ink sketches from the garden

An unusual pop of colour this week thanks to a bookmaking session with the UWE Artists’ Book Club. The prompt was “These books are rubbish” – we were encouraged to make a book in an hour from materials that would otherwise be thrown away. I chose a Sarah Raven catalogue destined for the recycling bin, and folded one page down into a single sheet T book. I then coloured in all of the backgrounds with a black Sharpie pen, before collaging on a few more flowers and excerpts of the rather florid text. A spine made from another page of the catalogue holds it together as a booklet. I chose dahlias because I’m growing them for the first time this year, and I was suckered in by their bright colours in the catalogue in the depths of the last lockdown winter.

I enjoyed making some papercuts of leaves in the garden, and have scanned these in to start playing around with different colours and compositions in Photoshop. I think some of them would also make good rubber stamps, so that’s something to add to the ‘to do’ list…

The weather here in the UK is unseasonably cold at the moment, and as a result I‘m sharing my bedroom with all my young chilli plants before it’s warm enough to re-home them in the greenhouse. I noticed that they had rather dramatic silhouettes, so I drew one of them with natural ink. I also continued my quick garden sketches with white pastel resist and natural ink - it’s good to work quickly without worrying too much about the end result.