August Insects
It feels like the golden silk orb-weavers (or “banana spiders”, as they’re more commonly known around here) started building their giant webs earlier than usual this year. They’ve been in place for what feels like a month or two already. Maybe I’m mistaken, but that feels like an early start. We have quite a few around the yard, but I don’t have any photos of those to share.
Instead, here’s a photo of a few Gulf fritillary caterpillars. Each summer, the bright orange Gulf fritillary butterflies come and lay their eggs on our passion vines, which the caterpillars eat until it’s time for them to turn into butterflies, themselves.
I’ve been seeing a lot of large butterflies of a few different types, lately—not to mention many other types of insects. I guess it’s that time of year!
Selvage Quilt Update
Tonight, I finished trimming the 80th block for the on-going low-volume selvage quilt project.
You may remember that the goal is 120 blocks, so there’s still a way to go, but we’re moving along pretty quickly.
Easy Watercolor Snails
This sketchbook page was inspired by this YouTube short. But instead of combining different colors in each snail, I thought this would be a good chance to use the Kuretake “granulating” (and color-separating) watercolors. They naturally break into different colors, when used with enough water, so I chose two of the colors for my snail shells.
After it dried, I doodled the snails with black pen—just a regular pen, this time.
I thought my snails needed a little more oomph, so I went back and painted the bodies grey:
This is an extremely simple project, which is sometimes just what you need or even all you have the time or energy for.
Doodle + Watercolor
One night recently, I just wanted to do some doodling, but I had no idea what to draw. (That happens a lot.) I ended up just starting with the first thing that came to mind—cupcakes.
I’d originally pictured a whole page filled with cupcakes, but after drawing the first row of them, I decided I didn’t have enough ideas for different types of cupcakes, so I changed it up with a second level of cookies, followed by glass jars of candy and cookies.
Later, I went back with watercolor and essentially treated the doodle like a coloring book page. It’s not perfect, but I had fun both doodling and painting it—that’s a lot of enjoyment from just a half a page of watercolor paper and a little paint.
More Doodle + Watercolor
I wanted to repeat the doodle and watercolor process on the other half of that page. (It’s a pad of cellulose watercolor paper that I turned into a block by gluing the other three sides together. I find that dividing the 9 x 12 pages in half gives me a size I’m more comfortable using.)
Once again, I had no idea what I wanted to draw, so I just started with another of my favorite subjects—pumpkins. I added a bird (with a wonky leg) and some berries to fill in the empty spaces.
After that had a chance to dry, I colored it in with watercolor paint. I debated tinting the background with a nice turquoise, but I was getting ready to stop, so just left it like this. I could always go back and do that later, but I doubt I will. This was fine for a fun “something to do”, but I don’t think it’s worth the effort of carefully painting around all those shapes.
That’s all for this time! Have a gif of Mister Frodo looking silly until the next blog post:
