Small sketches and paintings

At one stage I churned out a lot of small sketches and paintings, the urge for the brush was greater than trying to plan something big and wonderful! Smile!

Daisies singing in the rain - small watercolour on note paper 4.5" x 6"

Winter fires - small watercolour on note paper 6" x 4.5"

Hibiscus beauty - Black ink sketch and watercolour on small sketch pad 6" x 4.5"

Arum lilies - small ink sketch and watercolour on sketch pad 6" x 3.5"

 Herbs in pots - small ink sketch on sketch pad 6" x 4.5"

I have plenty more, so don't go away!

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Sunrise over No. 84

W&N watercolour and ink sketch in Moleskine 200gsm sketch-book

Sunrise over our smallholding in Tarlton, Gauteng, South Africa. We lived on this particular smallholding for 13 years, and many mornings, weather permitting, I would exit my garden gate and walk around the tall wall surrounding our house to catch a glimpse of the sunrise. Luckily the sunset was visible from my garden and I would often sit on my patio watching the sun setting and listen to the birds getting ready for the night.

Crocodile River

Black Pilot FineLiner ink sketch and W&N watercolour on Amedeo 200gsm

A bank of rocks overlooking the Crocodile River on it's way to Hartebeespoort Dam in the North West Province of South Africa. This area is a favourite spot for river rafting enthusiasts.

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Herbs in pots - Oregano

Bladk ink and watercolour sketch in watercolour sketch pad.

Having herbs in terracotta pots on your kitchen windowsill is an excellent way of always having fresh herbs handy for your cooking.

This aromatic, ancient culinary herb (Origanum vulgare), also referred to as “wild marjoram,” originates from the hilly, Greek countryside, and is now grown all over the world. Its pungent, spicy, slightly bitter flavour pairs well with almost any vegetable preparation.

Herbs in pots - Lemon thyme

Ink and watercolour sketch in watercolour sketch pad.

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Having herbs in terracotta pots on your kitchen windowsill is an excellent way of always having fresh herbs handy for your cooking.

In cooking, lemon thyme (Thymus citriodorus) delivers the best of both worlds. It has a soft herbal thyme flavour along with a subtle essence of lemon, all without any of the bitterness we sometimes get from regular thyme. It pairs well in everything from salads and vegetable dishes, to meat, and fish.

Lemon thyme is also used for the following :

• relieving muscle spasms
• has anti-aging properties
• immune system
• easing digestion
• easing a tight chest
• constant coughing
• relieving asthma
• promotes relaxation
• laryngitis
• gastritis

The Dragonfly and the Daisy

 Black ink sketch on Bockingford

After spending several years under water in fresh water, the Naiad (Dragonfly larvae, about 2cm in length) emerges, crawling up a plant stalk, usually at night, as a fully grown Dragonfly (order Odonata). They may be on the wing for just a few days or weeks and are fast, agile fliers, sometimes migrating across oceans, and are often found near water. I’ve watched them emerging from my wildlife pond many a time and am always amazed at the beauty that comes from such a voracious (and ugly!) little predator, capable of catching small fish twice their size.

Bushveld tranquility

Artline200 Fine-point Black ink pen and W&N watercolour in my Moleskine 200gsm Nature Journal

Since moving to the North Coast of KZN from Gauteng, I have these flash-backs of bushveld life. I try not to live in the past, but let's face it, spending 70 years of your life in a bushveld area is not to be sneezed at. I really do miss fields of waving savannah, Highveld trees and all the animals and insects that make their home there. 

The sketch above is a memory of long summer days spent fishing with my father when I was a kid and just generally revelling in a summer in the Bushveld.

The Limpopo river, the second largest river in Africa, flows in a great arc, first zig-zagging north and then north-east, then turning east and finally south-east. Then it serves as a border for about 640 kilometers (398 mi), separating South Africa to the south-east from Botswana to the north-west and Zimbabwe to the north. There are several rapids as the river falls off Southern Africa’s inland escarpment. In fact where the Marico River and the Crocodile River join the name changes to Limpopo River. The waters of the Limpopo flow sluggishly, with considerable silt content. Rainfall is seasonal and unreliable: in dry years, the upper parts of the river flow for 40 days or less.
- Info Wikipedia

Herbs in pots - Coriander

Ink and watercolour sketch in watercolour sketch pad.

Having herbs in terracotta pots on your kitchen windowsill is an excellent way of always having fresh herbs handy for your cooking.

Coriander (Coriandrum sativum) is an extremely popular herb that is used extensively and liberally in Indian, Thai, South African and Middle Eastern cuisine.

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• Use in all types of curries, pickles, chutneys and sauces.
• Sprinkle over fresh salads.
• Use to flavour soups, carrot and coriander is quite popular.
• Use to flavour home-made bread, waffles and scones.
• Coriander is used as an ingredient for some cakes and biscuits including gingerbread.
• Use to add flavour to creamed cheese or mayonnaise.
• Use to garnish meat, fish or vegetable dishes.
• Use in meatballs, meat or vegetable burgers and other home-made dishes.
• Add to stocks and gravies.
• Use in marinades, particularly for meat and fish.
• Coriander goes very well with mushrooms.
• Use to spice up stir-fries and bland vegetables such as spinach.

Herbs in pots - Parsley

Ink and watercolour sketch in watercolour sketch pad.

Having herbs in terracotta pots on your kitchen windowsill is an excellent way of always having fresh herbs handy for your cooking.
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It’s easy to write parsley off. Parsley (Petroselinum crispum) is just the requisite garnish that decorates plates at fancy restaurants. Right? Wrong! Parsley is a popular culinary and medicinal herb recognized as one of the functional food for its unique antioxidants, and disease preventing properties.

Rose of friendship

Black ink sketch and watercolour  on a sketch pad

Long associated with beauty and perfection, red roses are a time-honoured way to say express love and affection. Whether it’s for a birthday or just to express appreciation for someone, there’s no better way than a red rose to express your feelings.

An African Moon in December

Black Pilot Lettering pen ink sketch of a full moon over my garden in Tarlton, Gauteng, South Africa

Sketching again...

Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth,
And ever changing, like a Joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?
- By Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

Echeveria imbricata

Ink sketch and watercolour in Moleskine Watercolour sketch-book – 8″ × 5″

I’m absolutely mad about Echeverias and have a small section in my garden set aside just for them. My collection started off in the late 70’s when my father gave me three rosettes in a pot, which I transplanted into a rockery and soon they covered the whole area. Since then I have given away hundreds to friends, the geese got out of the pond area and made a hearty meal of them and they’ve survived many of the severe frosts we get in our area.

Autumn reds

Black ink sketch with colour wash in Moleskine 200gsm watercolour sketch-book

Autumn – The colourful month of May filled with red daisies and orange leaves.

Spring splendour

Black ink sketch with colourwash in Moleskine 200gsm watercolour sketch-book

It is somehow extremely satisfying doodling with ink and colour!

Spring is always a celebration of new light green leaves on the Celtis africana (Stinkwood tree) and sunny Euryops daisies.

Summer Cosmos

Black ink sketch and colour wash in Moleskine 200gsm watercolour sketch-book.

Summer goes hand in hand with fields of Cosmos flowers every November to March, covering the landscape in pinks, cerises and purples.

Morning cup of coffee

The morning cup of coffee has an exhilaration about it which the cheering influence of the afternoon or evening cup of tea cannot be expected to reproduce. 

 ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., “Over the Teacups,” 1891

Ink sketch on Visual 200gsm watercolour paper, using a Pilot Calligraphy Lettering pen (Black) and a Pilot black Fineliner for finer work. 

Sketching has always been one of my great passions, but of late I’ve been neglecting it in favour of doing mostly watercolours. I’ve decided to go back to basics and sketch a lot more.

Sketching forces you to look in more detail, and ask yourself what you actually see. You’ll end up seeing a lot more than you would otherwise. There’s something about holding a pen or pencil in your hand that gets your creative juices flowing in a much different way than holding a brush. When you get used to sketching, the movements of your hand become much more fluid and it becomes really easy and natural. The more you practice, the better you will become at sketching.

Here I’ve sketched one of my pet hates – tea or coffee in THICK hospital-like cups! (Sketched at the Krugersdorp Private Hospital, Krugersdorp, Gauteng, South Africa).

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Keeping a Journal

Ink sketch and watercolour

Journaling is the process of regularly writing your thoughts, your dreams, milestones, events and feelings down on paper and, these days, virtually on blogs. There are many different kinds of journals you can choose to keep but it is a powerful process that provides the opportunity to explore things in a measured way. It can also be fun to look back and discover how far you have come!

"A common symptom of modern life is that there's no time for thought, or for letting the impressions of the day sink in," says Thomas Moore. Setting aside a block of time, however brief, to freely express thoughts and feelings is psychically healthy.

Journals also affirm the value of our lives, preserve our memories and dreams, and help to pin-point emotional patterns. Writing about problems is a great way to work them out, and recording negative emotions is often akin to dropping them altogether.

Keeping a nature journal, for example, is a wonderful way to become spiritually centred. We are rewarded for the attention to detail and patience this practice requires with deepened understanding of what it means to be human and alive and a part of Creation. What you decide to put in your journal is a personal choice. Nature journals can be anything from field notes, which limit themselves to objective descriptions of what the writer has observed, to fully developed poems, stories, or essays in which the landscape is a major character.

You may want to draw or paint in your journal as well as write in it or to fill its pages with photographs or pressed flowers. Experience the natural world through fresh eyes! Keeping a nature journal is your most powerful ally in crafting the kind of life you want.

 One of my Nature Journals - here I used a Feint

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An African moon

Black ink sketch using Pilot Calligraphy Lettering pen and Artline200 black fine-point pen on DaleRowney 220gsm heavy-duty sketching paper

It was full moon last night and when I switched off the garden lights, my garden was bathed in a golden glow… and I could’ve sworn I saw the fairies hiding under the mushrooms... 

One website explains the full moon thus, “The moon and sun are on a line, with Earth in between. It’s as though Earth is the fulcrum of a see-saw, and the moon and sun are sitting on either end of the see-saw. Thus as the sun sets in the west, the full moon rises. When the sun is below our feet at midnight, the full moon is highest in the sky. When the sun rises again at dawn, the full moon is setting.”

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Sketching more

MOST of the earth is beyond the walls of buildings, and is untouched in appearance by the art of the sculptor or the painter.

A daily practice of sketching and painting gives you a chance to exercise the big three P's - practice, practice, practice!


Quick landscape sketch with my Parker Fountain Pen, black Quink ink and some colour added - done in my Moleskine Folio (A4) 200gsm Watercolour sketchbook

Sketching has always been one of my great passions, but of late I've been neglecting it in favour of doing mostly watercolours. I've decided to go back to basics and sketch a lot more. Sketching forces you to look in more detail, and ask yourself what you actually see. You’ll end up seeing a lot more than you would otherwise. There’s something about holding a pen or pencil in your hand that gets your creative juices flowing in a much different way than holding a brush. When you get used to sketching, the movements of your hand become much more fluid and it becomes really easy and natural. The more you practice, the better you will become at sketching.

She is Mother Nature

A daily practice of sketching and painting gives you a chance to exercise the big three P's - practice, practice, practice!

Black ink sketch and colour wash on Bockingford 300gsm

LOVE HER AND CHERISH HER

Nature has so much beauty, so much to teach us. Mother Nature has inspired the greatest poets of all time to write unbelievable prose.

Nature, Nature,
Please don't go away...
We over polluted and any day, now, any day
It might die forever
And just go away
We are transmitting from the future
2115, I think
We lost count at 2079
When the world was on the brink
Look Larry
Look Sue
Look Harry
It’s 2011 according to the machine…
Those trees are green!
The sky is blue!
The fields are beautiful
And even the people are, too!
Look everyone!
Look at the screen!
Look at when nature, nature
Was such a fragile creature
With such delicate green features
By John Murray