Continuing in the Garden...

Last week I posted a few doodles of snails, inspired by a recent book that I finished reading. These last few days I decided to continue to look for critters that would be found in a garden or in the wonderful nature that surrounds us, and paint them, cut them out, an do a collage or compilation of the things I have found.
I like the idea of painting a myriad of little creatures and then compose them on a paper in various ways until you get the layout that you want.  Here's one of the layouts which captures a frog from this week, a snail or two from last week, and a couple new critters and plants.

I think I'll take a break from the envelopes for a while and play with my nature "cut-outs" for a bit.

This reminds me of when I was a little boy sitting in Sunday School classes and having the teacher put little cut outs of people on a flannel board...maybe I'm longing for Sunday School, or for more youth....I could probably use a good dose of both.

These are all done with gouache and outlined with pen and ink.

Here's the pile of critters from the past couple of weeks that I'm still trying to figure out how to compose.  So much fun!

Inspired by "Crawdads"

A few days ago I finished reading "Where the Crawdads Sing" by Delia Owens.  The book was an interesting read, and the story was quite a page turner.  There were a few scenes that were a bit too elicit for my liking, but aside from that, I was really quite intrigued by the story.  But equal to the story was a fascinating main character who spent most of her time collecting living things, or memento's of living creatures in the nature that surrounded her.  Not only would she collect, but she would catalog, and paint things to help her remember what the memento pertained to.  I was intrigued with some of the descriptions of what she collected, painted and how she put them together.  Consequently, I chose to do a little snail and shell collecting and doodling to satisfy my "fix" for a little nature gathering.

This is all done in gouache with a pen and ink outline.