It seems I’ve needed a bit of a break from pastels since Art Walk in July!  I’ve been enjoying some summer-weather time, family time, friend-time, and dart-time (have I mentioned I love to play darts, especially outdoor darts?).

A couple of weeks ago, I ordered a set of Micron Pigma drawing pens  (to add to those I already had) with an eye towards doing some ink drawings with watercolour under paintings for my pastel paintings.  I painted “At Home” and “North Shore, P.E.I. that way, as a bit of an experiment, and both will be posted later.

But it didn’t take long before something inside whispered to me, “leave the pastels off this time….let the ink lines and watercolours show themselves!”  So I did.  I forgot how much I like doing simple illustration.

Here are three ink and watercolour illustrations.  The first is “My Backyard” (a plein-air painting of a part of my backyard), the second is “Sunflowers and Beehive Hat” (from imagination) and the third is a bit of playfulness with Edouard Manet’s  Le déjeuner sur l’herbe – “Sunflowers and Victorine With a Hat”.   (Victorine Meurent was arguably Manet’s favourite model. She appears in his most infamous paintings and was a very accomplished artist in her own right.)

My Backyard
(Ink, watercolour on 140 lb Arches cold press w/c paper   15 x 12)

Sunflowers and a Beehive Hat ink and watercolour on 140 lb Arches cold press w/c paper 5 1/2 x 7 1/2

Sunflowers and Victorine with Hat
Ink drawing and watercolours on 140 lb cold press Arches w/c paper.
7 1/2 x 5 1/2