Drawing from Nature: Blackbird Floral Ring

This dark fellow was drawn last week using the back of another scrap of brittle old wallpaper. Sometimes when I sit down I put all my attention into one drawing and other nights a few come out rapidly in succession. This was drawn in about a minute after finishing the larger patterned wallpaper bird. I

Drawing from Nature: Wallpaper Bird

Yesterday Gayla and I had a rewarding day doing gardening and garden-related errands. As the weather did its current norm — leap-frogging between glorious and tragic — we cut into soil, positioned and repositioned rocks, added and moved plants, decided then undecided, and generally experimented. This is the season you can do that sort of

Grow Write Guild: Creative writing prompts for gardeners

Grow Write Guild #3: Ch-Ch-Changes

Sometimes, when I look back on the photos I take in my garden, I can hardly believe how much transpires within a single growing season. In the springtime I can see the pathways between beds and most of my plants are just a few inches tall. Everything is exposed. By the end of the growing

Drawing from Nature: Star Fisher

I thought I would talk a bit about tools and process. For me, making these drawing is a mixed emotional and technical exercise. When I began spontaneously drawing these made up birds, I made something of a promise to myself that I wouldn’t be too precious about the tools or paper I used, and that

Drawing from Nature: Blue Bird, Happiness

A day belated simple blue bird… The birds I have posted here so far with Gayla’s invitation have been calls for Spring. As of today, while Winter’s legacy does still linger in crusty countryside ditch snowbanks and the occasional flurry of odd styrofoam-like snow pellets, many signs of Spring are happily appearing. The scents and

Grow Write Guild: Creative writing prompts for gardeners

Grow Write Guild #2: Dream Garden

“Memory is a gardeners real palette; memory as it summons up the past, memory as it shapes the present, memory as it dictates the future.” – from My Garden (Book) by Jamaica Kincaid Hello writers. Our first writing prompt was meant to jog memory and take us back to our beginnings (or somewhere nearish), back

Drawing from Nature: Dollar Store Dove

Happy Friday! Say hello to another brashly tinted bird staring steadfast into the crocus-hued days of Spring. This week’s bird comes by the way of the dollar store. Looking at my friend Aaron’s sketchbook I asked him about some bright (bright!) washes of colour he had laid down and was shocked to hear he had

Drawing from Nature: Bird in a Thicket

I felt myself applying the colour to this bird heavily and vigorously as it came to life. I grabbed and scrubbed with the most vibrant pencils I had at hand muttering “[expletive] Winter” while trying to drive warmth into the paper. A lot of us are there right now. We understand and respect that Nature

Send a Seed-filled Card & Celebrate the Arrival of Spring

January of 2011. I was not feeling the New Year vibe. I realized then that for the gardener, the New Year comes when we can once again dip our hands into the soft earth, and I made a resolution to make a big deal about spring when it arrived. And I did. That spring, Davin

Grow Write Guild: Creative writing prompts for gardeners

Grow Write Guild #1: My First Plant

I hope you enjoy this first writing prompt. Future prompts will range from simple to complicated and silly to serious. Some will be straight ahead and others will be surprising and unexpected. Please join the newsletter if you’d like to be notified when prompts are posted to this site. In interviews, I am often asked

Grow Write Guild: Creative writing prompts for gardeners

The Grow Write Guild

Note: You can skip my explanation and go straight to the Grow Write Guild page to find out more. Tell More Stories. Back in December I declared that this was my goal moving forward. The more I know about gardening and the more I write about it, the more I see that it is all

Drawing from Nature: Bird on a Budget

I kept talking Gayla’s ear off about drawing in these hardcover engineering log books I remembered from highschool physics class. Something about drawing on top of those thin blue/green grids pulled at some aesthetic urge in me. This week she found the next best thing in a thrift store, an old bound Blueline ledger. Above