Inside the Art Studio: Vol 1

Hello friends! 

With so much going on at the same time in my little art studio, I thought it would be more fun to show you what I am working on behind the scenes and what I am inspired by through video every so often. These will be quick, casual videos that I plan to create and send to you about once a month to keep you informed on how my art is progressing, what's inspiring me at the moment, and what's growing in the garden. I hope you enjoy seeing inside my studio a little bit more! If you're already subscribed to my newsletter, then you will automatically be sent the videos as they are posted. If you would like to sign up, you can do so at the bottom of this page. If you would prefer to read, you can scroll down to the transcript/blog post below. Without further ado, here's "Inside the Art Studio: Vol 1"!

Transcript:

Hi there! I have some updates for you that I thought it would be easier to share with you via video rather than just a blog post, because there's lots of things to see.

Most of you know my work is grouped into two separate categories: landscapes and botanical illustrations. You might have heard me mention before that one of the big projects I'm working on right now is a whole series of artwork that is inspired by a really awesome trip my husband, Kevin, and I took to Ireland a couple years back. I'd dreamt of going to Ireland for a long time, so it was really amazing to finally fly across the ocean and land on the patchwork of brilliant green fields, dotted with sheep. In a way, it sort of felt like coming home. We rented a car and road tripped around the entire country. It was a really great way to explore some of the more wild locations.

I knew when I was there that I needed to create a collection of artwork that really captured the experience of what it felt like for me when I was discovering these wild locations for the first time. I also knew that this series of artwork needed to be bigger and better than what I had done before. It needed to kind of stretch the boundaries of what I was used to, it needed to be on a larger scale, and it needed to be more immersive. The way I plan on doing this is by creating almost like a 3-D watercolor painting and I'm doing that by taking each element of the scene, painting them on separate pieces of paper, cutting them out, and then layering them so that it almost gives the illusion of three dimensionality.

So what you see behind me is one of 2 pieces that I've been working on all winter. You can already see where I've cut them out as separate layers. This is still very much a work in progress but I thought I'd give you a behind the scenes glimpse. The idea is that this will be one of 2 pieces called a diptych. That is 2 separate pieces that are meant to be hung and viewed together as one collective piece. I'm using that because I think it will really help give off how sprawling that coastal landscape really was. There will be more to come on that later.

If you've been following me since last year, then you'll know that gardening is one of my biggest hobbies. It inspired me to create a whole series of artwork that I called "Homegrown 2020". I basically painted the flowers and vegetables that I grew in my own garden and it become sort of a visual journal of how I was spending my time in isolation during the pandemic. I'm really proud of this work and loved it so much that I'm doing it again this year. This is part of why I wanted to do a video update; I wanted to show you the progress of the garden throughout the year and show you behind the scenes of how I create my art.

Right now it's time to thin the seedlings so that they have room to grow and it's really reminding me of this time last year when I was so inspired by the shape and the color of my tomato clippings that I arranged them into a design on the table and I created a colored pencil drawing of them.

That's about it for now! I hope you enjoyed the behind the scenes of the studio and I'll be back with more later.