More tomatoes

Drawing and painting in the garden is so relaxing I couldn't resist having another go with the tomatoes. These are a much larger variety and have been quite slow to ripen but that may have been because the weather hasn't been great recently. Last week summer arrived with a bang and they've been coming on a treat. And they will be a treat too, if they taste as nice as the last ones!

Sennelier watercolours in a small watercolour Moleskine.

Two bees, or not two bees?

 A large bee spotted outside the Mairie's office. There are some really inventive displays around Geneva which are changed out with the seasons. I particularly like the planting displays on the roundabouts - a life size tractor made out of plants and flowers was one I saw recently but I couldn't stop anywhere near to take the photo!

Spotted in our garden about two weeks ago was this strange looking thing. I thought at first it was a bee but when I Googled it, I discovered it is in fact a Hummingbird Moth.  I thought too that it might have been the one and only time I'd see it but I saw it again yesterday and twice today. It likes these flowers especially. I just loved the colours and the way they blend from yellow to deep red, it never occured to me that it would attract such interesting insects.

It was only after looking at the photos that I could see the length of  it's proboscis. It's curled in the top photo and here I could see why it appeared to be hovering so far away from the flowers. There are tons more buds on the plant so hopefully it will be a regular visitor in our garden.

Chirpy chirpy cheep cheep!

I had something completely different in mind for this page when I began with the woodpecker, but I enjoyed it anyway and it turned out better than I expected. I'm learning to be a lot less terrified of things going wrong although I really need to be more aware of which colours are staining! The top three birds are from Australia and the little dove a very popular bird in Dubai where we used to live.

I used mainly Winsor & Newtons with some Senneliers. On Saunders Waterford HP paper which just handles beautifully.

Our first tomatoes

Growing tomatoes was just one of those things we said we'd do but somehow never got around to. Amazing really, now we know how easy they are to grow. It's fun too, to go out and check the progress - how tall they are getting, how they are ripening and counting how many more there are since yesterday! It's ridiculous how much pleasure it is to grow your own food, I can see us trying a few more things next year.

We haven't had the best start to the summer, with May being the wettest on record, so as this weekend was so hot and sunny, we enjoyed relaxing and pottering in the garden. So just to make it even better, I thought I'd get out my little Moleskine and add another garden sketch to it. The heat made this a fairly quick sketch, which I liked, though at times it dried a little too fast. I added the background and lettering afterwards. (Terrible wonky lettering, I know, but it is a tiny sketch!)

Another thing I haven't got around to is finishing my page of birds. I've been distracted playing with the watercolours again - I hope it's not just me that this happens to! - but I also decided to sort them out and get rid of the colours I wasn't using. Since the last photos I posted, I've added some new Sennelier colours to my collection and I decided to get tubes instead of pans so that I can put the more useful ones together for taking out (in the small palette on the left). The two little pans in the middle are Rose Madder Lake, which is a lovely colour but overpowering, and Cadmium Yellow Orange. I left them to dry overnight then added a bit more to top up and put a deeper yellow on top of the orange by mistake! So I just put it there to use it up, and the Rose Madder I wanted it where it would remind me to be careful with it.

The larger palette contains all the colours that Billy Showell recommends in her books and DVD's and I get along well with them, they are well thought out and I'm getting to know how to mix greens and browns from them. I've added a couple of colours to them partly because I had space but also to include some favourites. Cobolt Green stands out in the bottom row but I love the colour mixes it makes, especially with Indigo. And at the bottom far right, is Permanent Carmine, which I took a dislike to a couple of years ago and put away, took out and played with again, and I really like it. It makes beautiful purples with Indigo so again, I've put it where it reminds me to be careful with it. Apart from that I added a Sap Green a Neutral Tint and a couple of browns. I'm sure I'm going to like this arrangement but one or two things are bound to be taken away and added over time.