I am inspired by nature, I look to draw from nature and ground myself amongst the world around me. I love watching Blue Planet, I find it so calming and the incredible intricacies of the sea amaze me. There is a whole world down there we know so little about, and it is so much fun to draw from.
I decided to start my sketchbook with these drawings because it was what I wanted to draw in the moment. I see us as being a part of this world and I think it is important to appreciate and take a moment to see the world around us, a world we are very much intertwined with. I saw how one small change can have a huge impact.
I told a few people what I saw in Blue Planet 2 E5 Green Seas because it resonated with me so much. Sea urchins can scrape off every vestige of algae from a rock, their spines are needle-sharp. Sea urchins have the ability to swarm and can eat entire forests of kelp, leaving behind vast barrens along the pacific coast of North America. Urchins are among sea otters favourite delicacies, but in the past, they were hunted so intensely for their skin they came close to extinction. With them gone, many kelp forests were replaced with urchin barrens. SEa otters are now protected and many of the kelp forests are recovering now the sea otters are eating urchins again. In some remote areas, there are now enough sea otters that they form huge rafts, something that hasn’t been seen in over a century.
This resonated with me because it shows how everything affects everything, something that has been in my thoughts for a while. Everything is linked, intertwined and change is happening all the time. It is important to think about the impact we have, and how we exist as a part of this world. I want to read The book by Alan Watts because he talks about the idea of who is self and how we grow into this world; “the ocean waves and the universe peoples”.
At Sara Lavelle’s workshop I looked through one of the artbooks and found the artist John Lessore. I like how some of his paintings capture the shapes and movement of the human form and found drawing from them very expressive. I enjoyed drawing them as androgynous and abstract figures with gentle but confident poses. I particularly liked drawing the figures interacting in pairs, but feel like I need to have my characters interact more with one another in my drawings as they can be very seperate from everything else happening on the page.
I want to draw more from dancers because I love the movement in my drawings, and find they flow and express this movement naturally and it can be fun to refine the composition of limbs – often I just draw characters and let my pen take me where I want in the moment.
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