My husband was cleaning out a cabinet last weekend and found a small sketch book. He gave it to me and I thought I would try to fill it up with sketches of wild flowers. I really enjoyed sketching flowers last summer for my stitch class homework so I thought I would do more. I want to use the sketches as a basis for small free motion embroidery pieces.

Here’s the sketch book. It is much smaller than I’m used to and is only 3 1/2″ by 5″. It doesn’t have very sturdy paper so I can’t put much water on the pages but it works very well for the water brush that I use which doesn’t put out much water. I sketch in pencil, draw over the lines with a permanent ink pen, erase the pencil and then color in with Inktense pencils by Derwent. After coloring in, I use the water brush to wet the ink a tiny bit.

I’ve only gotten a couple of sketches done. I thought I would concentrate on wild flowers that bloom in Montana. This first one is an Indian Paintbrush. We have lots of these around the woods by our house.

This is the sketch of Lupines. I have tons of these around the house and in my flower beds. Most of them I haven’t planted and they just keep spreading. The deer eat them occasionally but usually only when there’s nothing else to eat. I have to go to a continuing education class this weekend but I’m planning on doing some nuno felting tomorrow.  I’ll let you know how it goes!