Pens, drawing and flowers

 Recently for my birthday a friend gifted me a journal and a pen. I have loved these pens from the first time I saw them, she didn't know that, and I doubt I would have gotten one for myself; but now I am the happy owner of this one, The Wren from Tom's Studio.

I promised to bring the journal and pens with me and try some ideas in the journal. I am notoriously bad at using journals, but I liked its already worked into look and figured I could work with that rather than simply blank pages.

The pen uses these nibs that you can replace depending on what colour ink you are using; as well as these soak-it-up cylinders which draw the ink from the bottle and can be changed in and out. Quite a fun way of doing pens! I  will have to see what other colour inks I have here and try them out.

And so in line with my commitment to use the pen in the journal I did some blind contour drawings o f a jug of daffodils.

I like blind contour drawing because there is no pressure - you just look at the object and draw the contours and don't lift your pen and who knows what will happen. I was chuffed that she could see daffodils when I showed her!

In typically trepidatious fashion I started with the card that had been in an envelope fold on one of the pages thinking I could throw it away if needed (why oh why do we censor ourselves so much???) and then overcame myself and drew another version straight on the page. Well done me. First actual page in the journal committed to!

I am going to try and do something in the journal with the pen each week, and see where I go.

And just because daffodils...

The late varieties are so different!

A single tulip contemplating will it open further, or retreat? It retreated when it started to hail yesterday, but today is pondering emerging once again...