Drawing summer school - day 4

Was it yesterday's meditation that brought on my calm state on waking early?

Watering the garden, I took time to smell the roses - well, honeysuckle - and to photograph it

 for drawing on the tube journey -

Today's tutor, Marcus Coates, had us moving between close-up looking at microstructures and making large-scale imaginative structures that scrutinised things natural. Fascinating to hear him talk about his own work. Dawn Chorus (2015) is amazing. A lot of his work draws on bird-ness, but his range is wide - an appearance on Galapagos TV, for instance, in blue-footed-booby costume, giving a bird's eye view of the inhabitants ... with a teeny bit of social critique.

To work. Buddleia through the loupe, against cool blues and greens of my sundress -

 I stole the idea of making an eye-level shelf to hold the specimen -

... and got this far before giving up - the looking back and forth through the lens was so very frustrating. The memory of the exact shape gets lost, somewhere....

(Even with my best spectacles, prisms-in-lenses-wise, my severe astigmatism means that refocussing is active rather than automatic - I have to decide which eye to favour, and find its sweet spot in the varifocals. But hey, I can still see, even if looking is slow.)

I took a few deep breaths and turned the paper over. This photograph

 blown up on my phone, screenshot taken, became a different kind of lens, another type of aid for looking. Cheating? maybe; I don't care. It does lend itself to scrutiny, to discovering "what the thing is itself".

Such a beautiful thing

Even with this in hand I lost my place in the intricate structure, and (like others, it turned out) resorted to absorbing and expressing the principles of the plant's growth -

 I was so impressed with the large scale works others were producing. Impressed and discouraged, actually.

 A second chance - "take another plant..."

There wasn't time to add the spore cases ...

 On to the next!

 ... imagination at work as we transition from this physical world to the imaginative world of the (possible) drawing ...

What I chose to do was outright self-sabotage. Working title, Uphill Struggle -

As the ink ran down, I tried to stop it by blowing (through a straw), which somewhat emulated plant growth - roots and leaves -

The look of it was creepy, horrible... and it hung there, unfinished/unresolved, overnight. My calm mood of the early morning was completely gone. And it was hot hot hot in the big gritty city. Time to go home.

Certainly I wasn't expecting  what happened on the last day.