The little sketchbook that lives in my backpack

I bought this little 5x7 inch sketchbook to keep in my backpack, with the hopes that I would do more drawing outside. My friend Michelle and I like to draw together at Brooklyn Botanic Garden sometimes. This past March, the snowdrops were blooming like crazy and we were so happy to see flowers after a really long snowy winter. The witch hazel smelled So Good too. Really hard to draw though.

I mostly fail at drawing in this sketchbook when I'm out and about unless I'm going somewhere just to draw. I managed to get a few pages in while I was killing time in a cafe in Long Island City a few months ago. I'd like to do this more but I don't think I drink enough caffeine or go to enough places to make it a habit.

A few weeks ago I had the privilege to join a group on a botany-focused trip to the New Jersey Pine Barrens. The night before the trip I decided to try studying for the first time in like 20+ years. I pulled up iNaturalist observations from the time and area where we were going, and cross referenced with an app I bought called "FloraQuest" (it's really useful, worth it if you're trying to get better at identifying plants in your area). From there I figured out what we were most likely to see and did some little drawings and made a few notes. Some of it was more of a wishlist. I slept horribly that night and most of the binomial nomenclature had dissolved from my brain by the next morning. Still, it helped, and since the sketchbook lives in my backpack, it came with me and helped me in the field.

We ended up seeing a lot of what I thought we might, including several species of carnivorous plants and rare orchids, plus some weird fungi and tons of very ripe blueberries.

I also got sucked into the bog up to my knee which was unpleasant and kind of scary. I don't think I'm supposed to make this my photo blog or anything so I'll just link to my iNaturalist account where I put pictures of everything I saw.

My perennial issue as an artist, and in life in general, is that I have a hard time picking one thing to focus on. For example, sometimes I think I want to make botanical illustration but there's something about doing straight technical work that bugs me, like how can I make this do something that couldn't be accomplished by taking a photo, how can I make this feel like Art, where can I insert a little fairy creature? I always feel happiest when I'm making comics, and if I treat everything like comics I feel more confident in my work. I might have more to say about this later, it's something I'm still trying to figure out. I'll end my first Garden Variety post with these two drawings I made for the New York Mycological Society spring newsletter. I went through the photos I took on two walks with the group in the Bronx and Staten Island last year and drew a sort of collage of what we saw, from the point of view of something living on the forest floor.