Spring Comics

 

4/15/24 Maple Leaf neighborhood

Just as I was lackadaisical about keeping up with my sketch journal last year, I was also lax in doing as much nature sketching as I had intended to. Now that spring is here, it’s the best time to say it again: I want to do more nature sketching. And maybe this year I’ll actually do it and not just say it!

Dazzled by all the color I saw on my walk one morning last week, I picked out a few blossoms to sketch. Since the comic book layout I learned from Drewscape has been working well with my urban sketches, I thought it would be fun to try it with nature sketches, too. There’s no sense of narrative or story, of course; it’s more of a visual structure. Simply drawing a box around a couple of flowers immediately designs the page better than blossoms randomly floating on the page. I also sketched one Kwanzan cherry tree from a distance to balance the close-ups of the other three vignettes – another tip from Drewscape taken from comic book design.

Looking again at this page, I take back what I said about a lack of narrative: It’s about taking a walk on a lovely morning warm enough to stop four times for small sketches filled with color. If that’s not a story of spring, what is?