Something is always blooming in Seattle and my small garden offers a constant parade of subjects for drawing and painting. Much more fun than weeding!

This photo taken in late fall, looking down from above a large ceramic planter, shows fading heuchera and Japanese forest grass leaves above a cascade of flowering rosemary. I liked the composition enough to use as the basis for a watercolor sketch.

I’d recently found some dusty art supplies that had been tucked away for years in various parts of the house. Among them was a set of watercolor pencils that I don’t recall buying and didn’t really know how to use. The colors were not impressive to draw with, but when I brushed water over the pigments, they became more vibrant as they melted and blended together. These could be interesting.

I used a grid system to transfer the design from the photo to a larger sheet of paper. Treating each square of the grid as a small abstract on its own, lets me concentrate on each section’s shapes, values, colors and textures. The grid marks can be erased, painted over or treated as design elements, as I did in this color sketch.