I draw very quickly – gestural sketches that are more about the essence of a thing than its detail. But drawing little creatures also needs me to be still, seeing what lands, noticing how it moves, taking in as much visual information as I can, as quickly as I can, in case they head off before I’ve finished.
The giant sunflower is out, atop six feet of muscular stem. I draw, hoping for bees but spotting only a passing hoverfly. But I sit with it and in a few minutes, these, three bees, three species, two working their way steadily around the flower and a great big furry bumble doing a few flypasts before going in to investigate.
The lemon balm is in flower. It’s popular, one little grey hoverfly so laden with pollen that it stops to wipe the dust out of its eyes.
The fennel is a constant whirl of activity and as I draw, a hoverfly comes in upside down, looking like some prehistoric swamp creature. I need the dark background to describe how it flies, beating wings making beautiful shapes from its tiny, stripey stick of body.
And I’m drawing a rosebud when a yellow hoverfly visits an open rose just above it so at speed, in the seconds it gives me, I swap over my paper and sketch.
All things come to she who waits…
Ballpen, watercolour and fineliner on leftover watercolour paper and waste paper.
Rose sketches from this project are available as greeting cards, from the Garden Museum shop in London and at Hackney Wick Underground.
On my Teemill shop, watercolour and line sketches on t-shirts and tote bags.