Field Notes & Shark Week for Stephanie - Round 3

I've been working on and off since Labor Day weekend on Stephanie's Mole, and I have to say that except for one spread and one page I did while on nearby field trips, there is not a lot of commonality among my pieces. This first one I call "Shark Week." It incorporates a doodle I did of my feet with a photo my husband once took of a shark at the local biopark. We don't have cable television, but I was glued to Shark Week this summer when I caught it at the hotel I was staying.

For this drawing, I pasted a bit of card stock on the back and then gently cut the outline of the toes as the top. That allowed me to slip in the photo of the shark, so that it adds depth. I loosely glued in the photo--hope it doesn't fall out. I wanted Stephanie to be able to replace it with other photos if she wished.

This is the first image I did in Stephanie's Mole. It was inspired by my teen-age daughter's obsession with elephants. She has elephant jewelry, elephant clothing, elephant knick-knacks. I think elephants must be in style because once I started paying attention to them, I noticed that elephants really were everywhere.

My daughter's name is Daisy--hence, the elephant and daisies. I'm glad she loves elephants because I love them, too. Such gentle creatures.

For this elephant, what I had fun with was the textures and patterns. I've used these in many other drawings.


The next three drawings I did are all what I call "Field Notes." Over the past month I had the opportunity to join my 12-year-old on two Science field trips. While the kids did water testing, I was free to do whatever I wanted and so I drew in Stephanie's Mole. I love old botanical drawings, and while my plant drawings aren't anything like the ones I love, they were the inspiration for these.

The first two are a spread. The third stands alone.






And the last two pieces are not anything like the others. For one of my pages I opted for a simple message. :) Finally, something simple for my collaboration with Gretchen. By the time I got to this my hand was hurting from detail work, so I went with a few broad strokes. (Oh, and speaking of collaboration, I didn't realize until after I'd put this in the mail to Gretchen that the scanned version of my collaboration with Mike hadn't come through. Hence, no photo of that piece.)