A zine of garden stories...
Sometimes, the sketching comes first. Sometimes, the gardening comes first. But the garden always has a story for me.
Water, colour is a limited edition zine of sketches following on from my three-year lockdown project Dispatches from a Small World. I drew live from my urban garden, looking through drawing; learning from nature; noticing the garden’s perpetual motion, complicated colours and multitasking plants; using up waste materials. The project grew to over 600 sketches and a blog, now an archive.
The follow-on series of sketches is more visceral in style, still drawn live in the garden or from things brought in, in biro, pencil, fineliner and watercolour on handed-down paper. I've included in the zine the scribbled notes that are never far from the images in my reportage sketching.
For Christmas, I’ve produced a postcard to accompany the zine or be sent as a standalone item, in a format that’s reusable as a bookmark. It's holly, traditional for the holidays, but to get them at their best, its berries have to be drawn in Autumn, before the birds have the lot.
As with all of my personal projects, this one has exercised skills and knowledge that I feed back into my client work. There’s been an exacting process of curating, image editing and looking at format, material, supplier and packaging. And of course, the drawing itself, done often, as a dancer does class.
There are a few copies left for sale – if you would like to buy a copy, please contact me for information.
Printed in England by Ex Why Zed. PDF version available.
