Spring has arrived with some sunshine and the early bumblebees, and here are a couple of pictures to celebrate. The first ones are some small and simple studies of bumblebees and buttercups/poppies/nasturtiums  which I’m putting up for a bee exhibition for Friends of the Earth via Artfinder

the top poppy picture is a first stage of this kind of watercolour and really I think I prefer this sort of looseness and lack of definition, but I succumbed to more description; old habits being hard to break! I’m thinking greetings cards as I do these, and they do need to be less abstract.

The ones below are the two stages of a textile design, possibly to be used for gift wrap; you can see that the second stage adds very little information, but just enough to make the bees look three dimensional. There’s very little actual work involved but it takes some concentration to maintain the delicacy.

And in the picture below four of the images above are “stitched” together in the Procreate App on the ipad and another bee added here and there to fill in any gaps. In my past incarnation as a textile designer I used to be good at doing repeats, but was never shown this neat method of working out a simple brick repeat. Take a look, its magic, and will keep creative kids happy for hours!

https://www.skillshare.com/tutorials/5-Steps-to-Illustrating-a-Repeat-Pattern-by-Hand/59?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=video&utm_campaign=2015-10-28-buzzfeed-DIY-repeat-patterns