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Wednesday 20 May 2020

Inspired by Nature-Vignettes

I have been enjoying the on-line course Inspired by Nature. We have been encouraged to walk around our neighbourhood and our own gardens and collect any leaves, flowers or seed pods that we find on the ground.



It is Autumn here in Australia and so there are beautiful red, yellow and orange leaves everywhere. It is really magical and I often wonder what other walkers think when they see me taking photos of the trees.

When we come back with our leaf collections, we are encouraged to make some simple vignettes with them, photograph them and add them to our sketch books.

Here are some of the vignettes that I made. Tara Axford, our tutor suggested that we use the Moment app to take photos of our Vignettes but it is only available on iPhones. It has very easily adjustable features especially if trying to take a photo at night or in poor light.






The idea of making these little vignettes is to make us look more closely at them, to take in the colours and textures and make a memory of our walking experience.

We were encouraged to download a colour app on our phones called Palette Republic. I can't remember if the app was free or under $2. The Palette Republic app finds the colours in our photos and you can also print them out if you want.








I am just using the basic beginner colour swatches; if you pay some extra money you can get much more comprehensive colours, but I haven't felt the need to pay for those.

I am enjoying these exercises so much that I have decided to take it further and am trying to draw and label the different leaves and seed pods and maybe colour them as well.
I am in the very beginnings of doing this but I want to be accurate with the leaf shapes, not just draw a generic leaf. This means that I have to know the tree that the leaf comes from!!

This led me to download another app onto my phone. It's called Picture This. This app cost me $29.95. I could use it for free for a week to try it out and I loved it, so paid the money. It is just like the cost of buying a book anyway!

You take a photo in the app and they tell you the common name as well as the proper botanical name and show you other pictures of the same tree, bush or flower and then tell you all the details if that's what you want to know. I usually just want to know the name and move on.

All the photos are stored in the app and it also keeps a summary of the photos and records when you took them. I took a couple of screenshots.




I never would have thought that I would be doing this or even be interested in doing this. Will this lead to anything or is it just a distraction from the current virus lock-downs? Time will tell.

I have so many things on the go that I have to timetable my activities. So, I have to say today I will work on my nature and printing exercises. Tomorrow, I will do some more work on my latest quilt, the next day I will work on quilting my other quilt; and so, it goes on. Honestly, I need another year of lock-down.

Bye for now,
Linda

5 comments:

Robbie said...

Your vignettes are wonderful! Thanks for info on the apps...will have to look up the color one...that sounds very interesting! Thanks again!

Robbie said...

Appears MOMENT isn't for Anroid phones...boo hoo.

Linda Steele said...

Hi Robbie,
Moment isn't available on Android yet but there is an app called Filmic Pro that is really good apparently

Magpie's Mumblings said...

Nature vignettes look like a fun diversion and serve the additional good of paying more attention to your surroundings when you're outside. Most of us don't even notice the little things that really do deserve our attention. I'm certainly guilty of that and have to learn to pay more attention. I knew about the color finders but didn't realize there was an app for identifying plants.

Linda Steele said...

So true, magpie Mumblings, I've been walking around thinking about my latest project for the last few years and have forgotten to take notice of what is going around me, nature wise that is.