Monday 5 April 2010

That look...

I was drawing the last two days. I saw a photo last week on Flickr. One of my contacts uploaded a photo of a girl. It was taken in the 1930s or so. The only thing we know about this girl is her name, Ruth Akin. Her portrait was so impressive, it was on my mind all week and I just had to draw that face. There's something about that girl. Her pose, her mouth... but most of all her eyes. They tell a story and it could be a very big secret or a sad history... maybe she was just tired. I guess we'll never know. It was a challenge to draw her and I made three drawings of her. The final one was the best and I think I captured a bit of her mysterious look. I made her with black coloured pencil to get a very dramatic contrast, like the photo.
I must say that it was a lot of fun to do and maybe I'll do something like this again some day.

Ruth Akin


The other thing I did (today) is going to my nursery to sell some of my cards and to buy some plants for my garden. I bought Astrantia, Pulmonaria, Angelica Gigas and a few other beauties. After collecting all the plants I wanted, I went for a walk in the spring garden of the nursery. Many wonderful flowers already. Helleborus, Corydalis, Scilla and, the best of all, Fritillaria. Not the normal Frits but a very light, creamy yellow, 50 cm high beauty: Fritillaria raddeana. They were planted all over the garden and it looked so wonderful. The weather was cold and very wet but those flowers lightened up the entire garden.

Fritillaria raddeana


Another sweet surprise was a flower I never saw before. Well, not in this colour anyway. It had a name tag beside it and it said: Dentaria heptaphyllos. I couldn't find a lot of Dentaria heptaphyllos on Google though. But I did find out that it's better known as Cardamine enneaphyllos (Drooping Bittercress for normal people).

Cardamine enneaphyllos ~ Dentaria heptaphyllos

It's on my wishlist, just like that Fritillaria (funny that they both have the same pretty yellow I can tolerate in my garden... well... it's not very yellow at all.... Ivory.... Cream.... Lovely). Aaaahhhh.... spring :))

2 comments:

Gillian Mowbray said...

That portrait is incredible. Congrats, Sigrid. x

Jala Pfaff said...

Wonderful drawing! She does have a certain je ne sais quoi, doesn't she?

I love that plant, the one you saw in bloom. Very cool.