The tentative summer weather here in the UK has allowed me to experiment with creating some outdoor mindfulness art. I thought I would share a few pages from a sketchbook I’ve been scribbling around in this summer. This is me trying to tap into my creative inner child. Trying not to care about the outcome and just seeing what happens with the combination of a few pen marks, colours and doodles. For more on this topic, see my Mindfulness Art Blog Archives.
Birds in the garden
You know that feeling you get when you’re watering your plants of an evening and it’s like there’s someone watching you…
It’s blackbird baby! Just sitting on a branch in the hedge.
Bird art
One of the things I’ve enjoyed this year while tending to the flowers in the garden is the abundance of birdy activity. I even made a blackbird friend earlier this summer – she was very interested whenever I was digging anything. Hopping around me within reaching distance, sampling the worms and insects uncovered. She got so close, it was wonderful – one time she even perched next to me on my gardening bucket. It made me feel like I was in a Disney film.
This is her, foraging amongst the flowers:
And this is her with blackbird baby:
It was amazing watching this scene actually – blackbird baby sat in the same spot, on the same branch for a whole evening – he was still there when I went to bed. Talk about being in the present moment!
In fairness, I don’t think it could fly anywhere. It was all bobbly and crinkly looking and didn’t seem to have any substantial wing feathers. And every now and again, my blackbird friend came back to stuff its beak with a wide selection of garden-sourced delicacies. I felt privileged that she trusted me enough to let me stay and watch for a while, from only a couple of metres away.
Nature shows us the way in mindful practices.
A quick note on my other garden birds…?
Meet Plucky, Clucky and Ducky, my live-in house guests:
These three are less animated than the other birds in my garden, but they all have colourful personalities.
Art materials used
The process for each of the pages was fairly similar. I found that keeping to this method helped reduce the tendency to overthink. This is an exercise in mindfulness art after all – so the emphasis is trying to focus on what marks/colours/shapes feel right in the moment.
Basically, I built up a bit of a background with Brusho first. If you haven’t come across Brusho before it’s like a pigmented powder which is activated by water. You can either wet the page first and then shake some Brusho powder over it, or spray the water on afterwards. I combined a bit of both.
Watching this dry (fairly fast!) in the sun was fun – it kind of moves around and evolves so you never know exactly what it’ll end up looking like before it’s completely dry.
After the Brusho layer is dry, I would scribble some shapes in pencil – whatever I was looking at, or remembering, or feeling inspired by. And then I emphasised these lines with my Uni Pin Fineliners just keeping it really loose.
For a bit more controlled colour, I used my watercolour pens to fill in some of the shapes. You have to work quite fast with watercolour pens as the paint (ink?) dries quite quickly, so quick water activation is important.
And then the ‘final stage’ of the process is free-for-all doodling with a fairly random collection of pens and pencils, including some white Posco markers and metallic markers from Hobbycraft. This induced a very meditative state where I was just adding little shapes and marks and dots for the fun of it. And sometimes layering up some bits of text quoted from books and the internet if it felt relevant.
Final thoughts
So there you go, I hope you enjoyed exploring some of my garden inspired mindfulness art. I would recommend giving it a go if you want to have a bit of relaxation and unleash your inner-creativity while doing so. Fingers crossed the sun stays for just a little bit longer!
And remember to be kind to yourself today.