Category: Life

My grown daughter lives in New Hampshire and I live in Florida. She had an idea of how we could share some time together. She signed us up for an online drawing class! The class was offered through a local nature conservancy called The Harris Center. (Link at bottom of page.)

We had four weeks of lessons and drew something different each week. Our homework was to find the item to draw.

Each lesson was an hour long and we did Zoom meetings. This was a bit of a learning curve for me, as I had never done a Zoom meeting! But it was fun.

Our first lesson was practicing shadows and gradient color using a pencil. Also, we had to draw a rock.

Florida is not known for having rocks, but I did have a coquina rock, which I chose to draw. Class was at 7:00pm so lighting was not good in my house.

For each lesson we would begin drawing along with the teacher. This took about half the class time. The rock on the left above was done with her, and then I had about 30 minutes to draw my coquina.

Lesson #2: Drawing a Stick

We were drawing from nature, so our second lesson was about drawing a simple stick and showing the shadow. Both sticks, in image 1 were done with the teacher in the first part of the class. The second photo is my stick drawing which is pretty awful….!!

At the start of the lessons we were told to have a good eraser, and I didn’t have one. She used the eraser to create white spaces on the image. I couldn’t do that, so my stick was just dark. And the end looks like a dog head…. haha…!

Lesson #3 Draw a Leaf

The class was full of New Hampshire residents. I was the only outsider. While they were bundled up in sweaters, I was sitting on my porch in a sleeveless shirt with the fan blowing.

It also meant that my gathering of subject materials would be different from theirs.

When it came to drawing a leaf, since it was February and the dead of winter in the north, they had to either draw a dead leaf, or a Beech leaf (I think). They tend to hang onto the trees longer.

Being in Florida, I had loads of leaves to choose from, but I figured I’d draw a dried leaf also. I’m not sure what kind of leaf I collected, but it ended up being my favorite finished drawing of the class.

Lesson #4, and Last Lesson: Draw an Animal

When the teacher mentioned that our last lesson would be drawing an animal, I was not too happy. I’ve never been good at drawing wildlife, and I really don’t enjoy it.

But she had us draw a little hummingbird for starters, and I think mine ended up looking okay.

For my own animal I chose the Sandhill Crane because I had a good photo of one that had come into our yard. It really needed a lot of detail, and I ran out of time.

After each lesson we could share our drawing if we chose. I shared the Crane drawing and explained I was not in New Hampshire and this is why I chose this for my animal.

Once the Zoom meeting was over my daughter and I would share our drawings with each other. We had a lot of fun and it was a good way to do something together while living so far apart.

Read more about the Harris Center for Conservation Education based in Hancock, NH.

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One of the things I dislike about living in Florida is the freezing temperatures in winter. If plants are growing outside in your yard, and in pots, they may need to be covered to survive the cold night.

I had tomatoes, squash and peppers growing. Also one large eggplant plant and some small ones. I was not as worried about the peas and parsley as those things like cool weather.

My vegetables are in raised beds.

My basil is pretty dead, even though I covered it along with everything else.

The good news is that I still have some basil seeds and have planted those for this new growing season.

Christmas was the long stretch of cold weather. Since then we’ve had heat and some coolness, but nothing too bad. As I am posting this, it is March and there should not be any more freezing temps.