Fan mail

Hey everyone! Two posts in one day, my goodness.....

But I forgot to tell you about a video a friend of mine made for me. Here's the video, with one of my favourite songs, "Breathless" by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds:

Or follow This link to few it in high quality.

Thanks Giovanni for making this beautiful video for me.

More seeds

Jeroen is home today so I can do a little bit of drawing. I decided to draw a seed head of a fluffy Clematis in my garden. It is Clematis “My Angel”.

I’ve blogged the flower before. But that was a photo. This morning I made a drawing with coloured pencil. A big challenge because the seeds are really fluffy and silky. Very, very light (almost white) coloured. But I was , after a lot of struggles, quite happy with the result. So to show it to you and the rest of the world I decided to scan it and upload it on the Internet. The scanner however couldn’t detect the light, delicate hairy seeds. So I had to take a photo of the drawing. Not a very good photo, but it is better than the scan. Very happy with this little drawing….. Hope you like it too ;-)

But wait! There’s more! I also found a nice looking seed head of an Acanthus mollis in the garden. Not possible to draw it this year but today I made a very nice photo of it. Here it is:

Tiny stuff

I have a ganglion in my right wrist. That's my drawing wrist. Normally a ganglion isn't very painful but in my wrist it is painful. Especially when I have been drawing for a while. So 1,5 years ago I went to my doctor to ask what it was and what he could do about it. He told me what it was and that I could get rid of it by hitting it against the wall or give it a big whack with a phonebook or a bible (in case I had a lot of faith in God's power). But he also said that it wouldn't be a guaranty that it would be gone for good.
My doctor is a very nice man with a great sense of humour. He knows that I draw botanical stuff and he likes my drawings. He therefore thought it would be wise to send me to a plastic surgeon in the hospital in Groningen.

The plastic surgeon (strange name isn't it?) had a look at it and told me it was unusual that it's hurting me so much. So, just to be sure, he told me to get an x-ray. There was nothing on the x-ray. So he told me to get a PET-scan. There was nothing on the PET-scan either. But still he didn’t want to cut the ganglion out of my wrist. He inserted a needle inside my ganglion and removed the glue like substance instead. He hoped it would stay away.
But a month later the ganglion was there again and still painful. So…. I returned to the surgeon. Now he wanted to see an MRI of my wrist.

Sighhhhh……

Ok, so two weeks ago I went to the hospital again to get that MRI. And last week I went to see my surgeon again. He told me that the real problem isn’t in the same spot where the ganglion lump is. But it is more inside my wrist. In the joint of my thumb. Now I have to get a surgery to get it all out. And for that he has to cut around some bones and tendons. He has to cut some tendons too.
The surgery will take place around Christmas time. Yippee! And after that I won’t be able to use my wrist for about 6 weeks.

BUT….. after that I will be able to draw again without pain. At last…..

And until then I only can draw some really tiny stuff. And that’s what I’ve been doing the last weeks. I can show you these two drawings.

One of Clematis seeds (although there are some people who rather think of it as sperm, and others look at it and think of tadpoles). They are the seeds of Clematis viticella “Little Nell” also blogged HERE.
The other little tiny thingy is the small drawing of a Hydrangea “flower” you can see at the start of this post. I want to do some more of those…. They are really very much fun to do.

Calla

Haven't blogged in a while. But I'll make it up by this one. I've been very busy lately. One of the things that keep me busy these weeks is a basic course in Botanical Drawing with graphite pencils. It's a three day course and is in the Nature museum of Leeuwarden.
Yesterday was the second day of the course. The students had to draw flowers. I had a lot of flowers with me for them to draw. Amongst them also Calla lilies. I never did a Calla Lily before and I thought it might be fun to try one. So I made a start yesterday but couldn't work a lot on this drawing because I had to walk around a lot and help the students (which was a lot of fun btw). So today I finished the drawing. And this is the final result: