My knee started to go on a Manning Park hike up the Three Brothers, so I settled myself down amongst the mosquitos with my sketch pad, and did these drawings of lupins in the wild.
Pencil drawing of blue Lupins against a weathered log; the watercolour was added later.
Pencil drawing of Lupins against shards of granite. I quite like the quirkiness that sometimes happens when drawing from life as opposed to working from a photo. 
Here are some photos of Lupins when we came back through Merritt this summer.
A lupin in the sun. I can’t begin to imagine how different the drawings would have been if I had done them from photos.
Another time I saw masses of lupins was in Arizona. This is a photo of the desert scene with Cholla and Prickly Pear Cacti amidst a once-every-four-year-bloom of orange California poppies and blue lupins. Because this was taken back in the days of film I didn’t actually see the photo until much later, and found the colours quite subdued compared to the way I remembered them. 
This is how I remembered the place in my mind and painted it in my sketchbook while I was still in Arizona – a sea of orange and blue. Again, if I had used a photo to paint from the result would have been very different. 
I’ve been thinking about the difference a lot as I paint from photos during this time of COVID. Moving around outside allows me to gather impressions and process them in a way that is totally different than working from a photo. The photos for some reason remove me from having a personal take on anything and I end up painting much too realistically. My creativity seems to be lost…
I love your sketches, Elizabeth! I hope you do more of them. The colors are marvelous.
I love your creative arts better than the photographs.
Me too, but only if I don’t get caught up in working from photos. That’s been my biggest problem with COVID: not going out and collecting impressions…
Going to post your lupin artwork in my FB credit to you. Thanks
Well done! I have tried painting, but it surely takes a lot of training…You are so talented.
This post was part of a discussion with a friend about artists and creativity – one of the conclusions was that the most important thing was a sort of obsessive passion – we have several friends with more talent than us but they don’t have the passion so they don’t keep at it. At any rate, your passion for photography shows through, and I bet you don’t even notice the time it takes…
;-D
Wow. Beautiful art and photos. Very well done.
Nicely done!
Very interesting Elizabeth. For one who has absolutely NO talent for painting I envy your ability to see and portray things differently. Excellent example of creativity!
I completely agree, Tina….I, too, have zero talent for painting
Creativity takes many forms, and you and Sue have tons of it in spades – even the ability to see things differently than other people – you’ve just chosen to express it in a different way!