My knee started to go on a Manning Park hike up the Three Brothers, so I sent everyone further on and settled myself down amongst the mosquitos with my sketch pad and did these drawings of lupins in the wild.
Pencil drawing with watercolour added of Lupins against a weathered log.
Pencil drawing with watercolour painting 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!