garden spiders

Wildlife gardening usually involves leaving an area a bit messy, or undisturbed, and this might sound troubling for perfectionists. One of the advantages of this inactivity with the secateurs is that tall-stemmed plants of many perennials and annuals provide uprights for spiders to use as supports and scaffolding for their webs. Hollyhocks, Verbena bonariensis, knapweed, teasels, sunflowers and poppies all retain their structure well into spring, and watching the orb web spiders festoon them with silk is one of nature’s finest architectural wonders right there.

I wanted to try a sketch to communicate this, as I’m trying to get my head around working towards a brief, as this will be necessary if I want to get hired for my illustrations beyond individual images. Of course, the point of illustration is to communicate a message using visual language rather than just words, so I need to get used to being given a topic I haven’t chosen or just decided to paint because I want to…

Here is my sketchbook page:

I like the challenge, and while this is just a rough sketch, I enjoyed challenging myself to paint something different. What do you think?