Weekday Sketchcrawl - 8/12/11

The San Diego Sketchcrawlers (Weekday Edition) met today in Balboa Park - where else?  Our group consisted of Rachel, Kathy, Linda, Stephen and myself. We met in the Zoro Butterfly Garden, which is tucked away between the Reuben H. Fleet Science Center and the San Diego History Center. The garden started out as a sunken stone grotto that was designed as a nudist colony during the 1935 California-Pacific Exposition.  You can find more info about the garden at the Balboa Park website and the San Diego History Center. Thanks to Rachel for the history and  links. It is now a butterfly garden with plants and conditions conducive to the life cycle of butterflies. It was a lovely cool morning there. Most of the pictures have larger versions if you click on them.

The garden is full of walkways and places to sit and sketch.

There are a lot of huge trees.

A big mural.

And a river of stones.

One thing I noticed is that the pipes that they used for the railings have cool curvy ends.

Of course, since it's a butterfly garden, there are lots of flowers everywhere. Here's a buddleia.

Passionflower.

Some kind of yarrow I think.

And even a heliconia, though I don't think the butterflies can feed from it's flowers.

We settled in to do our sketching.

After it started to warm up, the butterflies came out. The only kind I saw were Monarch butterflies, very eye-catching. I chased them around for a while and managed to get a few pictures. I don't know what kind of flower this is, but it was the only kind I saw them on, even though there are many other flowers in the garden.

Sadly, it was soon time to pack up and leave. Here are pictures of the artwork we did. Linda and Rachel did more than one, so I  had to take 2 pictures.

The tomatoes are the remains of a bag I brought of homegrown tomatoes from my neighbor that we snacked on. As you can see, Stephen brought his ukulele and serenaded us a little. Here is a closeup of one of Linda's pages.

And Rachel's ink sketch. She is in the midst of doing an ink sketch a day for 75 days. Go Rachel! 

 I caught a quick picture of Stephen adding shading to his sketch of the big tree.

There was a tree stump that is cut to make a nice place to sit, so first Kathy sat there for a picture.

Then of course everyone else had to pile on.

Then Stephen and I switched places.

A lovely time was had by all. I'm looking forward to the next time we can get together.

Go make art! Sketch something! Paint something! Anything!