Beachcombing And Sketching - A Match Made In Heaven

If you can get to the seashore, it's a brilliant source of subjects for sketching. With any luck your finds will have been out long enough for all organic matter to have returned to nature and it will travel back to your studio or kitchen table without being too offensive! I love to pick up little crabs on the beach or rocky shore as they make terrific sketching subjects. I never tire of them. The only thing that can go wrong is that they are incredibly fragile and lose limbs easily.

I was honoured to be selected as a teacher for this year's Wild Wonder online nature journalling conference. I am all about getting out and sketching in nature. My SketchPocket is ideal for that, as it can be used anywhere you have space to hold a tiny sketchbook, even standing.

Wild Wonder is full of amazing, inspirational teachers who, like you and me, have a passion for nature. The class I will be teaching takes the sketcher through the drawing and painting of the crab you see at the end of the video, from that shore, start to finish, in ink and watercolour. If you've signed up, I will see you then! By the way I didn't find the pretty intact crab, it was my husband, but I was trying to give the illusion I was alone on the shore :)

There are many things I love about sketching nature.

You are out in a silence broken only by birdsong and twittering, and the hum of insects.

Being out there makes you conscious of the changing seasons, which I find grounding, and in this wild western Irish climate helps me accept that the cold, wet weather is on the way.

I also feel - and excuse me while I have a hippie moment - that we are made of the same stardust (or who knows what?) that everything around us in nature is made of, and that we have all existed since time began, in some way or another. That makes us part or the whole thing, and sketching it quietly feels very right, very natural.

Right now I can hear birds being very busy on the roof of my studio. I don't know what they're doing but I'm sure it's not good. I can hear starlings getting ready to fly south, as it's suddenly got cold. My house is full of bee-like creatures, which don't bother me in the slightest. There are huge spiders indoors, which do.

I love them all, except rats...then again I love the stoats that live along the path to my studio and it's probably the promise of rats that has them there.

So it's all connected, it's all beautiful (except for rats) and I am happy to sketch what I can.

I hope you enjoy this video - and if you would like to join us in Sketch With Roisin, we'd love to have you. You can head to roisincure.com and join us today. We have four live classes a month (Saturdays) with the odd unshceduled one too, and the community is extremely welcoming and friendly. All recordings are sent after class, so no need to worry about missing anything.

I look forward to meeting you!