Every Day in May: Day 2 - 'Sound' (and first ever attempt at painting with acrylics)

I misread the theme for Day 2 as 'Draw a favourite smell'. I was very excited about this as I knew exactly what to draw and it would fit in perfectly with my sketchbook being a pregnancy journal as I have been obsessed with the smell of a hammer in my kitchen draw! On re-inspection later I realised it was a favourite 'sound'. I was pretty stuck with this as the things that are my favourite sounds are things like the sound of the baby's hearbeat, Loxie chirruping, rain on the window i.e. all things I've drawn very recently. But then as I was sitting in the garden underneath the very blossomy tree that was covered in more bees than I've even seen, I realised how much I was enjoying the combination of the sound of the buzzy bees and the sound of the city. I know a lot of people dislike the sound of the city but I really love the hum of traffic, sirens, aeroplanes overhead etc. So I decided to just draw what I could see from where I was sitting...

'The Sound of Summer'

The added bonus of putting this composition to paper was that I knew I was going to have to draw a lot of white for all the blossom and this has forced me to finally crack open the acrylics. I drew in pencil and then painted bits of the drawing. I didn't want to paint the whole thing. I also thought there was a strong possibility I might really mess this one up so used the final page in my Moleskine - the one I had covered in brown paper. As it turns out, I'm now kicking myself that I didn't just use the next page in the new Seawhite sketchbook. My line of thinking with this 31 days of drawing is that it will have lots of pregnancy memories in it and I will be able to give it to the baby when he is older. A painting of our garden would have been a really nice thing to have in it!

I'm annoyed with the scanner again as it has scanned this so fuzzy that it has obliterated the bees! What am I doing wrong, I don't know. Also, the wall in the garden is white but I didn't paint it because I wasn't sure how it would look against the blossom and the walls of the houses. But now that I look at it again, I think I really should've gone ahead and painted it white.

 I feel pretty inspired to take these acrylics along to portraiture class next week now (and to actually use them). I now understand what people say about them being fast drying though! Especially as I was painting outdoors!