March 2026 Pages
spring, of sorts, gathers pace in my sketchbook
March is a bit of a funny creature, really. I always build March up in my head as a glorious sweet-sun month of frolicking in daffodils, whereas in fact the wind whips and sometimes there’s hail. I quite enjoy the merging of winter and spring – skeletal leaves leftover from autumn next to new fresh green growth; late frost and a dawn chorus. There’s an inbetweenness about March; noncommital, not choosing a camp. And then April comes in all sure of herself “I AM SPRING” she crows (I hope).
Professionally, I am undergoing some sort of willingness to try new things, which is both exhilirating and exhausting. Learning, trying, attempting, re-attempting, worry about the trying. I’ll share more about my attempting in a different post, sometime, but I’m telling you now about it because it explains why there aren’t terribly many sketchbook pages for this month.
And in most THRILLING news, groundworks have begun in our back garden for a new garden workshop for me (and Brenda, of course) to use as our studio. And in our home life, March was dominated by the littlest turning four years old. I absolutely adore the kids’ birthdays and throw myself in to making them special, creating myself totally unnecessary tasks (like designing a sheet of birthday stickers for the party bags) and running round like a mad hare. We hosted an animal-themed birthday party (because Trix is crazy about animals) to which a real-life meerkat turned up (and a skunk and an armadillo). The birthday was special, and the kid is spectactular, so it was worth it all.
On with the pages…
1 and 2
I’ve been playing with taking prints from autumn’s leftover leaves by drawing all over the back of a wet leaf with a watercolour crayon. I love the outcomes. I’ve also been enjoying drawing on tracing paper to build up layers of drawings. White Posca markers are lovely on tracing paper, as are coloured pencils. Adding drawings on tracing paper is a lovely way to forgive areas of a page that haven’t been quite so successful; building on top rather than rubbing out. I’ve been leading a project doing nature journaling with primary school aged children, and I can see the influence it is having on my own work, which is really exciting. More play, more freedom, more masking tape.
I got very excited about the notion of SAP RISING (discovered in Lia Leendertz’ Almanac, which I was reading while eating my brekkie one morning and had to dash for my sketchbook in delight at the idea that sap might be rising out there right this very moment). Apparently you can smell the sap rising, sometimes, at this time of year. The tree draws up water from the root system to disperse sap round the branches, encouraging gorgeous leaf buds. How did I reach the age of 39 without knowing that sap rises in March?
3
Seaside print-making with little Trix, taking prints from barnacles, while her big brother sat on a rock with the tide coming in around him, in wave-child heaven. We had stumbled across the Spring Tide, the lowest low tide of the year, and the best possible day for beach treasure hunting and tide watching. We possibly even found fossils (let’s just say we did).
4
I had promised an after-school picnic of leftover birthday cake (a 3-tier chocolate owl cake, this year). We trekked down to the river and walked a bit of a distance to find a good sheltered spot to spread our picnic blanket (March wind! Bitter!). Into my bag I dove, and OH DEAR, I hadn’t packed the tubs of chocolate cake. Two little tupperwares must be still sat on the kitchen bunker at home. All I had with me was a tub of stale Cheerios, a banana and two pointless cake forks. Unforgivable! The walk back to the car was fraught. But on the plus side, we got a lovely fly-by from two (loudly) peeping oystercatchers. Oystercatchers are my most favourite March birds (we call them Eammons, and you can read why here).
And that’s it for March. The rest of my March pages were dedicated to a gorgeous project I am working on with a primary school, and I will share those pages seperately when the project concludes.
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June 2026 Pages
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