Nature Notebook -- trying again

Silvia's posts on her nature walks and pictures of her and her daughters' nature notebooks always inspire to make this a habit of my own.  I didn't like the way my pencil sketches were turning out, so I bought myself a set of watercolors.

We have a row of crape myrtles along the driveway and on my walk this morning, the patterns on the bark caught my attention, so this afternoon I attempted to paint the trunks of one of the trees.

This was mostly an exercise in mixing colors and trying get the general blotchiness of the bark.  I gave up trying to recreate it accurately.

I like this result a lot better than my pencils sketches of the Jerusalem Artichoke.

Trying to give my children something to imitate . . .

Inspired by Silvia's latest post on nature journaling, when I took my walk this afternoon, I took lots of pictures of the Jerusalem artichokes, which are in their glory now and brought in one flower, so I could sketch it.

I stared at this flower for several minutes trying to figure out where to begin.  It's a LOT more complicated than I'd realized, and I'm not at all good at drawing what I see.  Finally I decided to draw just one petal . . .

. . . and while I was staring at the flower I noticed that all that complicated stuff in the center was made up of curlicues like this:

Then I noticed that each curlicue was growing out of a tiny flower like this:

Ah!  Now I remember -- Jerusalem Artichoke is a relative of the sunflower, so this is a compound flower.

The bees love it

[And by "something to imitate" I mean the habit of paying close attention and keeping a nature journal.  They can all draw a whole lot better than I can!]