Hello beautiful creative friend! 
I have some NEW ART to show you! 😍
Apparently my art table has become extremely wing-heavy lately. 😂
I’ve been working on pieces for the upcoming Year of Wild Nature FREE Taster Sessions, and somehow I’ve gone from dark, mysterious, swooping crows to a whole sheet of gloriously wonky vibrantly coloured butterflies.
Which, honestly, feels quite on brand. 😆
First up: CROWS! 🖤
I’ve been having SO much fun exploring crows in a much looser, more expressive way.
Rather than trying to create a perfectly rendered bird, I’ve been playing with watercolour, acrylic inks, sweeping marks, splatters, scribbles, abstract shapes and delicious dark blues and blacks.
I love how the crow can almost emerge out of the abstraction, part bird, part movement, part atmosphere. I do have to fight my own instinct to keep ‘refining’ the abstract areas, but I think I did pretty good keeping the wings abstracted!
There’s something wonderfully freeing about letting an animal painting be expressive rather than making every feather behave itself. 😁
And then…
I went in an ENTIRELY different direction. 😂👇
WONKY COLOURFUL BUTTERFLIES! 🦋🌈💖
LOOK AT THEMMMMM. 😂😍
A whole sheet of cheerful, colourful, completely unapologetically wonky butterflies.
No perfectly symmetrical wings required.
No butterfly police measuring whether your left wing matches your right wing. 🚨🦋😂
Just colour, pattern, stripes, dots, hearts, strange antennae and lots of playful little characters emerging onto the page. Yay!!
I especially love this kind of exercise because it takes us away from:
“Can I draw a butterfly correctly?”
…and towards:
“What sort of butterfly wants to exist on my page?”
Which is a MUCH more interesting question. 😁
And YES! I’ll be teaching you how to make these! 🙌✨
Both the expressive crows and the wonky butterflies are part of the upcoming:
🌿 A YEAR OF WILD NATURE — FREE TASTER SESSIONS 🌿
If you haven’t signed up yet, come and join us! 
The Tasters are a completely FREE online art event where you’ll get to sample lessons from the wonderful teachers taking part in A Year of Wild Nature 2027.
We’ll be exploring nature in all sorts of ways, animals, plants, landscapes, natural forms, symbolism, our own inner wildness, beautiful materials, expressive mark-making and so much more.
And as you can probably tell from the butterflies…
“Nature” does not mean everything has to be beige and botanically accurate. 😂🌈
Wild Nature can be:
- Dark and mysterious.
- It can be soft and beautiful.
- It can be abstract.
- It can be colourful and ridiculous.
It can have heart-shaped wings and antennae going off in completely unreasonable directions. 😆
Mostly, I want us to use nature as a doorway into play, connection, expression and creativity.
🌿🦋 JOIN THE FREE TASTERS HERE 🦋🌿
I hope you’ll come make some wild, wonderful things with us. ❤️
Big creative hugs,
Tam xoxo
P.S. I am refusing to choose between the moody dramatic crows and the fluorescent wonky butterflies. I contain multitudes. 😂🖤🌈🦋
PPS. There are still some spots left @ the cheapest price A Year of Wild Nature will ever be (only £109 GBP – approx $145USD) – Check it out here
Uplifting/ Nurturing Message of the Month
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