Take a close look at each object: What might appear to be leaves reveal themselves to be silk and velvet; stalks and grasses are rendered from cotton and corduroy. “I used vintage fabric samples, scraps from altered pants, and other materials I had been hoarding,” Lazarus explains. “The red flowers are from ‘An Intimate Evening with Pamela Des Barres,’ the pink flower is from my late great grandmother’s rose bush, and the mosses are inspired by those I met in Eugene, Oregon, on a recent family road trip.”

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For her Zócalo Sketchbook, Glasson presents a series of abstract compositions that represent the natural world in the tactile intricacy of her chosen materials. “For this series, I have abandoned the realism of my portraiture work and am using natural and synthetic inks to create playful abstract shapes,” she tells Zócalo. She describes the process as “totally different” from how she usually works: “With these, I give all my attention to materials and colors,” she says. “They are wildly fun to make, and at times even meditative.”

Glasson’s Sketchbook invites you to zoom in close to get lost in the fjords and forests of her paint, or to stand back and find yourself face-to-face with ethereal creatures from other worlds or dimensions. Glasson finds pleasure in how open the work is to interpretation and how the shapes can “sometimes reference the natural world and other times seem otherworldly or just slightly ridiculous.”

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For their Zócalo Sketchbook, Pérez Espinosa has rendered images of California flora and fauna on top of local store receipts. The vibrant colors and undulating lines of the art joyfully overwhelms the substrate of humdrum commercialism.

Of their work, Pérez Espinosa says, “I’m delving deeper into understanding systems of care and Indigenous knowledge in regard to nature, and how essential they are to healing ourselves. I drew different sprouts representing my feelings on tending, renewal, learning, interconnectedness, and coastal life.”

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For her Zócalo Sketchbook, Grimsdale painted five pieces of enamelware with roses and scrollwork traditional to British “canal art.” The roses Grimsdale depicts were commonly seen on 19th-century working boats. This was “a time when the canals were busy with industry and families took great pride in their brightly decorated vessels,” she tells Zócalo. The painting was “quick and efficient,” Grimsdale adds, “as there would have been many boats to work on, hence the stylized nature of the artwork.”

The scroll shape has its own deep roots in signwriting and folk art. “The classic shape of the scroll, with all its flicks and flourishes, is inspired by the leaf of the Acanthus plant, a design that dates back to Greek and Roman architecture,” says Grimsdale. While the shape has become “quite far removed from its original model, particularly in signwriting,” she shares that she often turns to those early carvings for inspiration.

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For her Zócalo Sketchbook, LeBlanc-Payne draws inspiration from natural artifacts found on the beaches of Connecticut; Cape Cod, Massachusetts; Costa Brava, Spain; and the Côte d’Azur, France. Using traditional ink illustration, she composes her beachcombing into elegant arrangements that she finishes off with vibrant geometries of color that she adds digitally.

“I refer to the sketches as ‘exercise at the beach’ to flex my drawing muscles,” LeBlanc-Payne tells Zócalo. “My day-to-day is immersed in digital. It’s satisfying to switch off and switch over to a traditional medium to create these drawings.”

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For her Zócalo Sketchbook, van Drimmelen combined the look of watercolor painting, woodcuts, crayon etchings, and fabric painting. Remixing them into her own brand of illustrative digital magic, she’s immortalized for us a northern flicker, a starling, sword ferns, broad-leaf maple seeds turned into weird moths, and Strobilurus trullisatus—a tiny mushroom that grows on Douglas-fir pine cones.

“These arrangements are based on observations and feelings around living close to nature for the first time, noticing so many small things because there’s nothing else to distract me,” she tells Zócalo. “My mind is wandering to interesting places, imaging things that aren’t necessarily there.” The nighttime world, especially, engenders these conditions that she’s come to think about as high visibility: “Walking at night, when it is so dark, many objects covered with dew glow when you shine a light on them in the same way reflective material would,” she says.

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Castillo draws upon her favorite climate—the tropics—for this month’s Sketchbook. Her digital paintings incorporate the idea that “all animals are enlightened beings, and that nature represents a bigger force, call it the universe, or god.” As you look at Castillo’s work, consider the way she chooses to blend each animal into its surroundings, and where she allows parts of it to pop into the foreground, using shapes, colors, textures, and the occasional surrealistic element to establish contrast.

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For her Zócalo sketchbook, Kethevane presents us with a new series of her figures, called Voiceless. Her alien-like entities are recomposed from organic or mineral elements, archaeological fragments or objects. They appear to us isolated in a void, making them intentionally difficult to situate in space and time.

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In her Zócalo Sketchbook, she puts nature under the magnifying glass—depicting it dripping out of pipettes and filling up test tubes. By using the tools of science to explore the natural world, she gives us one of the great gifts illustration can offer: making the familiar new again. “The way we humans see and interact with nature is drastically linked to the historical period we live in,” she tells Zócalo. “Right now, nature seems like something that exists far away from us, and the only way we have contact with it is by studying and analyzing it.” So next time you’re out in the world, why not picture the things you see around you inside a giant Erlenmeyer flask? It just might change your focus.

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For her Zócalo Sketchbook, You offers us a psychedelic aquarium of fish that expand and reveal themselves to symbolize her name. “In Chinese, Zhi means wildflower, Yu means fish. So I combined and expanded these two symbols to create this series,” she tells Zócalo.

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