Chilly Copenhagen

I arrived in Copenhagen in the dark after hours and hours of travel. I was to meet a childhood friend — my best friend, really, certainly my longest-lasting — and her husband here the following day.

We all drink tea, copiously. This meant finding somewhere after lunch where we could have a cup of tea and I could sketch without us all becoming hypothermic, so we ended up at a bar with outdoor heating on the Nyhavn, a big cliché, I know, but this is where we found.

I am not very good at drawing buildings and I didn’t have unlimited time but here’s my sketch, which I colored in after I got back to our hotel… Today was a brisk walk through the wind and cold of the Naturpark Amager, a territory formerly owned by the Danish military which is being allowed to rewild itself. We had hoped to see birds and I did see my life barnacle goose, or rather several thousand of them, but mostly it was a long walk in the wind. (We did help an elderly man with dementia reconnect with his son, which seemed like a kind thing to do.)

Tangerine At Large

I’m continuing to practice my multimedia technique of sketching an underdrawing with my Derwent drawing pencils, then adding some ink lines for definition, and then adding a watercolor wash over the drawing (in this case the Inktense mango pan color). Here is a tangerine from Tuesday’s grocery shop.

What to Take

I’m heading out tomorrow on a trip to Germany. I’ve been studying German fairly assiduously since the start of the pandemic and though I grew up in Europe I never went to Germany.

I have some rules about traveling, which overlap a lot with Numenius’s (though not entirely, and in this case we’d have very VERY different itineraries). One is, hand luggage only, whether for a week or a month. Two is, forget cameras; bring minimalist sketching equipment (you know that advice where they tell you to put all the clothes you plan to bring and cut it in half? I had to cut my sketchbooks into a QUARTER). Three, have plenty and diverse things to keep you entertained (I have knitting, audiobooks, and access to whatever films they show us on the 11-hour or so flight in addition to my sketching stuff).

I’ll be seeing friends and exploring different places on my own, all of them in the western third of Germany. An excursion to Bingen to stay in the Benedictine convent for three nights is particularly appealing: I’ve been reading a lot about Hildegard and have to figure out how to say what I’ve learned in German in case a nun sits next to me at breakfast and asks me why I find her so compelling.

I’ll plan to blog here on the usual schedule but it might be brief and very sketch-heavy. Short stay in Copenhagen at the beginning to see some friends from Sweden; hoping for some lingering winter seabirds!

Riverfront Outing

Today I went on a little outing to the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, walking to the museum from the Sacramento train station via Old Sacramento and the riverfront. Old Sacramento is the most touristy area in Sacramento; it developed during the Gold Rush. Since I have been reading a lot about Northern California history in the latter half of the 19th century and pondering the Gilded Age fortunes that were made during that period, it’s neat to see the actual storefront where Collis Huntington and Mark Hopkins made their wealth off miners needing supplies. This is a sketch looking west across the Sacramento River downstream from the Tower Bridge.

Grapevine in the Spring

The landscapers have trimmed back a lot of the grapevines near the edge of our backyard, but there are still a few. Here is a sketch of one of them leafing out.

I am enjoying working with my new 72 color set of Derwent drawing pencils. It is interesting how I rotate through different combinations of media. Here I am experimenting with doing an underdrawing with the Derwent drawing pencils (it’s great having Fresh Green as part of the colored pencil set), adding in a bit of line work with black waterproof fiber-tip pens, and then doing a watercolor wash over the drawing.

Turkey In The Dell

I went to today’s Davis sketchcrawl which was at the eastern end of the Arboretum. My main sketch for the day was of a wooden shade structure with trees in the background, but once I finished the sketch I turned around and saw several turkeys at close range, one of which was displaying prominently.

New Drawing Pencils

Pica has just given me a set of the new Derwent drawing pencils as an early birthday present. I have loved the Derwent drawing pencils for many years now, starting with their original set of six pencils and then later acquiring their set of 24 pencils when the line got expanded to that size. These pencils are enjoyably soft and creamy but the colors in the 24 pencil set are muted and have a limited range of hues. To the excitement of many, late last fall Derwent released a much bigger set of pencils in this line with 72 colors in it, including some bright greens, yellows, and reds.

I swatched the pencils out yesterday and am starting to draw with them. Here is an apple I sketched this afternoon (the variety of apple is a “Cosmic Crisp”). The full set is too bulky to carry out into the field most of the time so I’ll probably be drawing with them mainly at my desk. I may also try to identify a few bright colors to supplement my set of 24 pencils and use that as my field set.

Backyard Ceanothus

There is a ceanothus shrub just in our backyard right up against the wall of the house that is now in flower. I don’t know what variety this is, not being particularly up on my horticultural ceanothuses. (When I lived in Santa Barbara I knew the local wild species of ceanothus pretty well.) I sketched this with the Derwent Inktense pan color set — I like the way the colors turned out.

Sketching with a New Palette

I recently got a new palette from Art Toolkit and was sketching people at the Upper Crust Bakery this morning… Caucasian flesh tones are hard, but I think the key is to water them way down.

Graphic Reportage

In Making Nonfiction Comics, Eleri Harris and Shay Mirk talk about the power of reporting on events using comics. There are advantages: a loose sketch of someone is a screen to hide behind in case they fear investigation. But it also humanizes the whole process, and I’m glad I took a pen and brush along to yesterday’s gathering in Woodland.

There are so many things to make us upset and even despair about this administration’s recklessness in all areas of public life here and in disrupting the world, but doing something, anything, to stand up to it feels helpful.