Sketching Between The Rain Showers

There have been a lot of showers these past several days which has made for interesting sketching outings. Yesterday I walked over to the city hall and completed my ink sketch of some tall trees and a portion of the building before heading back home. On the way back I stopped to photograph a mushroom and then noticed a bit of drizzle on the camera. I put it back in its case and then came the downpour. I scurried the block-and-a-half back home. Our weather station recorded a maximum rate of 4.27 inches of rain an hour during the downpour.

The sketch at left is from today and shows a view looking northwards across a playing field towards the Davis Senior Center. No dramatic downpour, but it did drizzle a bit on the page.

Revisiting Old Art Supplies

I do have a habit of accumulating art supplies, which at this point should probably be enumerated in my will. I broke out the Prismacolors this afternoon to do a slow, inexpert drawing of a persimmon we were left as a gift.

I’m much more of a sketcher than a drawer, but you can get so absorbed in the slow, painstaking process of layering different, contrasting colors onto Bristol board that it’s quite a meditation.

I might do more of this. I should also work on my sad watercolor skills. But this year I have another intention too: I want to get better at drawing trees.

Scoping out the Local Golf Course for a Christmas Bird Count

Tomorrow we’ll be participating in our local Xmas count, and we’ve been assigned the Wildhorse Golf Course (and residential streets).

Four Palms And A Gym

We’ve had the miracle of full days of sunshine yesterday and today, although it has been chilly: Pica was even able to wash and block her new jacket today. For my urban sketch yesterday I walked over to the bus circle near the student union on campus and sketched Hickey Gym and the palm trees in front of it. As is now my habit in winter, I colored the sketch once I got back home, testing out one of my newly added Neocolor II crayons, Sahara yellow, on the face of the gym.

The Artist's Way: Week 12

Much to my surprise I’m nearing the end of this twelve-week journey. (I thought it was 13 weeks, so that was like a bonus.) Here are my thoughts:

a) I am much less pissy about writing morning pages when I sketch in them too. Since hummingbirds are almost as present as cats during daylight hours, they get a lot of real estate in these pages.

b) I don’t care that she says these should be three pages of writing only. It takes me the best part of an hour to get through three pages of longhand drivel; at least I can make it more fun by drawing too.

c) Despite myself, I ALWAYS feel better if I’ve written my morning pages.

d) Artist’s dates are fun and I plan to continue having them.

e) I think I will be turning more to the Danny Gregory visual journal idea than morning pages per se, but without making them too precious.

I made a drawing yesterday about my journal ecosystem… missing even from the list of missing items are my knitting journal and my nature journal. I ought to redo this drawing to include them all.

Sketching In The Fog

It’s been a stormy week in California, with floods in the Mojave region of Los Angeles County, 10 inches of rain in the mountains of Ventura County, and wind gusts of over 114 MPH doing major damage to the Lick Observatory on Mt. Hamilton in Santa Clara County, the worst damage in its 140-year history. The weather was comparatively mild here in Davis, but we did get 2.26 inches of rain over the week.

It cleared last night here and got chilly, which set up conditions for a tule fog in the morning. I went sketching around 10 AM, coping with the chill by only drawing with ink outside and waiting until I returned home to color the sketch. This is the Davis School For Independent Study on B Street.

Illustrating a Journal

I’m playing with what I might do in the new year once I’ve finished with my Artist’s Way session, and this might work. I’m doing more and more drawings in my morning pages — cheating, I know — and here I’m landing, I think. A thick paper that will take a light wash, will stay open flat.

There will be a lot of cats in this journal, I’m guessing.

Sketching A Triffid

It was late in the afternoon and the rain was coming in when I got around to doing my daily sketch, so I drew a plant in the garden through the living room window. Nobody is sure what this is, but it seems triffid-like to me.

This is another sketch with the Neocolor II watersoluble crayons: I used yellow green, lemon yellow, prussian blue, malachite green, brown, umber, russet, and gray in the sketch. It’s fun mixing all the colors on the page.

Comix Coven

I finished the Comix Activism 4-week session with Maureen Burdock last Saturday, and decided to make more of a commitment to my comics making. I’ve signed up for her year-long Comics Coven starting in early January.

I got sent a syllabus for the first two months of the year along with a list of materials, most of which I already own. But I was puzzled by the requirement to bring a “visual journal” — I know of them, and I know people keep them, but I have sketchbooks and journals, and mostly never the twain shall meet, apart from my nature journal, which has actually been a good trainer for this activity. (I’m not in the least bit interested in doing the painted-collage-ephemera type thing which seems to me to be little more than scrapbooking, but I do like the Arne & Carlos “idea book” concept, though I’m not sure how likely I’d be to stick to it.)

I’ve decided to make a start on a visual journal which I’m hoping will replace my morning pages once I’m done with the Artist’s Way (three weeks to go). I like journaling. I like lettering. I like sketching. Throw them all together. Finding the perfect size, paper weight, and paper surface will be a trick, of course…

Christmas Cards

When I first moved to the US from the UK, back in 1988 (the Dukakis election), I got a job at an architect’s office in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I was fascinated by the new buildings I was seeing — postmodernism was in full, if somewhat uneven, force. But that experience drew me to, well, draw.

A train trip to Mystic, Connecticut, to visit my mother’s cousin for Thanksgiving that year had me drawing trees from the train — of necessity bare, spare, and plentiful. By the time the train pulled in to South Station I had dozens of small drawings, done in pen and black ink (pretty sure it was a Rapidograph, temperamental bitches that need to be held upright, not a comfortable way to draw, but hey, I was working in an architect’s office, and they had pen cleaning equipment galore; this was before anyone other than a couple of geeks was doing architectural drawings digitally).

This started me on a yearly Christmas card-making journey. Thirty-seven years later, I’m still making my own cards. (The xmas card list has dwindled significantly; I think I’ve only made 35 this year and I still have about six left.) They have been drawn, silk screened, painted, calligraphed, collaged, gelatin-monoprinted, accordion-folded — whatever I was into that year. So in a way this is a good catalog of my artistic journey over decades.

I figured out early on to keep copies of them. The fact that my mother handed me ones I’d sent to her and dad over the years filled out some of the gaps. This isn’t the full set but close…