side table art supplies

There’s a nice little art desk set up in our office / library / laundry room (tiny room that functions as all of them). Bill even made me a taboret on wheels that stands next to it. But most of the time I sketch from a comfy chair in the living room while talking with Bill or watching shows on TV. This might explain the smudges that appear on my sketches! 🫣  I usually keep an Art Toolkit loaded with my tools — easy to grab when we head out in our camper. But camping is on hold for a couple of months so I transferred the tools I’m currently using to this wooden box. Much easier to grab what I want!

The second photo was taken “in process”. I added a few colors to this daily palette (colors that show up better on toned paper) so I put a business card sized magnet in the mixing area to hold mixing pans and clip it to my sketchbook page.

(I drew the ink drawing several days ago, but took my time adding color.)

using color on toned paper

When I tried my new Grow Untamed palette out on both this toned Nideggen paper and on some white watercolor paper, I noted that these particular colors work much better on the white paper. So I did test blobs of all my watercolors on the back pages of my journal, including two more colors from Letter Sparrow which just arrived in the mail: quin. magenta and Paris green just because I love cool red and turquoise. I love how black inks and white gouache look on this toned paper, and brighter colors add a rich “pop” to sketches. I may change my style of sketching while working in this journal.

a new red toy

Bill knows I love a rich cool red, and I love collecting Pocket Palettes, so he gave me the Grow Untamed palette from Art Toolkit. Lovely hand-made desert-colored pigments from Letter Sparrow — These paints are so creamy to work with! Unfortunately, the deep red color of the palette can not be mixed from the colors in the palette, so in this wonky sketch I added a bit of quin. rose from my regular daily palette along with some white gouache on this tinted paper.

not camping this week . . .

Bill and I had made reservations for a Christmas camping trip this week. Average lows for our area are around 45° with daytime highs in the 70s, and our camper has a good heater. But this below-freezing weather that has gripped the nation quickly changed our plans — who wants to deal with a frozen camper? So we winterized the camper instead. 

And tonight we went with our daughter and son-in-law to their church’s Christmas Eve service. I did a quick sketch of the altar’s art before the service began and painted it later at home — with a too-large, clumsy brush. 🫣

Have a blessed Christmas, everyone!

Christmas pinch pots

In addition to the collection of pinch pots on my kitchen window sill, these special Christmas pots have now appeared. All of the pots and pottery dishes were made by our children when they were in school. The barbed wire star was a happy surprise from a dear friend in Kansas.

a parallel fountain pen

I recently bought a Pilot Parallel fountain pen along to play with. I knew the ink would not be waterproof, but I thought it might give a subtle gray wash when touched with a waterbrush. Wrong!! The ink in this pen is very wet and very intensely black! Just a light touch of a wet brush tip releases a strong black wash. Still, I was determined to see it in action with a quick sketch — I had to really work to keep areas of this Flint Hills farm scene in lighter washes.

The nib shape is similar to my Lamy Joy pen’s calligraphy nib, but the Lamy nib seems to dry and clog if not used daily. The flattened nib makes for interesting sketching lines. Packaging that this pen came in warns to not refill the empty ink cartridge with other inks — which was exactly what I had planned to do using my waterproof fountain pen inks. There is a converter sold that fits the pen but I’m curious as to why I couldn’t simply refill the cartridge with a syringe?

The Spice Merchant

We are now home from Kansas but I had one more sketch to finish and post. As long as we were in Wichita, we decided to do a bit of shopping at our favorite coffee / tea supplier, The Spice Merchant. The business has expanded since we moved to Texas, into the adjoining building. They roast their own coffee beans in the center of the main floor and the aroma is amazing, even for a non-coffee-drinker like me! There is also a Huge Selection of loose-leaf teas, something I’ve been unable to find in Texas. So many new choices to try!

The business is located in the historic Mentholatum building, one of my favorites of Wichita architecture. Silent film star Louise Brooks also ran a dance studio here at one time. 

an unexpected trip north

We had told ourselves that we would never return to Kansas for a visit in the winter. Weather can be too unpredictable, and for a man dealing with some level of chronic pain 24/7, cold weather can be especially brutal.

Yet here we are, sitting in an AirBnB in Wichita, Kansas.

Several family members are dealing with life-threatening medical issues and we decided that we really needed to come see them in person. There was a family reunion of sorts held in Manhattan, KS yesterday. Today I visited my father in a nursing home — he has Covid so I was masked, shielded, gowned, and gloved to nearly be unrecognizable. But we were able to have a wee bit of time together.

On Friday we had a lovely visit with my mom and brother, then met some dear friends for dinner later on. Tomorrow we head to Baxter Springs to check on another friend who was like a second father to both Bill and me when we were in our teens. And finally we will head home to our much-warmer though very wet home in Texas.

The AirBnB we are staying in is a tiny home in an old RV park. The owner is, bit by bit, building up a small community of tiny homes and a small trailer home to rent out at low prices to those needing lodging for a few weeks to several months. This one has an old Wichita Cowtown decor that fits right in with Texas as well.

new sketchbook

Another sketchbook, another sketch of my tools . . .

This time I’m using a small book I bound using a vintage book cover and Nideggen paper which is no longer made. This lightweight paper is made for printing, not watercolor, so it will take a bit of adjustment after using 140# watercolor paper!

After sketching out my currently chosen tools and inking them in, I already made one adjustment. I’ve been using a squirrel mop brush and a dagger, both travel brushes from Rosemary & Co. But the squirrel brush held way too much water and paint for this paper — so I switched it out for a #8 sable blend round brush.

The tiny pencil sharpener is not my favorite for Blackwing pencils which are great for holding elongated points, but we are traveling this week and this one fits in my Art Toolkit.

The large pan of white gouache is cracked but still usable. Recently I heard that if you add a drop or two of glycerin when filling the pan, gouache will not crack.

a Charlie Brown tree

One more sketch from Ratcliff Lake in Davy Crockett National Forest: one of several Charlie Brown Christmas trees we found growing from a stump. Many trees, when they die, are allowed to rot in place giving habitat to insects and small animals. But some trees endanger something nearby, requiring them to be cut. Out of several stumps in a tent-only site down near the lake, new growth has begun.

Painted in a 2” square Hahnemuhle ZigZag sketchbook.