Technically, this small sketchbook is for nature or botanical sketches. But sometimes I just want to play. Our daughter brought over a plate of goodies on one of her new dishes and I love the color and pattern. So I drew some of the design, slightly scrunched up to fit a rectangular spread instead of a round plate.
— fountain pen, pencil and gouache —
Last week Bill took our corgi, Butters, outside to play ball. Across the yard and driveway, he saw this Great Egret over by the swimming pool. Not wishing to startle it, he took a quick photo from where he stood — a very distant, out-of-focus photo.
I’ve been wanting to try less “representational” sketching anyway, so I painted this page using that fuzzy photo as a basis. Mostly granulating watercolors with some gouache patterning added on top. Not quite as I expected it to turn out, but an interesting direction to take my sketching while still capturing daily memories.
I started a sunflower sketch in my sketchbook over a week ago — left it to allow paint to dry and haven’t gotten back to it yet.
One could say that I’m obsessed with the flexibility of these palettes. After using two separate pocket palettes in my mini Sendak, one watercolor and one gouache, I decided that one large folio works better for me. But how to combine watercolor and gouache in a useable way?
This is what I came up with upon returning home from our camping trip yesterday. The watercolor pans are placed horizontally and gouache pans are vertical — all except that perylene black gouache but its placement was unavoidable. I’m trying to keep color groups together.
UPDATE: the Transparent Red Oxide watercolor was supposed to be a brownish color but it was too similar to the Venetian Red. So I replaced it with Lunar Earth. Being transparent, I was able to lift it with a wet stiff brush and tissue before applying the new paint choice.
Here at the lake it became too cold and blustery to do much more than walk the dog halfway around the campsite. Interesting botanicals blew away; the herons, cranes, and pelicans flew for cover. So I sketched my Mini Sendak from Peg & Awl and tools. Which covers the first 2 challenges of Maria Cornell-Martin’s Nature Journaling challenge prompts. Not sure how many of them I will do but this one was fun — and my hands didn’t shake too much! (I have essential tremor which can make ink drawing wobbly.)
Today I finished the next to the last page of this journal (after posting the last page yesterday). It didn’t turn out quite like what I had in mind — seems a bit stiff and not enough contrast in values. But I’m calling it done and moving on.
What drew me to sketch the scene were the lavender-shadowed clouds. But they seemed to fade away in the sketch. This is the view from the front of our small converted barn house looking towards our daughter’s farmhouse. I added those shrubs in the lower right corner where our barn-red house corner would be.
Though this is the last page of my current sketchbook, it is not the last page to be worked on. The previous page, an evening landscape, was started and is not yet finished. But today I just felt like painting something from scratch so I did this from a photo taken during a clinic visit on Monday. The pumpkins had a velvet surface.
This is sort of the direction I’d like my sketching to go: directly painting with a combination of gouache and watercolor with touches of colored pencil or Neocolor II crayons . . . maybe even a bit of ink, who knows? But working looser without so much niggling the details. Letting go of perfectionistic tendencies.
There are two other sketched pages in this book waiting for me to continue a Marty Burnham workshop I began in October. The first of those turned out to be a disaster and I haven’t taken time to get back to the course as yet. I do plan to finish the 2nd and 3rd sketches, but will probably not post those since they are not my own original work. Even the one that turned out badly has taught me a lot.
Today is Thanksgiving day and things are mostly ready. While waiting for family to arrive, I did a quick sketch of a leaf picked up while walking with Butters. The quote from a Winnie the Pooh book popped up in an email from Peg & Awl.
Have a happy and blessed Thanksgiving, everyone!
Recently I purchased some stackable ceramic trays for mixing paint when I’m at home — mainly because they have a lid that covers all when stacked. I can walk away from mixes without the kitties nosing in the paint. I also found a collapsable water cup with a wavy edge that holds my paint brushes.
These tiny sketches were done this past week — I drew the corner of the building, Rice University’s BioScience Research Collaborative, just today after we drove past it on our way to the Med Center (for Bill this time, not me). I snapped a quick photo because I liked the angles and curves. The iced tea and salsa are from yesterday’s late lunch while waiting to pick up our corgi from the groomer’s.
I have only four more to do to reach my goal of 50 tiny sketches by December.
One last October ink sketch, loosely following an example from the library book “Pen & Ink Techniques” by Frank Lohan — I drew the tree directly in ink, letting the pen move a bit intuitively across the page. But you can still see faint pencil lines under the text that I didn’t bother to erase.
. . . sketched without any pre-planning. Today I was busy baking a birthday cake for Bill (his birthday is tomorrow), and gave no thought to doing a daily ink sketch. Until remembering this evening that I still have 2 more days of this self-imposed challenge.
So I drew the first thing I saw.
My mother always made red velvet cake with an old-fashioned boiled milk frosting, also known as ermine frosting, so that’s how I used to do it. But Bill grew up with a cream cheese frosting, and now our daughter says that’s the correct topping for red velvet. So I did it their way.
My month of simple daily ink-only sketches is almost over, and I am ready to play with color again! Today, I was entering a deposit in my checkbook, took a look at the pen in my hand, and used it to draw my hand on the spur of the moment.
A few weeks ago we had our trees trimmed. Apparently a few small branches were left up in the live oaks — today’s high winds blew them down. I picked a few up to throw on th3 burn pile, but stopped to sketch this.
Part of the fun of post-cancer: regular CT scans to make sure it stays gone. With contrast dye. Which means a whole lot of drinking . . .
(Not complaining! I’m thankful to be healthy again!)
Today’s ink sketch was done from a photograph I took early last month when temperatures were still over 90°. This rescue horse living next door has a very white face; the fly mask is for protection from UV rays. The mask is no longer needed with our cooler days in the 70s, but the large horses have been moved away to a different area.
There was a wire fence separating my corgi and the horse but I chose to not draw it in. Whenever this particular horse saw her out in the pasture, he would run over just to be near her. He would calmly nibble the grass while she sniffed around. Maybe picking up on the gophers’ and moles’ gossip.
In our part of Texas, we don’t see much falling leaves in the autumn. Even many oak trees tend to hang on to their green leaves until springtime. But today a thunderstorm blew through with high winds, leaving broken leaf tips everywhere.
Today’s ink sketch, a very old wall from a photo I took in 2021 while on the hunt for bluebonnets. This wall was once part of the original campus of Baylor’s women’s college, located in Independence, Texas. Not sure I like how this sketch turned out but we have happy memories visiting the site.
The second photo shows a portion of the old college ruin that still stands on what is now called Academy Hill. Baylor University was founded in Independence in 1845; the men’s campus was located a bit further down the road on Windmill Hill.
