Old Baylor

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.

remembering violets

Bill once gave me a beautiful African violet plant which was very special to me. But when we moved from San Diego to Bremerton, then on to Portland, I had to fly (being 8 months pregnant at the time) — our things were moved up by friends. The plant probably would not have survived so I gave it to a neighbor.

This is another drawing exercise from a library book, “Pen & Ink Techniques” by Frank Lohan. I chose to add a bit of purple watercolor. Ink lines were drawn with a Kaweco Liliput fountain pen filled with Noodler’s green El Lawrence ink.

Grandma’s snack set

When my brother and I were children, our grandmother would sometimes serve us snacks on her set of glass plates with ruby-red colored glass cups, made by Anchor Hocking in the 1950s. And we never dropped or broke a piece!

Later she gave the set to me — and sadly I lost it. When we moved from the 1913 bungalow we once lived in, we forgot to check the tiny cupboards in the kitchen near the ceiling. After all, they were only hiding some vent work, right? Wrong! Years later I remembered that these dishes had been stashed up there when I needed room for something else. For all I know, they may still be hidden up there. And I don’t know the buyer’s name anymore. That was well over 20 years ago.

I looked them up online to sketch this memory page from the photos.

letters, a thing of the past

With my father’s passing away last year, I no longer write real letters. I miss that somehow. When I was just a child my father’s aunt, my great-aunt Lucile, became my pen pal. How I loved getting letters from her! A teacher who began her career in a one-room schoolhouse, she always showed an interest in what I thought or felt. We shared many interests as well, and she made the best strawberry preserves!

Emails and texting is more immediate these days, and multiple-people texts can be fun conversations. But there was something special about real pen and paper.

tiny Irish sketchbook

This 2” sketchbook from 2009 has handmade non-archival paper — I drew on one side, text on the other. A trip to the zoo, a band concert in the park, and misc. sketches of 3 of our grandkids.

a little baseball

Our local rural electric coop publishes a monthly magazine full of coop news, recipes, and Texas history articles. The July issue included a story on the history of sandlot baseball, illustrated by a photo I used for this sketch.

Generally, I’m not a big fan of sports but baseball is special — as a young man, my grandfather played professionally in the minor leagues. I remember watching televised games with him, sharing a bowl of Spanish peanuts.

Years ago our son Jason took me to see the Astros play at Minute Maid Park. People sitting around us seemed to come just to socialize, but I actually watched the game and enjoyed it!

I drew this with a Kaweco Liliput fountain pen in J. Herbin Lie de The ink, touching it here and there with a waterbrush for the wash. The text was penned with a Lamy Safari pen filled with a sepia ink I mixed using De Atramentis document brown and black inks.

my favorite missing pot

If anyone has seen a pot for sale like this one, please let me know!

This past week Bill and I have been working on the planting beds in front of our barn-house. Before all the construction on the old pole barn began, these beds were overfilled with lantana, purple fountain grass, prickly pear cactus, agave, and some unknown plant we called the pokey plant for its very sharp needle-leaves that hurt anyone fool enough to touch them.

Much was trampled by carpenters, some was pulled out because of extreme overgrowth, and we lost the cacti in last year’s freak “snowmageddon”. As we replant fountain grass and prickly pear cactus, I am also moving my container herb garden to the front. It’s been next to the back patio but didn’t get enough sun there.

And I find myself missing this favorite herb pot more than ever. A gift from our daughter after she first moved to Texas, it grew many herbs as well as hens & chicks over the years. This sketch is from 2008, just a year after I began keeping sketchbook journals. Two years after this sketch, the much loved pot was stolen from our front garden by thieving orcs — and I have never found another quite like it. How I wish I could!

A couple of other sketches from this old sketchbook: my sweet Maine Coon cats, Beorn Bearcat and Dali, keeping watch out the front window, and The Church of the Savior, the small stone church in the Riverside district of Wichita, Kansas. It was here in 2005 that I first learned how to watercolor from a very talented artist, John Lokke. We called ourselves the Riverside Watercolor Society and had so much fun painting together! The group has now scattered all over the country but I often think of the good times we had.

Ceilidh, from 2011

Recently our son Jeff and I were trying to remember how old our shared Scottish Terrier, Ceilidh, is now. She went to live with Jeff during his college years to help him through a bit of depression, then she chose him as “her” human permanently. She now lives with him in Ohio.

To determine her age, I went back in my sketchbooks — these are from 2011. The blog entry to the above sketches reads as follows:

“ Ceilidh insisted on tackling the front steps by herself after the first few times, running from me before I can pick her up. But she is still wary of coming down them.

Sort of like us. In life, it's much more exciting to go forward when we are feeling "up". Harder to function on the down side.”

Annie the musical

From last week: our granddaughter Jayna was in a stage production of Annie and it was fabulous! Too dark to sketch on site and photos were not allowed due to copyright — but these bunk beds were on the stage before the musical began so they were fair game, right?

During one of the songs, champagne bottles were uncorked shooting confetti and tiny $100 bills everywhere; this is one of many our grandsons Josiah and Judah gathered.

remembering Aunt Lucille

When I was a child, I had the most wonderful penpal ever. Aunt Lucile was actually my father’s aunt, older sister to my grandmother. She was also my friend. Even through those impossible teen years when it was not cool to write letters to elderly aunts, she was patient with me and persevered — and I continued to write her through the rest of her life. Even when dementia changed the content of the letters.

For many years of her adult life Lucile remained single, taking care of my great-grandparents and teaching. In fact she began her teaching career in a rural 1-room schoolhouse! Later on, she married a widower and helped raise his 3 sons.

Though I take more after my grandmother in looks (she’s also where I get the ability to draw), I like to think I’m a lot like Lucile in curiosity and varied interests.

Among so many hobbies (and she was good at everything she tried!), she also made sock monkeys. Sadly, I did not end up with one of her monkeys, but when I saw this little guy I bought it to remember her. There are a lot of different facial expressions on sock monkeys but this one looks quite a lot like hers did.

revisiting old journals

I was introduced to Webkinz in 2009 when our oldest granddaughter, 6 years old at the time, gave me a White Terrier — the closest match she could make to my Wheaten Scottish Terrier, Maxwell. She wanted both of her grandmothers to play the online games with her. At the time, all of her grandparents lived in Kansas and she’s a Texas girl.

The above sketch recorded this surprise reverse-birthday-gift. I would have named this first pet after Max except for that pink bow — my dog was not a froufrou type! So I named her Annie Laurie after one of my favorite Scottish folk songs. I remember hearing Alex Beaton singing it in person at a Scottish Festival years ago.

A year later I was acting as “granny nanny” to Mikala, and of course we went shopping for more Webkinz! That’s her Peppermint Puppy in the sketch below, a gift from her other grandma.

This month, that same granddaughter started college . . . and I have returned to playing on Webkinz, this time with our 2 youngest grandsons, Josiah and Judah.

 

one final sketch from Kansas

 

We spent our Saturday in Kansas visiting friends and family in El Dorado, starting with Ron and Sharon who live in a log cabin near the lake. Sound a bit like us when we lived in our own log cabin here in Texas? Ron is also a very talented cabinet maker; his woodshop makes Bill’s look like child’s play!

I was very surprised to see this tin-man! Standing between 9 and 10 feet tall, it had been at the city library (one of my favorite places — I have not found another library quite like it) as long as we had lived in El Dorado. What I did not know was that Ron had built it as a senior in high school, some 49 years ago. When the library was going to get rid of it, Ron was able to save it.

another urban sketch that wasn’t

Over the years that we drove from Kansas to Houston visiting our kids, we often passed the Swamp Shack on HWY 290 in Waller, TX. Every time I saw the 25-foot long crawfish, ridden by a mannequin dressed as a cowboy, I wanted to pull over and sketch it on-site. But never did.

After moving to Brenham, TX we still passed it driving to Houston. The restaurant was no longer in operation and the building was turned into a temporary fireworks stand (Fireworks are BIG in Texas: New Year’s, Texas Independence, Cinco de Mayo, Fourth of July . . .). I still wanted to stop to sketch it, but my husband is not a sketcher and we were always on our way to somewhere.

Then this past December, the crawfish was gone. There seems to be some work going on to the building but probably for a totally different use. So I sketched it from a photo just to remember it by.

I found this photo online taken in May 2019 — the cowboy’s hat was mostly gone and the whole thing was badly weathered but it still made me smile.

remembering San Diego

 A few days ago I was looking through an online sketchbook put together by Leslie Conklin Fehling on Facebook. She included sketches of the Point Loma Lighthouse and Cabrillo National Monument in San Diego, California — that made me wish I had been sketching back when we lived there in the early 1970s. I took photos at the time with an old instamatic camera; unfortunately the photo album was destroyed when a basement flooded.

Just one week after we got married, Bill first took me to Presidio Park. I had mistakenly believed that the structure now standing there was a reproduction of the original mission church. While this is the actual location of California’s first mission, this structure is a museum building built in 1928-29 by a local businessman who wanted to preserve the history of the site. Nothing remains of the original mission or presidio (one thing that fascinated me at the time was the archeological dig going on just down the hill).

The presidio (Spanish fort) was begun in May 1769; Mission San Diego de Alcala was established on this site July 16 (my birthday!) of the same year. But in 1774 the mission was moved a few miles away up the valley (where it continues as an active Catholic diocese today).

We sometimes bought lunch and ate it on the lovely presidio grounds. Bill carved our initials in a heart on a tree down the hill — when we took our kids to California on a vacation years later, we found that the tree had been removed, possibly for more parking.

Presidio Park’s Junipero Serra Museum, 1929

This is where I began my love of old Spanish missions. During a trip to San Antonio in 2012, I was able to do several mission sketches; someday when traveling is back to normal I hope we can take the Spanish missions trail from San Xavier to Corpus Christi.

hangin’ on the vine

 

Years ago I was commissioned by a small church to do some sketches to be used as backgrounds for an overhead projector. Placed over these images were prayer prompts that would be up during a noon voluntary time of prayer. I recently came across four of these original images that I particularly liked. Especially the grapes.

The very first thing I ever tried to paint in watercolor was a bunch of grapes (a sketch that was never even finished because I niggled it too much!) in an informal group of friends in Wichita, Kansas. We called ourselves the Riverside Watercolor Society.

“I am the Vine, you are the branches. When you’re joined with me and I with you, the relation intimate and organic, the harvest is sure to be abundant. Separated, you can’t produce a thing.”  — John 15:5, The Message

when I wasn’t sketching . . .

During the 30+ years after high school that I was not sketching, I couldn’t help myself — creativity found other outlets. One of which was embroidery.

Bill and I were married in Apache Junction, Arizona under the looming Superstition Mountains. In the early 1970s, they practically seemed to be in his mother’s back yard with only desert between her house in the outlying parts of Mesa and the mountains’ beginning. The last time we were in Arizona we were saddened to see how much development was allowed not only up to this iconic view, but also up the side of the mountain itself.

I cross-stitched this scene (using a purchased pattern) as a gift for his mom. Years later when she died, it was returned to me and it now hangs on our bedroom wall — a memory of both our times hiking the Arizona desert and of his mom.
 

Sketch With Me: challenge

This past weekend was the monthly virtual sketch crawl with the Sketch With Me group, and this month’s prompt was “challenge”. The challenge of a hard subject, a new medium, etc.

For me lately, the real challenge is taking time to sketch at all! With Bill’s ongoing dentist appointments, my periodontal appointments, our going through stuff to get rid of anything we don’t wish to move (if we haven’t used it in 5 years, why keep it?), meeting with the realtor to sell the cabin, taking time for get-togethers with our kids in Pflugerville, Needville, and Houston . . .

In fact, getting photos for the realtor proved to be my biggest challenge this weekend! The company’s photographer came out to take photos — and they turned out horribly! So dark and depressing, I sure wouldn’t want to look at the property as she captured it! She’s young; perhaps it is just a summer job for her. I admit taking photos of a small space in a dark log cabin can be challenging, but I knew we could do better. After all, it was a great bunch of photos that made Bill and me consider buying the cabin in the first place — and we have improved it since then!

So our daughter came out to stage the furnishings better and take new photos. And what a difference they were! It’s good to take time for sun or cloudiness to get the right outdoor shots, and get the right angle to enhance a space rather than making it seem to close in on itself! Our cabin, though built of darkly painted logs, is really quite a sunny place with lots of gorgeous views of trees.

I gave the new photos to our realtor to replace the first ones online but ran into another glitch: Kristen’s camera resolution was too high, creating files too large to upload. So, with our son Jason’s help, I now have the correct pixel size and hope the new photos will be posted later today.

Leaving very little sketching time. But ever since we moved in 5 1/2 years ago, I have wanted to draw this view of our loft from the steep stair-ladder made of half-logs, looking upwards to the peaked roof log beams. That’s my great-grandmother’s quilt hanging over the right railing. At first I thought I’d just paint it and leave the heavy logs with the white bead board in between them in ink only. But now I’m not so sure . . . Should I paint the logs as well?

the Flint Hills

I’ve been slow at finishing these sketches . . .
We returned to Kansas last week for a friend’s funeral, held in Emporia, KS. As our son Jason drove us up the Turnpike, I snapped some photos with my phone, to be sketched later.

These are the beautiful Flint Hills we used to live near. When I used to meet with friends in the Kansas City area for monthly sketch crawls, these are what we drove through. Though I seldom actually sketched them while I lived in Kansas.

After grueling cattle drives from Texas, cattle were brought here to fatten up on the rich tall bluegrass before heading for the trains. We have seen them in every season, drenching rain and drought, and even during the yearly burning of the Flint Hills. Always beautiful, always a bit mysterious.