New Colors for the Road

Hello friends,

I'm already on the road headed into California Gold Country for the week, but as part of my trip preparations I decided to revise my watercolor palette and downsize from the large one I've been using to a smaller one. 

First, I emptied the small box and gave it a good rinse.  There! All clean! 

I especially like this small Schmincke palette box.  I bought it filled with Schmincke pans but I've used them and now I fill empty pans with Daniel Smith tube paint.  And yes, I pulled out the metal base with the prongs that hold the pans, because I can fit more pans in without it.

Instead, I cut a piece of quilting or stenciling template plastic the size of the base.

That holds the pans and then I can pop them out easily too -- as here, where I pulled out the last configuration of pans in this palette box...

The palettes are stuck to the plastic with that blu-tack putty you can get at art supply stores.

But look how many half-pans I can fit inside:  21! 

I don't know a tidy way to fill the pans from the tubes.  I'm just messy at it, what can I say?  At least I didn't end up with any paint on my face.   And voila -- now to let this rest and dry for a bit.

I have a lot of my usual favorite colors but I'm trying a few new ones this time.  Here's what's in the palette (All Daniel Smith except for one WN):

Row 1: 
Lemon Yellow
Hansa Yellow medium
Perinone Orange
Pyrol Scarlet
Quinacradone Rose
French Ultramarine
Indanthrone Blue

Row 2:
Green Gold
Green Apatite Genuine
Jadeite
Perylene Green
Cobalt Turquoise (WN)
Carbazole Violet
Diane's Bistre (burnt sienna + french ultramarine)

Row 3:
Buff titanium
Quinacradone gold
Goetite
Burnt Sienna
Indian Red
Raw Umber
Lunar black

Lunar black is one of the new ones.  I usually don't include a black in my palette but I've read that this makes interesting mixes and granulates well. So I'm giving it a try.  Every time I fill a palette and start using it, I discover that there are colors I just rarely use.  Perinone orange might turn out to be one of those.  We'll see.  

Jumping Frogs Packed

In a few days, I'll be hitting the road for a little adventure.  I can't wait!   I should be cleaning house and doing laundry and getting things in order before I leave.  However, I have my priorities.

I spent yesterday making a travel journal just for this little trip.   And this time, I've tried to restrain myself and leave lots of open space for gluing thing in and journaling and, eventually, adding photos.

So where am I headed?  Off with my sister to explore the California gold country!

We'll be staying in this cozy cottage and venturing forth from here each day.  We've not been to this area since we were kids so we're eager to see it all again. 

Adventure, here we come.  Jumping frogs packed and ready.

Trying to be a chameleon is hard work

I think there is some chameleon in me.  I see something that mesmerizes me and I want to BE it.  I crawl toward it. 

Like this, over here.   Or this. 

I climb all over it and look really hard and try to figure out how to crawl into that skin.

You know, so I can do this.    

I can spend a whole lot of time trying to make myself match those wonderful, wonderful things.  Like this... who wouldn't want to do this?

But really, I'm not a very good chameleon. And that's probably a good thing.  After I wear myself out trying to do things that look like something that's not me, I remember what it is I can do. I remember I like things simple and clean.  I like to see the white of the page.  I remember that what I do isn't great, it isn't perfect, but it reflects me.   For today, anyway.

Tomorrow, I'll probably crawl off toward some other wonderful thing and start trying to change my skin again. 

** All of this is to stay that I'm putting away the acrylic paints, packing up the box of stencils, and closing the journal full of dreadfully ugly, messy, over-wrought attempts at art journal pages I've made today.  I'm putting my pretty flowered cotton table cloth back on the table, and setting out the polka-dotted vase of white roses, and I'm gonna just relax and breathe easily again.  Trying to be a chameleon is hard work.  

Sitting and Listening

I've lived within an hour or so from San Francisco for a fair amount of my life.  And I've spent time in the city over the years, going to fun events and places and seeing the wonderful things there are to see there.  But this past weekend, I had an amazing revelation.

I was in the city in the first place to see a play.  ("Into the Woods" at the SF Playhouse.  It was fabulous.  Musical.  Toe-tappingly fun.  Deeply thought-provoking.  As the best theater is, of course.)  I stayed overnight and decided to do a bit of sketching and a bit of shopping around Union Square.

I started the morning in a cafe right on the square, where I could sit in the sunshine and sip my latte and watch the people lining up for the tour buses.  It was a great place to sit and absorb the place. 

And it amazed me.  I think I heard a whole planet's worth of foreign languages swirling around me as I sat there sketching.  People making plans. People poking at their cell phones. People eating breakfast and chattering away about... well, who knows, because it wasn't in languages I could understand.   

Later in the day, after some roaming and shopping, I returned to the square, found a bench with a good vantage point, and pulled out my sketchbook again.  

 I was near some young, beautiful Muslim women who had set up a table and were telling everyone about Eid al-Fitr, the celebration at the end of Ramadan.  (I taped the little card the woman gave me right onto my sketch which made her smile broadly.)  I could hear them chattering musically in their language, interspersed with their conversations as people stopped at their table.  I could hear the group of young guys behind me talking about their girlfriends and their party plans.  At one point, a big group of students gathered to announce a protest (about the political situation in the Philippines) and then they chanted for 20 minutes or so before they marched off, banners waving, to take their protest through the city.  

At another point, I felt a quiet presence beside me and I looked up to find a young girl, maybe 10 or 12, standing beside me. I said hello. She told me she was from China and she wanted to know what I was doing.  Drawing, I said, did she draw?  Not very well.  I told her my daughter was from China, which earned me a surprised look.  She told me where she was from.  Your English is very good, I said.  I like to practice it, she replied.  And off she went.

I had a good time sketching.  But what I'll remember from that day was how sitting and listening as I sketched gave me a whole difference experience of that place. 

I think we all need to just sit and listen a bit more in this world. 

Blog Hop: My Creative Process

So many of us love to see each other's creative processes.  It's inspirational and instructive, isn't it?  There's a blog hop going to share creative process details, and my friend Helen Conway tagged me to answer the following questions. (You can see her post here.)  You can follow the links at the end to to see others who've shared their creative processes too.  

What am I working on?

Well, as usual, I have a bunch of different projects going.  I tend to think of the concept of "working on" something as a fairly loose one, so it includes projects that I'm actively spending time on plus a few extra that are percolating in my mind.

I've not had a lot of quilt projects on the front burner lately.  I finished this art quilt recently, after it sat in my closet for literally years.  But at some point I realized how to solve the problem that had stumped me -- how to make the roses for this rose bush-- so it was fun and satisfying to actually get it finished.

I have a more traditional quilt in progress, too ... Well, if you consider  "sandwiched and sitting on the sewing machine ready to be quilted" as "in progress" which I do.  I can't tell you how many days over the past few weeks I've planned to get to quilting on it as soon as I finish the morning's chores... And then the day gets away from me, and there it still sits.  Ah well, it won't fly away.
(Har har har, see that is a flying geese quilt?!  Hilarious, aren't I?)

I've actually been spending more time working on sketching than quilting in recent months.  I'm enjoying the process of developing my drawing skills and learning new things all the time, and I continue to amaze myself at how just DOING it helps me get better.  I've been on a recent kick drawing bits of plants from my garden. I have to say that one of the things I love about sitting down to sketch something is that it's done pretty immediately.  It's great for immediate gratification purposes, especially compared to the process of making a quilt.

 

and more... 

 

and more.

I've written here about how the process of learning to sketch has taught me a lot of interesting and surprising things about myself -- not the least of which is I CAN LEARN THIS!  (I thought it was a matter of either having the talent, or not.  But no.  It's a learnable skill.  Brenda Swenson, an artist I admire tremendously, recently said something that really struck me:  The talent you need to have is the willingness to learn and persistence.  It's so true.  But one thing I've learned is that I love drawing buildings.... trying to figure out the perspective, drawing the little details....I love it.  Who knew?! 

Another project on the "in process" pile is an exploration into crossing the sketching over into quilting.  I had this sketch printed on fabric via Spoonflower.com, and I'm going to try quilting it as a whole cloth quilt and see how it turns out. 

Funnily enough, I've recently returned to making books -- something I did a lot of almost 20 years ago.  I used to teach making book, in fact.  But then I got burned out after a lot of teaching, and I went through a "but what are they FOR" crisis with the artist books I was making and exhibiting, and I veered off into quilting.  But sketching seems to inevitably lead to the search for the perfect sketchbook, which got me into messing about with making my own sketchbooks and some very fun collagey books I call Jumbly Journals. 

One of the things I'm enjoying about making these is that they combine a whole lot of things I love:  books, sewing, paper, collage, journaling, and I even incorporate sketches on some pages, too.

 

Here's a glimpse of some pages from a trip I took a few months back to Poulsbo, Washington.  I journalled on the back of that big postcard and that funny photo.

How does my work differ from others of its genre?

That may be the sort of question others would be better answering -- it's sort of like trying to describe one's own style.  It's more easily visible to others, I suppose.  But I have learned to relax and not worry about what sets my work apart from anyone else's, because I figure it'll become apparent because the work is MINE.  One interesting aspect about sketching is that I have become a lot more comfortable with just drawing the way I do, and embracing the resulting wonkiness as part of my own voice right now.  The sketches, or the quilts, or whatever else I produce, shows my tastes and choices and skills ... and even if it's quirky and not perfect, it's mine, and that's a good thing.

Why do I write/create what I do?

If you're a creative person, you've probably had someone say to you, "But how do you find the time?" And if you're like me, the answer has something to do with the fact that creativity is just essential.  It's kind of like oxygen.  I can't NOT do creative things because it's too important to me.  

And another part of the answer to this is that I'm all about the fun.  I am lucky that I can earn money in other ways and don't have to make my art about generating income.  That means that I'm doing this just for me.  And mostly, I'm making art -- whether through quilts or sketches or books -- to relax and have fun and play with colors and fabrics and papers and paints.  When I find myself feeling like I'm doing something because I HAVE to, whether because of a deadline, or some external factor, I look hard at how and why I put myself in that position.   

So, I don't make quilts about political messages or sketch scenes that I don't find attractive.  I admire that others do that and can use their art to communicate difficult messages.  I deal with those subjects in my work and through other avenues.  But the creative part is for my enjoyment, so Me, I'm just in it for fun.

How does your writing/creative process work?

I don't have any one process. But probably the common denominator is that something visual will inspire me.  Sometimes it's color.  Sometimes it's a piece of fabric.  Sometimes it will be an idea in my head that leads me to pull out fabrics or start thinking about colors... But I think it starts with the visual concept first.  


I don't really have one type of quilt methodology because I tend to make all sorts of types of things.  So sometimes I start with a photo that I want to translate into fabric.  Sometimes I start with fabric and start pinning it up onto my design wall to see what happens.  

With sketching, I've been known to sit myself somewhere -- where ever there's a bench or a cafe table, say -- and the look around for something to sketch that interests me or presents a challenge.  

I used to get myself worried that I must not be an Artist because I didn't have ONE method or style that defined my work, or ONE medium I was obsessed with mastering, or ONE coherent body of work that looked like it went together.  I thought I had to find my ONE magical, perfect process and then that's what I'd do to produce beautiful work and I'd be happy for the rest of my life.  But I think I've determine that it's not going to work like that, for me at least.  So I'm quite happy just trying different things and going as the mood strikes me.  In "artist-speak" I guess you'd call that "intuitive."  But I just call it doing what I feel like when I feel like it.  

I'd love to see your comments about how you approach your process, and whether you battle with perfectionism, or the belief that you had to do things a certain way, or develop a certain style...  

For more great blogging on the creative process, check out my friend Terry Grant's blog next Monday -- she'll be posting about her creative process!  And here are some links to other artists who have described their processes, too:

Rayna Gillman
Gerrie Congdon
Susan Lenz
Jeannine at Distilled from Stars

So Long, James Garner

Last night, I was in the mood to watch a good movie, and after casting about among the popular movies available through my pay-per-view cable provider, I switched over to Netflix to find an older movie that would suit my mood. Shopping through the weird array of current movies made me crave reliable, good acting, a plot with some depth maybe.  And almost immediately I settled on a "Twilight," a 1998 movie starring Paul Newman, Susan Sarandon, Gene and Hackman.

Somehow I'd missed this back when it came out.  (Let's see. Miss C was 2.  We were moving from New England to California in 1998.  That explains it -- not a lot of movie-watching going on back then.)

It was a terrific movie, better than the 2 stars Roger Ebert gave it in the review I linked above.  Maybe it just suited my mood -- a slow pace, a delicious film noir sensibility, the scenes of LA and the Sarandon/Hackman celebrity couple with Reese Witherspoon as their spoiled, cynical daughter, Paul Newman as a comfortably jaded retired PI.  It felt like a trip to another era -- you know, when movies were really good and actors really acted.  (Goodness, I'm sounding old and cranky.  I've just not seen a really great current movie in a while.  Recommendations welcome below!)

At any rate, when I started the movie I'd focused on Newman and Sarandon and Hackman.  So when James Garner ambled onto the screen (and he has just a perfect amble, doesn't he?) I was surprised. I'd not realized he was in the movie.  And I felt such a rush of pleasure, like having an old friend appear at the door after a long absence.  I've always loved him -- and he's so likable.  As Paul Newman's long-time private eye buddy, he was perfect.

And then this morning, I woke to the news that James Garner died last night. Weirdly synchronistic, and terribly sad... but I was glad I'd spent last night with him, in a manner of speaking.

So I've been thinking about how I've enjoyed James Garner in so many films and shows over the year.  I feel a James Garner movie marathon coming on to re-watch some of my favorites:

Maverick
Move Over, Darling (movie, with Doris Day)
The Thrill of it All (another with Doris Day)
The Americanization of Emily (oh, a wonderful, wonderful movie with Julie Andrews)
The Rockford Files
Murphy's Romance (with Sally Field)

Scanning James Garner's filmography on IMDB, I see there are quite a few movies of his that I've not seen.  Looks like I've got my movie watching taken care of for a while.

*** Oh dear.  It has just occurred to me that I may have cause for serious concern. This past week, I took delivery of an amazing comfortable LaZBoy recliner.  Am I destined to sit in it, trolling for old movies and fussing that "they don't make 'em like that any more?"  I'd better find some good current movies, fast.    Which begs another question: who is current film equivalent of actors like Paul Newman and James Garner and Jimmy Stewart?

How well do you know the trees in your backyard?

When I moved into the house I'm living in now, it was brand new and the backyard was a huge expanse of bare dirt.  It was a few years before we could afford to put anything back there, and when it finally came time to landscape, I researched and worked with my landscape guy and chose trees that suited the clay soil and the warm California climate.  Some the professionals planted, and some I bought as tiny babies and planted myself.  Now, some 12 years later, most of the trees are very big and it all looks lush and green and the yard is well- screened and shaded.  I feel such a connection to the trees out there, as if they are children I've been watching and nurturing.  We have a bond.

So in the Sketchbookery class I'm doing with Mary Ann  Moss (which is a whole lot of fun, let me tell you), when she suggested doing a plant field study this week, I knew immediately I'd do a page about the trees in the yard.  This morning at 7am I was outside in my bathrobe clipping a leaf or two off of each tree, and I sketched and painted while I sipped my morning coffee.  I knew the names of the trees but had to look up the latin names ... and learned, along the way, that the Gingko tree is reputed to be one of oldest trees (if not THE oldest tree) on earth.  Isn't that amazing and surprising? I would have guessed something more piney.  

Anyway, I had a lovely hour of painting and a special bit of time getting acquainted again with my trees.  

Maybe next I'll take a look at the shrubs out there... they quietly do their little background job and I should give them some recognition, too.

A Four-Legged Sort of Sunday

 
It's been a long time since I've spent all day at a horse show. But yesterday was one of those days -- a long, hot, dusty day, but loads of fun nonetheless.  I went with Miss C and her riding buddies from the local barn where she rides to a schooling show in the area.  Schooling shows are designed for novice riders and horses so everything is very flexible and forgiving and the judges act more like coaches who want to see every rider succeed.  I had a great time playing the role of Team Red Photographer -- here's how the day looked:

Photo slideshow made with Smilebox

We're all just looking for water

 

The other day, I scanned a page from my notebook to send to my friend Helen.  I was about to crop the scan down to the part with just the sketches, when I noticed the little specks  on the white page opposite my sketches.  Huh?  

I looked at the sketchbook.  The page was pristine. Could I have gotten ink or other marks on the scanner? I opened to look.

ACK!  Those weren't marks. They were ANTS!  ACK!

We're having quite the drought here in northern California, and on top of that the last few days have been very hot.  It's not that unusual to get the occasional ant invasion during hot summer weather -- after all, they're just looking for water, too.  

BUT IN MY SCANNER???  

So I did what anyone would do.  I got out the ant spray and the ant stakes and I sprayed and cleaned and then, just to be sure, wiped it all down with a bleach solution (yes, even the inside of the scanner). 

A few hours later, I found an intrepid line of ants venturing across the backsplash in the kitchen, heading determinedly toward the bowl of peaches on the counter.  DOUBLE ACK!

More ant traps, more bleach.  And more bleach.  Because, you know, I cook food there.   

 

 And then I memorialized it with a quick sketch in my sketchbook.  Isn't that what you would do?

 

Working Smoothly So Far

You know how every once in a while you can be surprised at how very well something works?  Well, that's what I'm experiencing these days.

I've always liked having fruit smoothies for breakfast in the summertime, as does Miss C.  Our blender is rather erratic, so I started researching juicers and smoothie makers and was getting a bit overwhelmed by the options and price ranges (those Vitamix things look good but it hardly seems worth $400 to me.)  And while I was in that research mode, I happened upon an infomercial for the NutriBullet "Superfood Nutrition Extractor"!!!  (Those exclamation points are so that you hear the voice of the infomercial announcer loudly exclaiming the wonder of this thing.)

I'm very good at resisting informercials.  I don't even watch them and if I stumble upon them, I click over to something else.  But I paused, because this was the very thing I was researching.  I watched.  Then got online and compared and researched.  This Nutribullet item seemed like it would do everything I wanted it to do, and the price was reasonable, and the reviews from users were very positive.  So there came a moment where I said "what the heck, let's just try it" and I sent off my order.

It came about a week ago.  And since then, I've made a smoothie a day for me and Miss C, and I am loving this thing.  The photo up top is the smoothie I made this morning.  It has spinach, fresh pineapple, strawberries, blackberries, and vanilla yogurt.  And its delicious.  The benefit of this (over some others or over a regular blender) is that it is supposed to blend some of the bits you'd normally leave out -- the seeds in grapes, or certain peels.  It claims to grind up healthy nuts and seeds so you can incorporate those, too.  Me, I'm starting with baby steps and basic fruits.  But I can report that it chewed up the blackberries completely and there aren't any of those teeny berry seeds that can ruin a silky, creamy texture.  It also handled the core of the fresh pineapple without any problem.

I consider myself rather brave for throwing in the spinach.  I actually love the taste of spinach, but I'm wary of drinks that look like brown sludge.  I'm thinking that I need to get an opaque cup so that if I do create a brown sludge, I won't mind so much.

So I'm rather pleased with myself.  I found just what I was looking for and it's working as advertised.  I'm waiting for the magic energy they claim will follow from drinking a smoothie a day, but hey, it could kick in at any minute.   Meanwhile, I'm liking these midmorning drinks.  Here's to a smooth summer!

* By the way, in case you think I've been sounding like I'm one big advertisement because I've been reviewing stuff, rest assured that I'm  just trying to get back to blogging more regularly and so I'm starting with talking about stuff that's on my mind and I want to share.  So yep, I'll get back to what I'm making and doing but I thought I'd talk about the good things I've been discovering, too. 

Book Review: Urban Watercolor Sketching

Recently, I was sent a copy of Felix Scheinberger's new book "Urban Watercolor Sketching" and asked if I'd review it.  I'll happily read any book on sketching and watercolor painting, so I readily agreed.  I figured it'd be another in the line of books featuring sketches by someone and I'd love looking at the pictures and I'd be inspired.

But when I sat down with this book, I discovered immediately that I was wrong.  This book is SO MUCH MORE than that.  Really.

The first thing I noticed was the quirky style of Scheinberger's sketches.  I wasn't familiar with his work and the idiosyncratic style is not one that I'm drawn to, at least on first blush.  But I liked that every page featured his sketches, even the technical pages were illustrated by his sketches of pens, paints, etc.  It makes for a book that feels visually exciting and fun and even surprising.  And the more I looked at his sketches, the more I fell in love with his variable line, with a style that expresses his unique view of the world, and his use of watercolor -- oh, it's fabulous.  Such gorgeous color and such splashy, confident work with paint.  It's remarkable and very inspirational.  I have come away feeling that I'll learn a lot by studying his sketches, if just for the placement of color, how he leaves white, how he lets the color splash outside of inked lines. 

And then I started reading, and I was equally surprised and impressed.  I've read a lot of bookds on sketching and painting, and most of them -- while wonderful books -- tend to follow a fairly basic formula.  This book is different.

It talks about what's in paint, and it gives a bit of history of basic color pigments.  It was full of interesting facts.  (Did you know that yellow is said to have originated from camels that were fed a diet of mango leaves, and then their urine was boiled and reduced to a pure pigment? That most mammals can hardly see red?)  He talks about the different aspects of color -- local color, iconographic color, how light affects color.  He talks about how to use color to portray distance.  He talks about leaving white, and even shows a page of sketches, with the same one in black and white and then again with color, to illustrate that neither is better, but that they are excitingly different.

And there's a lot more here.  Finding your own style.  Selecting the most important part of what you want to sketch, and accentuating it.  Using the negative space.  He talks about the tools -- the choices for paint, how to choose paint brushes, how to stretch watercolor paper, and he gives tips for sketching outdoors.  I loved his page on how to illustrate air, smoke, and fog with paint.

And for all of the content, none of it is dry.  It's written pretty conversationally, as if Scheinberger is talking to you and urging you on and giving you is sketching tips and philosophy.  

So here's my conclusion:  if you think, as I did, that this is just another one  of those books that show some artist's sketches, think again.  There's a ton of valuable information here, presented clearly with great illustrations.

The only thing I was wishing for as I read this -- and really, it was the ONLY thing -- was more information about Felix Scheinberger himself.  I like knowing how someone came to sketching and what it means to them, and especially because Scheinberger's sketching style is so individualized, I really wanted to know more about him.  The back cover reveals that he lives in Germany and that he's an illustrator, artist, and designer who has illustrated quite a few children's books.  I remembered that his art is featured in Danny Gregory's book "An Illustrated Journey," and there is more about him and his sketching background there.  I also found this video in which Danny interviews Felix.  So I'm going to go watch that now.  But really, do buy this book.  It's amazing.

*  I received this book for free from Blogging for Books for this review.  But I would have written this exact same thing if I'd bought it myself.

Book Review: The Mermaid of Brooklyn

I read a lot of novels, but a lot of time can pass before I find myself engrossed in a novel that I just love.  And to my surprise and delight, "The Mermaid of Brooklyn" by Amy Shearn was one of those books.

First, I have to say that the title is so intriguing and perfect.  Just that made me want to read this book.  The first line was a real grabber, too.  But what really got me about this book when I started reading it was the narrator's voice.  Jenny, the young, stay-at-home mom of a toddler and a new baby, is wry and honest and snarky and funny and depressed.  She's struggling with two kids, the constant feeling that she's never good enough, and trying to figure out how she got where she is.  And, with all of that, her husband leaves the apartment to buy cigarettes one night and doesn't come back.

This isn't a mystery.  But a complex story unfolds as Jenny is left, angry and sad and overwhelmed, to carry on mothering and trying to keep things going.  Then a mermaid enters her life -- and by enters, I mean, starts inhabiting her and bucking her up and challenging her and prodding her forward.

There was so much in this novel that rang true, about child-rearing and marriage and friendship and competition and being a grown up.  So many women, especially moms, will relate to this.  And with all of this, it stays light while covering deep, important life themes.

I loved it. 

An Art Play Day in San Francisco

           Yesterday, I woke early to a gorgeous, sunny, blue-sky day, and decided that instead of staying home and doing the household chores I'd been thinking about, I'd head to San Francisco to give myself an art date.  I packed up my art supplies and off I went.

     My first stop was the Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco's Presidio.  It's a wonderful place, all about Walt Disney's life and career and contributions to animation and film-making.  But my reason for going yesterday was that I've been wanting to see the special exhibit about Mary Blair, the artist who did so much work for Disney from 1940 to the mid-1960's.  She's probably most well-known for designing the look for It's a Small World, but she did a lot of other modern abstract/stylized stuff and was influential in art directing the look of various Disney productions such as Alice in Wonderland and Song of the South. You can find out more about her and see more of her art here.

   I loved seeing the exhibit, but what surprised me was how much I enjoyed seeing her sketchbooks.  They had the originals (one was a moleskine!) under glass, but they had digitized all of the pages and put them on an Ipad so you could page through them, one by one.  I was especially fascinated by the sketches she made on a trip with Walt Disney and other artists to South America, which they made for the purpose of researching and collecting imagery and designs to inspire future projects.  It was kind of reassuring to see that even though Mary Blair was a classically trained artist, her sketches -- especially the ones of people -- looked, well, SKETCHY.   Not perfect.  Weird faces, strange proportions.  Sort of like what I might do!  That was sort of eye-opening.

   

   While at the museum, I did a quick sketch of the case holding some of Disney's Oscars -- the special award he won for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is quite eye-catching and I wanted to do that.  I sketched fast and then used watercolor pencils to add color, with some water from a waterbrush quickly over that.  I enjoyed sitting there and doing it (and listening to all of the conversational bits as people flowed by) more than the result, but for me that's the joy of sketching.  Seeing this will always bring me back to the memory of being there.

     By then, I was hungry so I went exploring around the Presidio to find lunch.  (The cafe at the Disney Museum looks surprisingly dire, with very unappealing looking plastic wrapped food.)  I found the Transit Cafe, where I sat outside in the sunshine and enjoyed a great caesar salad and a view of the Golden Gate Bridge. Perfect.

    The Presidio is part of the Golden Gate National Park system, but was a long-time army base.  The buildings are beautiful and the grounds and views are stunning -- expanses of green lawn bordered by white clapboard buildings, views of the bay and the Golden Gate Bridge, groves of eucalyptus and cyprus trees.  I spent a while walking all around and exploring, and then settled myself in front of a former officer's house to sketch.

      Many of the homes are available to lease and are occupied and lovingly cared for.  It'd be a fabulous place to live, I'm guessing, if you could afford the very steep rent.  But I love these little Queen Anne style houses -- they date back to the 1840s. 

      By then, I was in need of a pick-me-up, so I headed over to another favorite spot in the area, the Warming Hut at Crissy Field.  It's also part of the national park and is a little hut/shop/cafe almost under the Golden Gate Bridge. I got a coffee and sat outside, enjoying the sea breeze and the crystal clear view of the city skyline and the great people watching. 

    Sitting there, I realized that heading home just then would put me in the thick of rush hour traffic heading out of the city across the bridge.  What to do?  I decided to spend a bit more time sketching before I headed north.  So I hopped back in the car and went over to the Palace of Fine Arts, another amazing, gorgeous San Francisco landmark.  

I love this place.  It was built for the  1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition, and is the only structure still existing on its original site.  It looks pretty in this photo, but it's hard to convey how huge and grand it is when you're standing next to those columns.  And, I might add, it is quite the sketching challenge. 

I kind of lost control of the perspective and proportion, but I had a good old time, and I had some nice conversations with tourists who stopped as they passed by. 

All in all, it was a lovely day.  Sometimes going to San Francisco feels like a big trek from where I live (it's a bit over an hour into the city, more depending on traffic) but going on the spur of the moment was just the thing. 

Pucker Up!

The good news: I think I've sorted out how to combine images and lettering to design quilt labels.

And I have a good handle on transferring the design to the machine so it's ready to embroider.

 

The bad news: I really have to improve the pucker situation.  I now know that all of these required tension adjustments that I didn't make (most likely, loading the bobbin a bit differently) , and probably should have been hooped a bit differently too.

 

 

But  it's progress, and frankly getting these done felt like such an ordeal that I'm not ready to do them over again.  But perhaps in a day or two I'll be ready to take it on again. 

There is definitely a learning curve to this machine embroidery. 

Meet Me at the Fair

When I was a kid, I lived in a neighborhood in San Mateo (a suburb south of San Francisco) just behind the county fairgrounds.  Each summer when the fair came to town, over the tops of the houses and trees I'd see the tops of the ferris wheel and other sparkly rides.  It felt magical to me, those glimpses of the carnival excitement that was just a few blocks away.  Going to the fair was a big family event, filled with loud sounds and bright lights and rows of vendors hawking unusual, enticing wares.  It was a Big Deal.

For the last two years, I've been invited to judge quilts at that very fair.  In fact, the San Mateo County fair was my first official judging job after I got my judge certification, which seemed especially meaningful somehow.  (I sketched this when I judged there that first year.)

Judging quilts is amazingly fun and fascinating, and this fair attracts quite a few (350+) quilts from very talented quilters.  The San Mateo judging crew is incredibly organized, which makes it easy and smooth and very pleasant.  I judged my allotted categories, but because there were so many quilts, I didn't see quite a few of them.  But the quilts aren't hung when we judge them, and things aren't open or set up at all. 

So yesterday, I drove back down to San Mateo (a 2 hour drive from my home) to go to the fair now that it's open. I took my sketching gear and planned to spend the afternoon looking at quilts and cruising the fair and indulging in a fair amount of nostalgia.

I can highly recommend a county fair as a fun place for sketching.  There is so much to see, so much color, so many amazing sights.  I ran out of time and never got to draw any of the animals, but (thinking I guess of my childhood attraction to the ferris wheel) I started in the carnival game and ride area and had a good old time sketching there.

Later on, after I tired of sitting out in the sun, I found a shady picnic table near one of the performance stages, got myself a cold drink and the Perfect Fair Snack -- "funnel cake" -- and then looked around to see what I could sketch from there.  Well, the funnel cake booth was pretty engaging.  So I had a wonderful time, watching local teen dancers and a troup of Chinese acrobats, sketching, and nibbling away at my cake. 
    

The day ended quite nicely when I met up with my friend Pat for fish tacos at a favorite spot in Mill Valley. We caught up after not seeing each other for a few months and talked quilting and art and compared our favorite colors of watercolor paint. Oh yeah, and ate chips and salsa and tacos.

It was the perfect play day. 

(I just realized that in my previous post, I wrote about the Sketching Disneyland project I'm working on with my sister.  Apparently I'm in an amusement park sort of mood these days!)

It's June and I'm Going to Disneyland!

Happy June 1!  I know it's not officially the start of summer, but if it's June, it's summer in my book.  So I'm feeling in the mood to travel and have fun. And what's more fun than Disneyland?!

Actually, I'm not going anywhere.  My dog Gemma, sweet aging girl, is having some back problems, and she needs to stay relatively inactive.  When I board her to go somewhere, she's around other dogs and she gets excited and agitated and wants to jump around like a maniac ... which is how she hurt her back in the first place.  So her back issue means no boarding, and until I find a house/dog sitter to stay with her if I go away overnight, I'm home.

So my sister Laura and I hatched a plan.  We decided that instead of going to Disneyland, we'd sketch Disneyland from photos.  We'll avoid the crowds and the expense and the hassle of getting from here to there, and we'll just work from photos and immerse ourselves in looking at Disneyland up close and personal through sketching.

I've been poking around online, and it's amazing the photos you can find.  Google Earth provides more, and of course I've got my own scads of photos from trips from years past.  It has been really fun just hunting up photos of my favorites places and sites, and each time I've come away feeling happy and relaxed, as if I have had a mental mini-vacation.

This idea was inspired, in part, by a wonderful art group called The Virtual Paintout.  Bill, the host of the VP, selects a location somewhere in the world each month, and participating artists agree to use Google Maps to find a scene in the designated location and draw or paint it, then post the original shot and the art on the blog.  I've only participated once -- Detroit -- but I had such a good time exploring a new place via Google Maps that I feel as if I've sat right in front of the Motown Museum and spent time there sketching.

So today, I'm off to Main Street in Disneyland to see what grabs my attention.  My rule for myself for this Disneyland sketching "excursion" is to work with colored pencil.  I've rarely used it (except for fill-in-the-space coloring when I was a kid) so it'll be an adventure and a learning experience. 

I have my virtual E-tickets and hand stamped and I'm on my way. 

A different sort of creativity

Last week, I was up in the charming town of Port Townsend, Washington to visit my friends Paige and Alan.  As always when I'm around Paige, I appreciate the amazing and unique nature of her creativity.  It's clear to me that creativity can come in so many different forms, but in Paige I see something I don't see in many people.  She has the ability to see things and put them together in unusual ways that instantly make sense.  The connections between them seem obvious once she makes them, but I'm often struck by how I'd never have put things together the way she does. Ever.

That art of arranging things is a subtle thing, too, because it's a sort of invisible creativity.  It's easy to take for granted, because once it's applied, it looks, well, natural and effortless. I suppose that set decorators and photostylists and window decorators have to develop this sort of skill.  But I've known Paige for almost 30 years, and she has always had it.  It's so normal to her that she doesn't think of it as anything special.  We've begun to call it "making vignettes" -- she'll bring something home, put it with a few other items that connect in her head, and voila, it's a new and charming vignette. 

So visiting her, and seeing the fun stuff around her house, and visiting the booths in the antique mall where she sells vintage collectibles, is always a visual feast. As usual, I came away wishing I'd taken more photographs and made more sketches.  But the truth is that I could be housebound at Paige's for a month and there wouldn't be time to see and sketch and photograph all of the interesting things she has collected.

I think I need to go back.