Practicing My Workshop Before the Trip

This week I took my portable printmaking kit, which I will be using in the upcoming classes, to 2 different locations. 

First one was virtual travel - but I was allowed only things that were in my "workshop bag". I was drawing with the  Street View World Tour - hosted by Jenny Adam and Eleanor Doughty via Gage Academy. I had limited amount of time, so I did only one sketch while Sarah Bixler painted O'ahu, Hawaii in gouache - I wanted both to travel there in person and paint this in gouache!! But with the restrictions on that day, this is what I came up with:

And then I had the pleasure of being introduced to a new (for me) little lake by my friends.  With a shady path, some buildings against the mountains, lots of different greens to reflect in the water, and various birds to sketch, it felt like a mini adventure! This time, my kit went on location and got another workout!

Drawing shadows as a way to look.

One of my favorite ways to break the ice with people who claim that they can never draw anything resembling anything is to offer them to draw a shadow :) It is always better to start with something simple, but complex, like a palm with fingers or a flower. You will need a good source of light (be that a lamp or the sun) - which is a mood booster by itself :) And then you ask them to follow the contour of a shadow - it is a self-explanatory thing - and it does not take long. And then you have a page with a recognizable thing drawn just now! But even for people who do not need a pep-talk and for people who are good or even great at drawing, there is a lot of delight in tracing shadows, be that what you start with or add as a detail for a background. 

For me, shadow is such a different way of looking at an object - it magically opens up dimensions despite actually flattening a 3D object into a 2D view. You can spend some time finding the angle that matches your current whims and follow shadows within shadows if you want more complexity with multiple sources of light. I enjoy collecting shadows when I am in a museum looking at sculptures, and sometimes (for example, on a Ruth Asawa show), objects move, so you have moving shadows to draw! 

This agapanthus was fun to draw, but having that little shadow portrait made that page extra special for me - I understood some mistakes that I made after drawing the shadow too and it gave me more time with the flower - so I noticed more details and now am ready to go back and draw it again :)

On My Table: Beginning of July 2025

July is here, and this year it is a month of teaching and traveling for me. I am honored to be a part of a team of teachers at the Chicago Urban Sketchers Seminar this July 11-13. And I am super excited to join a whole bunch of amazing artists at Sketcher Fest Edmonds this year - July 19-20. As a result, everything on my work table right now is about the classes and trips. A bunch of printmaking tools and a handout, samples of my class tests, and a pile of sketchbooks that I am taking with me to Edmonds to share during the sketchbook fair and also to illustrate during my talk "Extreme Travel Sketching: What to Bring and How to Survive." I hope to have a photo reportage about these in August!

Visit to an Artichoke Patch

In my neighborhood, there is a house where people LOVE growing artichokes. Some years they have huge plants, some smaller. I've been visiting this place for a few years now, left some artichoke sketches by the door during the pandemic as these purple beauties made my bike rides very special that year. This week I went back to check on them again. Looking for familiar and unfamiliar shapes and textures of leaves and stalks, and in the flowers. They always surprise me with the intensity of color and the joy of figuring out how they are built. 

I started with a super quick ink sketch to get it out of the way and then spent some time looking at different parts of the same plane with gouache (used as watercolor mostly) and ink.

The Last of Avocado Season

Here are the last sketches from the numerous avocados that were consumed this season. I am hoping that the tree that gave us these gifts will be generous again, for I have many more ideas for how to sketch these berries ;)