A season for pumpkins and getting together with friends - grateful!

It's a season to draw, eat, and decorate pumpkins :) It is also a season to be with people and tell them how much they mean to you! I am very fortunate to have some amazing friends who feed me (both literally and figuratively) with inspiring and enlarging ideas and foods on a regular basis. My  friend invited me for a "turn your pumpkin into a mini garden" party and I enjoyed it so much that I got myself some pumpkins and started bringing this idea to other people too ;) And then a bunch of friends got together to chat and draw and I got to make and then draw another pumpkin garden.  

There are pumpkins sitting at my parents and on our Nonagenarian's table. I am yet to draw all the pumpkins but this is a start.

Nonagenarian Update: fall of 2024.

We are approaching winter which is probably the hardest time of the year for our Nonagenarian - shorter daytime, colder weather. But she enjoys the rainy season. The bird feeder is attracting lots of visitors. The eye doctor says she is doing as well as they hoped for though this is a new doctor and "too young" again. She is vaccinated for the season. Her rose stopped blooming but there are some new shoots. Green onion, nasturtium, marigolds, and cucumber still prosper on her balcony. She is reading, cooking and even working on some new outfits - we are helping with sewing a little but the art direction muscle is still strong!

 

People sketching - online communities keep me going through another season!

Overall craziness of the pre-holiday and holiday season overlapped with the election season and with many folds of caregiving and projects left few holes in my schedule for some people drawing - which I continue to do in person and online - mostly via @pencils4tea - an online group of people who draw each other and time with songs. Here are some faces and experiments:

Virtual Traveling (with Street View World Tour) - Castles!

I was looking forward to the next virtual traveling and sketching event with the A Street View World Tour and wanted to see a demo by @ohn_mar_win whose color and spontaneity of sketching I admire. 

But plans changed and it became a day when I had to be in a hospital with my Mom (she is fine and I am writing an update on how my parents are doing for the next week's anniversary of my parents arrival to the USA). So a big part of the the four hours of surgery preparation we spent online - I explained the whole concept to Mom (and nurses), got my pocket printmaking kit out, and positioned it on Mom's bed. We looked for good angles, Mom was watching me draw, use found objects as stamps and I even cut some stamps out of an eraser for the craziest building ever (see first sketch). She enjoyed the demo by @ohn_mar_win a lot and gave me some advice based on it too. A memorable Thursday! :)

If you are not familiar - A Street View World Tour is a fun, no-pressure gathering hosted by Jenny Adam and Eleanor Doughty via Gage Academy. You can learn more about these monthly free events and about these locations at the links above. 

My previous participations include a trip to Kharkiv, Ukraine where I was the guest artist, Drawing Sky Holes, Kenya, Boats, Night Life, Hawaiian Foliage, Light and Shadow, and Japan, Ohio, Arizona and Taipei, Convenience Stores Around the World (I am quite sure that I participated in a few more but I am not sure I ever posted about them - will try to find and add to this collection!)

A day of rest in an otherwise crazy week.

Last week was very complicated on many levels. Yet there was a scheduled day of rest (the concept of Shabbat (which I take on unspecified days) was really helpful. 

On Election Day I went to the magical forest and garden in Santa Cruz Mountains to be with my friends. The fall is not here yet and we had gorgeously clear weather with golden light. This day was a part of my work to get a hold of the election anxiety. We were disconnected from all the news for a whole day. It was a gift of being among like-minded people, in nature, using our hands, doing things we love, trying some new stuff, failing and succeeding in our experiments, laughing, thinking, trying again, sharing a meal, conversation, and silence. 

That day and knowing that I am not alone and many people share my values and are ready to work together and make choices for a world of more kindness and justice and less greed and aggression are some of the things that helped me put one foot in front of another during this week.  Thank you, Gay and Suhita and the wonderful neighborhood of people who care! 

Travel Sketching: Pocket Printmaking Kit

This is the last post with sketches from my October trip to the East Coast, and here I collected sketches that I made with my pocket printmaking set of tools - plus a large acrylic marker for a quick spot of color (for details see a post about choosing tools for this trip).

I like how this worked with the limited palette and strong contrast - both things that I would like to develop further.

This is a series of posts about Fall 2024 trip to East Coast.

1. Airport Sketching 

2. Choosing sketching tools

3. Leaf Drawing Party

4. Catching Some Color / Fall feelings

5. Printmaking on the go.

Halloween 2024 - day after.

On the day after Halloween I went to see the Boo Crew House in San Jose  - all completed after the first night of performance. I knew that it would be different from the "work in progress" version I sketched last week but I was not prepared to see so many layers of attention and details added over just one week. It went from a really cool antique store/workshop site to a high-level theater set! 

I had the pleasure to sketch alongside @suhitasketch and @umapaints and met quite a few people from the Boo Crew itself - people who made it all happen brought their families during the daylight to show and tell about their involvement in different aspects of the production. It was just a mind-blowing level of imagination, craftsmanship, enthusiasm, and attention to detail on a huge show that lasted only a couple of days a year! 

And here is a link to a little video about this visit.

Visit their page (@boo.crew.on.church.drive ) and learn more about this volunteer-driven community project that is so inspiring!

Travel Sketching: Catching Some Fall Feelings!

I've re-arranged my sketches from this trip several times - thinking about how to share them, and I think this batch is a series of sketches that will tell you one thing only: I love color, and these all are mad attempts to show you how happy it made me to be in the middle of so much of it on this trip!

These sketches are direct gouache with some underpainting done with a large acrylic marker, texture added with the distress crayons, and some lines added in pen or pencil. Details on the tools that I took with me are in a separate post - see below. 

This is a series of posts about Fall 2024 trip to East Coast.

1. Airport Sketching 

2. Choosing sketching tools

3. Leaf Drawing Party

4. Catching Some Color / Fall feelings

5. Printmaking on the go.

On My Table: Beginning of November 2024.

I had a really amazing October with lots of drawings and a wonderful trip to the East Coast. 

This mess on my table is very much the true state of things as I am still unpacking from the trip but already drawing persimmons and working on a bunch of new cards to send to people while drawing lots of everyday things.

Halloween 2024

I have heard about this place before and finally made to the magical Boo Crew House in San Jose. Every year a neighborhood crew of enthusiasts puts together a differently themed exposition. This year it is WESTERN! Completed with horses, steam train, Saloon, collection of coo-coo clocks, stained glass windows and a collection of cactuses!

Suhita Shirodkar and I went to see the house as it was being built and we were able to sketch there. The house will be ready by the 31st and will be open for two days only. We saw it only halfway done but the amount and scale of imagination, care, invention, craftsmanship, and community that we witnessed is amazing and fascinating to witness! 

Here are a few words about their fundraising page to give you some background: "The Boo Crew on Church Drive presents Halloween in the Neighborhood Inc. Every spooky Halloween season since 2009, Bob Schiro and the Boo Crew of San Jose, California construct haunted houses from the ground up with the goal of bringing all communities together for 2 nights of frights and fun! Each event is made possible through recycled materials and props, generous volunteer hours from the Boo Crew members, and with the goodness of our fans and community, their charitable donations. With all of those possibilities, the result is that there is no cost for admission!"