Nonagenarian Update: Big Birthday!

Our Nonagenarian turned 96! We celebrated with some ice cream, and she had some good laughs and asked many questions about our lives - are we still cooking at home? Does everyone have a job? Is everyone healthy? :) Her fig tree is in good shape, and jasmine is blooming right now. The bird feeder brings lots of visitors. And several onions are growing on the balcony next to a marigold and a rose. 

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 ;)

Sketching in a Kayak

I am getting ready to give a talk at the Edmonds Sketcher Fest - titled "Extreme Travel Sketching: What to Bring and How to Survive" - and I will be walking about all sorts of unusual places where I sketched - including while in a kayak!

And this week I had a wonderful opportunity to spend some time on the water - sketching from a sit-on-top kayak at the Elkhorn Slew by the Pacific Ocean. I saw so many birds! Cormorants eating close by, and pelicans of two different kinds pass very close. Harbor seals popping up right by the paddle. And a growing population of sea otters - which is such a joy to see!

Botanical Odds and Ends from the current sketchbook (#160)

Little things sometimes seep in between bigger things - and little drawings fill the margins of my days and sketchbooks. This batch is from the last month or so - a collection of little botanical notes of treasures that I picked up here and there. When in doubt of what to draw - look in your pockets - there is a chance that little something from the recent walk is there waiting for you! 

A Surprise New Garden

I have a new addition to my list of places where there is always something to sketch. I was introduced to it by a friend when giant purple candelabras of Pride of Madeira were in high bloom. I found some really interesting juxtapositions of plants in this garden and some amazing workspaces that I want to come back and draw. 

Later I had a chance to stop by to look at one part of the garden with two different sets of tools (dual marker with two purple colors and my modified parallel pen with black ink) and then a direct gouache. In both of these sketches, my interest was to show how many different foliages are there in one little space. 

Museum Visit: Ruth Asawa's Retrospective

There is a wonderful (and large) retrospective of Ruth Asawa's work in SF MoMA (one of my "I want to see in 2025"). This exhibit makes a fair attempt at showing works of someone who had a very prolific 60 years of making art of all sorts. It was not an easy task to put it together and it is quite possible that several separate exhibits would be a much better solution. I probably would not visit them all through. But I would love to look at room after room of sketchbooks.  Or an exhibit of only paper sculptures? I would love to have a day of visiting a garden and the house. The faces installation in the Cantor Art Museum at Stanford is always worth a visit (they were not part of this retrospective however were mentioned). But that is an interesting project - uniting many years of artist's work and life in a community. The wired sculptures that are considered the most recognized pieces created by Asawa took many rooms and could be a separate art show as well. As usual - being in their presence was different from looking at them in a book - I spent quite some time watching people dance to them, kids try and draw every coil and I tried to film some moving shadows. Then there are public art projects. And teaching, and work with kids. And then there are some wonderful prints! In short - there is a lot to embrace if you are trying to make (or look at) a retrospective of Ruth Asawa! more notes in my sketches :)

People Sketching: Protests

Earlier this spring I wrote that a lot of people sketching is happening for me this year and promised to share more - this is the second installment from the "people sketching in 2025"  

This year one of my new constant sources for figure and crowd sketching is drawing during protests. Demonstrations are happening throughout the United States every week, and participation rates are growing. On June 14th more than 2000 "No Kings" protests happened throughout the USA, with several millions of people in attendance. The "No Kings" protests addressed a growing concern over diminishing democracy and the growth of the authoritarian behavior of the current administration.

I was there with the thousands of my neighbors and drew some of them. It was a very friendly, peaceful crowd - people were bringing water for each other and for the pets, people were singing and chanting and sharing chairs and supporting each other. They had all sorts of messages about freedom and democracy for all - it was an example of a functioning society. 

Below are my sketches from other protests. 

Democracy exists only as long as we take part in it - by not being indifferent: voting, attending city council meetings, knowing your rights and exercising them, making signs about an issue that is important to you, and showing them - in a window, on your shirt, during a protest. Make a call to your elected official, write them an email - make your voice heard. 

Here is how to place a call (or email) to your representative - it takes 5 minutes:
https://5calls.org/

Here are some of my five favorite signs from the protests so far:
First Amendment - Use it or Lose it
Only You Can Prevent Fascist Liars
Fight Truth Decay
Science Saves Lives
Justice For All

Reading Notes: Thinking on Paper

I've read a couple of books recently that are a perfect companion for each other. Both are "spiraling out" books - meaning you start reading a book and it sends you on a hunt for more books, authors, ideas etc. - my favorite kind of book but also the most complex kinds of books because it is really hard to finish them :) These two are

The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen and 

Remarkable Diaries: The World's Greatest Diaries, Journals, Notebooks, & Letters (DK History Changers)