I've had a social few days, so I'm behind on my blog. After thinking I would move mostly toward watercolor again, I spent Sunday just doing pen sketches. The weekends are great street music days, and since it was the only weekend that Stephen is in town to play with Rene (during my trip, anyway), I decided just to sit back and enjoy the show instead of trying to do serious work at the same time. He's an amazing bass player. I wish I were good enough to learn from just watching him. As it is, I just enjoy and marvel.

It was also rainy in spurts, so they'd play a while, and then we'd duck into a cafe for a bit to take cover. Not great painting conditions. So I did a few marker sketches because I just can't help myself (I loved the image of them playing in the Marais in front of a big mura,l) but mostly I just had a good time.

I think I might be a groupie at this point, but they really treat me like a friend and make me feel very welcome here, which is lovely. And they're interesting guys as well as talented. We talked about Shaker theology, early 20th century music, banjos (of course --- four out of five people at dinner last night played the banjo), accents, travel, and touring and who knows what all at a small dinner party last night. Stephen cooked for all of us --- Rene's niece was in town, plus another traveling musician and me, so I had a delightful evening with all of them.

But the sun is supposed to come back out today, and if so, I plan to make good use of it.

Oh! And this pedaled by while the guys were playing. One thing I love about Europe is that all of life, a whole carnival, is out mingling on the sidewalks. In America, people are mostly sealed individually inside their cars, which takes away so many possibilities for joy and interaction.

I moved back more to watercolor the last few days. It was raining off and on Friday, but I manages to find a couple of protected enough places to paint. One was the Carnavalet museum garden, where I could be under a covered walkway with a great view of the mix of formal boxwood with kitchen garden plants --- tomatoes, beans, and cabbages. Utterly charming.

I also went back to paint the fountain at the Place des Voges after doing a couple of marker sketches there earlier. It was drizzling slightly, but the thick tree arbors there gave me plenty of protection for painting.

I included a halfway done picture of this one. It shows what has been so hard for me about watercolor. For years in pastels and even in oils, I could do the entire background in the dark colors and then just pull the white of the fountain on top.

With watercolor, I have to be very conscious right from the beginning about where the water is and leave it completely clean as I'm working. It takes a lot of concentration, and there's no real recovery from a mistake. But I'm having fun with the watercolors, and their compactness is just marvelous for traveling, so it's been worth learning the mental shift.

On Saturday I had the marvelous treat of hanging out with Rene Miller and Stephen Harrison as they played music all afternoon. They set up just beside a Left Bank cafe, and I scored the table right next to Stephen and his bass. So I had the comfort of a chair and table to work at while I listened to the guys play their excellent music. A perfect afternoon. I did one longish watercolors and a couple of quick sketches of the guys playing.

This is one of my favorite places in Paris. It was Rodin's home, and he left it to the state for a museum of his work. There's something extra special being in the space where an artist actually did his work.

Plus there's a lovely garden, dotted with his sculptures, where I love to draw when the weather's nice. This was definitely an inside kind of day, but I still had a great time.

These are all Stabilo pen sketches. I'm trying the pens without using any water for wash.

Then I switched over to my Lamy fountain pen plus the Pentel brush pen that has a lighter, warmer black (really a grey) ink.

I love the flourishes in the house itself and how the sculptures look in that setting. This sketch has a little more of the house.

I also took a selfie there, along with the Prodigal Son sculpture I'd sketched earlier.

Here's the main hall. I'm totally tempted to do a block print of it. I love the black and white tiles.

And an Edvard Munch painting of Rodin's work, in the garden of a mutual patron. Two artists I love in one painting. Perfect.

Ok, I'll stop now. But it's my favorite museum in Paris. Please go if you have the chance.

There are a series of covered passages with shops and restaurants and tea rooms in Paris. They were built in the late 18th and 19th centuries, and they remain private roads with private owners but are mostly open to pedestrians. This one, Vivienne Gallery, was built in 1826. I love the vaulted window roof, the mosaic floors, the architectural curlicues.

It's also a great place to head on a rainy day, which is what happened with me yesterday. I had a slow start, but when the rain slowed to drizzle, I took a long walk and ended up here to paint.

I'm using part of this trip to Paris to try to get the hang of marker sketches. Tom Pruett has been posting his on the Memphis Urban Sketchers blog, if you'd like to see what's inspiring me. (I don't think I can include a link doing this on my phone the way I would from my desktop at home. A google search will come up with it.)

I'm having only limited success so far getting the effects I want, but it took me a while to get the hang of watercolor too.

Above is the Seine. Below is the Bastille monument sketched after making my busking debut at the market nearby. I played my banjo for an hour and a half and garnered 4.50 euros plus one indecent proposal. I never thought If art as a solidly reliable day job, but I guess everything's relative. I had fun, but I feel lucky to be doing this instead.

I tried busking again and earned 10 euros in the same time in the Marais district. Then I bought myself a gelato, sat in the Place de Voges, and did two sketches of fountains.

To make all other sketchers feel superior, I'll include this one, which is not at all what I had hoped. And which may be the reason I mostly switch back to watercolor for this trip. But we'll see.

While I was sketching at the Marche d'Aligre the first morning, I met not one but two urban sketchers, and it so happened that the Paris group had a meet up the following day.

I had met up with them when I was here last spring, and it was fun to get to go out with them again. We spent the afternoon drawing in the Luxembourg Gardens, and I took my full watercolor kit for the occasion. I loved the light filtering down through the trees, and it was fun to sketch a little, chat a little, sketch and chat some more.

My jet lag caught up with me before the final meet up (not till 6), so I headed home because I had a long way to go. But it was fun to have such a social weekend right off the bat.

So I made it. My first full day was a Saturday, and my friend Rene Miller told me he was playing at the Marche dÁligre. He and his part time musical partner Stephen Harrison had been so kind to me last year and really made Paris a welcoming place for me when I was here for a good while on my own.

So I turned out to listen to him (top right), and I just hung out and sketched the market while listening to Rene. I went light and didn't take my full watercolor kit for the first day. I'm still experimenting with these markers in more of a sketching format than a painting one. I'm finding it's an uneven result for me so far, but I hope to improve this trip.

I continued to walk and sketch in the afternoon. This is the first day's set. The very last one has a watercolor wash sky along with the pens. Otherwise, it's all marker and brush pen and fountain pen.

I've still got a number of prints in progress right now. I've been trying to get a lot of them drawn out and maybe carved before I leave on my next trip, so I haven't been moving just one or two from start to completion before I begin the next, which is my more normal way of working.

This print is the road down from the moor and back into the village of Levisham. I walked it at least once a day while I was there, and the final day I realized I really needed to do a watercolor of it before I left.

I'm still trying to streamline the printing process, so you can see that with the clouds being fairly removed from the ground, I can ink the grey on the same block as the green without the two getting mixed. Then I deliberately mix the yellow into the green for a little more depth and interest. Below on the left is the block with the ink rolled on it, and on the right is the print on paper.

Once the color part of the print dries, I can print the "key" block on top. That's the block with the main image and pattern, usually done in a darker color. I tried this print on several different shades of paper, so below are those color tests. Warm grey, natural, and a fawn (light tan) on the right.

Here is the color proof. I've done a bit more carving to keep the yellow from creeping into the sky and to get some more of the Queen Anne's lace staying white, but I haven't gotten a chance to print a final version yet. And I won't for a while. I'm lucky enough to be house sitting in Paris again this year (I'm so grateful they're having me back), so I'm off tomorrow. I'll be posting photos of sketches and watercolors from there. I'm glad I got most of the England prints I wanted to done, and hopefully I can pick up the threads of the few I still want to do when I get home. It's been a good month to be home working like crazy, but I'm excited about the next trip now.

Here's the first black and white proof of the key (or main image) block.

Because of the division between blue and green, I can print both on the same block, reducing labor and keeping registration problems to a minimum. Lining up each block for subsequent printings is tricky, so using fewer blocks means fewer mistakes in the printing process later.

I'm using three colors and three rollers, blending the sky out of two colors and having just one for the grass.

I tested the block on a couple of different colors of paper.

Almost finished. The green is a little too virulent, so I'll fix that in final mixing and printing. I think I'm going with the brown paper to have the cathedral be a warm, not too harsh color. I may try it on a little bit lighter fawn color too, just to see.

I've been pretty obsessive about my prints lately. I've got lots of them floating in my head, and I'm trying to take advantage of the momentum and get as many as possible out and carved and onto paper. So there are currently three that are in various stages of carving and final printing, but here are the first two in the series.

The actual printing is my least favorite part, trying to get a goodly number done in a quality control kind of way, and I didn't want to dig myself too deep a hole by having a whole mound of them still needing printing. So I settled in one afternoon, cut paper, and printed final copies of the first two in the series.

Both of these first prints are just single blocks but with multiples colors of ink rolled on at the same time. It's a looser form of printing than I've done before (I played a bit with it in my Psalm series, but this series is the full flowering). I like several different versions of these prints, color-wise, so I decided to print on a variety of tints of Stonehenge papers. The top one I printed on natural (shown), light blue, and light grey.

The second one I printed on all three of those plus a slightly darker grey. I also varied the amount of value change in the sky. Some have a more vivid change to light blue (above), and some are a subtler gradation (below). I'm not sure if my printmaking professors would approve of that. Editions are supposed to be a sheaf of identical prints. But I come out of a painting background, where it's all about the image you get, so I decided to go a little looser than the tradition in this series. I'm just having too much fun playing, and I think different colors will appeal to different folks.

In spite of three more in progress (one is thankfully in final printing), I drew out a seventh print in the series today and will transfer it to a block and start carving tomorrow. I've got another trip at the end of the month, where I'll be doing very different work, so I want to get these done before my focus shifts. Or at least get them all well on their way, so I can pick up the threads when I get home.