I'm still playing around with new pens in between intense bouts of printmaking. My friend Natalie suggested we go together to Blues on the Bluff this past Saturday night. It's the best fundraiser ever, put on every summer by WEVL, Memphis's volunteer radio station.

It's right down on the bluff overlooking the Mississippi river, and they get marvelous local blues bands to do five sets of music while you eat Central BBQ (Memphis's best, though I know those are fighting words for some) and watch the sunset. This year was beautifully and surprisingly cool, so it was even nicer than usual. I enjoyed sketching, as I often do when listening to live music.

Don McLean, the husband of a friend, was sitting next to me watching me sketch, and he asked if he could take this photo of me. It's fun to get to see the process from over my own shoulder.

Natalie suggested getting there early enough to poke our heads into the preservation tour of the U.S. Marine Hospital, just next to the National Ornamental Metal Museum that hosted the fundraiser. It was built in the 1930's (with a back building from the Civil War era), and it's obviously been sitting vacant a good while. It was neat to get to roam at our own pace, unlike last year's Urban Sketchers group in a similarly dilapidated (but much higher and vaster) Sears Crosstown building. If I'd known we could just stop at will, I might have gone down to sketch this one too. It's frustrating to be herded along as I'm trying to sketch.

Anyway, I took a few photos that I'm posting for the fun of it, in case anyone is interested.

I've continued to play with the new pens I bought after our weekend Memphis Urban Sketchers meeting. I really like the top drawing with the Pentel light black brush pen. It's a warm grey that goes nicely with the cooler black of my fountain pen, and it doesn't hide my lines.

I'm doing less well with the colored markers. I always really WANT to like markers, for the ease of them, but the colors are so strong and unvaried. I tried a quick sketch in the forest on my walk the other morning, but I wasn't pleased with it.

The weather has been utterly gorgeous here, so Mr. Darcy and I went back over to the park yesterday evening, and I did a couple more sketches sitting on a blanket with him. The color one is a bit better, but still not nearly as satisfying as watercolor would be, and I think I regressed on using the brush pen. I'm hoping it was just too late in the day.

Tom Pruett, who inspired me to try these Stabilo felt tip pens, just posted some of his work on our local Urban Sketchers blog. He's amazing. Be sure to scroll down to the last one, which is my very favorite.

He's not working to get the actual color of things with these pens. He's just using blue and brown for more or less monochromatic sketches, blending the two colors for various greys. I tried more of that tonight, sketching Mr. Darcy as he lay on the couch with me. I'm not getting as much blending/washing as Tom is, but I'm going to keep playing with them.

Memphis Urban Sketchers participated in the International Sketch Crawl today, along with sketching groups all over the globe. We met at the Peabody Hotel and sketched on the roof before moving downstairs to the mezzanine.

There I stayed out of the duck march crowds and sketched a side hallway with nifty old fashioned telephones.

We gathered back together to check out each other's sketches....

.....and then went to lunch across the street at the Flying Fish to compare pens and other materials and to keep on sketching.

I stopped at the Art Center on the way home to buy some water soluble Stabilo pens thanks to watching Tom Pruett work with them, and I also got a Pentel brush pen with grey ink, thanks to Elizabeth Alley. I love how much I learn from this group. They always push me to try new things and different ways of drawing.

I tried a quick sketch with the Stabilo pens after dinner tonight. That's my favorite mug, made by John and Judy Munn from Mountain View, AR. They come to Memphis several times a year for various shows.

I've been in a bit of a frenzy since getting home from England. I have a number of prints dancing in my head, based on the watercolors I did on site while I was traveling, and I'm trying to get them out and carved before they dim and vanish. I occasionally have these strong bursts of creativity on a certain project, and I try to ride them as long and well as I can. They usually end up in work I'm pleased with.

Here's the proof of the first one. I haven't tried it in color yet -- I got distracted carving the next two instead. But I just bought a whole sheaf of paper today to start printing on.

Here are color tests for the second block, a row of trees I kept painting along the top of Levisham moor. I'm trying it on different colored papers (natural, grey, and blue), and I may print on a variety of colors, as per my friend Peter Ceren's suggestion.

Drawing out the third block, this one from my day in Derbyshire.

I got an email from Cape Resorts in Cape May yesterday. They've got summer juice specials and a tomato summer sandwich menu and needed some illustrations. I love doing still lifes, and more and more I love the illustration piece of my job, so this was a welcome assignment. I hit the produce section of the grocery yesterday and took the day today to just focus in and do a series of quick watercolors, rotating the produce in and out of the various compositions.

Here's what my work table looked like.

I wasn't really planning to do them all today, but I've been working pretty obsessively ever since getting home from England last week (despite the utter absence of proof of that here....). I've been working on prints from my watercolors, and it made sense to just take a day to do this project, get it out of the way (since it was rolling along nicely) and be able to get back to the prints tomorrow with minimal interruption. If the work wasn't flowing I would have taken more time over it.

I hit streaks where I work and think about work at all hours, and then I take some time between streaks to recharge. That's the beauty of being self employed. Ideally the productive streaks line up with projects and shows. Having a fallow period with deadlines looming is pretty nerve wracking, but I've gotten better at focusing in and staying on track with projects over the last few years.

I ended up doing six small (6x8") still lifes today. Here are the rest. Tomorrow I'll get back to England, artistically anyway.

I had an utterly marvelous day yesterday. I sketched in the Minster and then went to the National Railway museum. Aside from trains, they are the repository for the mid century railway posters that have mostly inspired my series of landscape prints with the place names carved into them over the last two years. You may have seen some of these images on calendars and whatnot the last few years, which is where I discovered them.

I was heartsick that no posters were on view, but a very kind docent sent me upstairs to the archivists. They have a research center there, and one very kind archivist found books for me to see what I was most interested in and then took me down to the storage area and let me see a ton of the actual original oil paintings (big! --- 36x48 or so) the posters were made from.

This was so much more than I had even hoped for. It was amazing to see the art in person. I hadn't been able to tell from reproductions whether the originals were screen or block prints of some kind or whether they were oil paintings. (Some are more obviously watercolors.) To get to examine the originals in person was marvelous.

One favorite is Lionel Richmond. They had his Tintern Abbey, among others, down in the rolling upright storage bins.

I'm so impressed with how these artists can take a complex scene and simplify it into a strong, graphic painting that will reproduce well as a poster. I've learned a lot about printmaking from looking at their color and plane choices, but it was a treat to get to see the brushwork up close as well.

I really love Richmond's tree shapes.

Here's a second one of his.

Another of my favorite artists in the genre is Norman Wilkinson. They didn't have as many of his (and none of my very favorites), but here's one I liked a lot.

It was such a thrill to see so many of these paintings in person, and I'm very grateful to the kind and patient archivist who let me pore over them in detail. I couldn't stop smiling all the way home.

I drove into York and to my bed and breakfast with no problems, navigating by the map from my grandmother's 1960's AA atlas. But getting to the train station to return the car was another story. It was only a mile from my B&b, but York has recently closed a bridge in the middle of their one way loop around the town, and I couldn't go directly.

Three laps later, I walked thankfully into the city centre, wandered through the Shambles, and gratefully found one open tea table on the plaza just by the west front of the Minster. Tea, scone, and sketching fortified me for the rest of the lovely afternoon.

I'm mostly planning to play tourist in York instead of painting, but I find that drawing something helps me remember it much more clearly, and I enjoy the process anyway. Always have a sketch pad in my purse for drawing emergencies.

I've spent a good bit of time the last couple of days roaming around the Minster. I'm being more of a tourist than an artist, but I guess I can't totally help myself from drawing. There's a series of Green Men (and women) in stone carved medallions in the passage between the north transept and the chapter house. I couldn't get a good picture of my favorite ( below), so I sketched it instead. The. I did the Green Woman (above) and a Disney-worthy, somewhat bewildered looking dragon standing on the head of a slightly troll-like man.

Mostly, though, I've been looking at other people's art. The huge east window is under restoration, and several panels of the Medieval glass are down at eye level to be seen up close --- a rare and magnificent treat. Even better, it's a series based on Revelation. I love the visionary aspects of that book and illustrated it myself several years ago for the Presbyterian Church USA, so I was delighted to see a different interpretation up close and personal.

Usually Medieval glass is so high up its impossible to see anything but the most general impression of the art. I was frustrated last year at Chartres that another Revelation cycle was so hard to see.

But I had no idea the level of detail that's actually in this glass. Apparently the craftsmen were working purely to please God with the gorgeous details. There's now way all that would be visible from the floor of the cathedral.

It hurts me a bit that we'll lose all that glorious art when the windows are reinstalled. I'm thinking of the reproduction caryatids and whatnots in Athens and wishing it were possible to put up reproductions and let the originals be more fully appreciated. But I'm so very grateful I was here to see a few panels.

My watercolors of Rievaulx Abbey were so anemic that I want to share some photos of this marvelous place. It's a Medieval Cistercian abbey that was destroyed during the dissolution under Henry VIII.

And here are a few from that same evening out on the moors. Maybe

My best day of the trip so far, though there have been many marvelous ones.

In spite of a partly rainy day (necessitating a nap, darn it), I did four paintings my last day in Levisham. I did this first one from the road above Levisham. You can see the village down in the valley between the trees. It was a goodish uphill pull for this Delta girl to get up to the top of the moor, but nothing like scaling the side from scratch.

I did two more actually out on the moor, and I felt like I'd managed to paint everything I really needed to at that point. That's a good feeling to have as you're getting ready to move on. In Derbyshire I left with a pang, knowing there was much more I wanted to paint in and around Hartington. But it's also never wrong to have a good reason to go back.

Then on my way home, there was a vivid band of purple underneath this row of trees I'd kept looking at, so I perched precariously on a stone wall to give me enough elevation to paint it. I kept seeing things standing up that I wanted to paint but couldn't see from sitting on the ground. Someone needs to invent a lightweight folding bar stool for plein air painters to get our sight lines up over the wheatfields.

It was a good way to end the painting intensive portion of the trip. I plan to play tourist more in York and London. It's really the countryside I wanted to paint.