I’ve been slow on my journal this week since I’ve gotten back moving on prints, though truthfully, I’ve been slow on a lot of things. I’ve been spending a lot of time in my favorite reading chair with Wilkie Collins. I did at least draw the view. This is another corner I reworked recently in my push to get the house how I want to live in it. I found the little square stained glass lamp at a garage sale. It’s not fine, but it matches the wall well and cheers up to top of the cabinet. Hanging next to it is a Hatch Show Print I had bought years ago and never gotten around to framing. I love it, and it’s great to have it up on the wall. Less clearly visible to the left, on the oven with magnets, are a drawing from a friend for my birthday (which itself needs framing, but it came after my big order of frames and binge of work in that direction) and several show cards that inspire me and make me happy.

I’m trying to talk myself into more journal sketches again. I’m having a hard time finding the balance between cutting myself some slack and being even partially accountable for getting some work done. Today I carved after lunch and finally got this posted, so now I’m going to read a little more Woman in White.

I think I’ve had “finish seagull piece” on my goal list the last three months. It’s a lot, and I’ve amazed at how much more work the larger size is. It’s also intricate, so if I see something I want to fix, I then have to figure out where exactly it is on the backward block in the middle of the swirl of motion. I also realized yesterday that I think my reading glasses are no longer getting me the clarity that they used to, so I ordered the next up strength today. Hopefully that will help. I’m also struggling to thread needles just now.

So for all these reasons, along with a general lack of mental focus, this one has been hanging about. I did a new proof the other day. It won’t have that huge white gap in the middle, but I needed to see if the color of the paper would do for the cuts in the distant water or if I was going to need another block or color. I think it will be good, but now I need to cut ripples into that whole section on the color block. The other option was to have a separate water color near the horizon, which you can see in a previous color test, but I don’t think I need it, and I actually think it detracts a bit. There’s still a good bit of way to go in carving the water and refining all the patterns around the birds. They’re too thick in this current proof, so I’ve been thinning them down. But I do finally feel that I’ve worked out exactly how I want to go about it, after staring at proofs and being unsure for a while now. That alone will help move things along tremendously. Maybe I really will manage to finish it this month.

I keep sketching my main muse and housemate. I'm really enjoying that Sailor fude pen, and I've had it and my smaller sketchbook lying around handy lately. It's been fun to do during a slow week.

The last sketch has The Woman in White sitting on my lap. I've been listening to a delightful podcast of The Moonstone ("Phoebe reads a Mystery" -- she started with Poirot, and I love her voice), and I decided I wanted a bit more Collins. I found the absolutely perfect quote for the current situation:

“I ought, perhaps, to have made more progress than this; but, as luncheon time drew near, I grew restless and unsettled, and felt unable to fix my attention on work, even though that work was only of the humble, manual kind.” My week in a nutshell, courtesy of Wilkie Collins.

I feel like most of us are having these most weeks. This week has been especially so for me. I had a lovely mother's day visit on the patio with my folks, from a safe distance. Then the baby Cardinals finally hatched. And then they died overnight in the nest, I think from cold. It affected me in an outsized way, although I imagine some of that is just the grief and stress of these times also showing up, and it's not bad to push a little of that out occasionally. Plus Mr. Darcy came over and gave me big sloppy kisses to make me feel better.

I found that I needed to physically turn the page on this page of my sketchbook, so I drew my dinner last night. I've never cooked beets before. Thanks to Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything (which I think is going to be key for my CSA journey), it was super easy, and I've had a couple of truly lovely beet salads with goat cheese and slightly candied walnuts.

Then today was lovely again. I met Dad and Pat at his grandparent's house, my great grandparents, about half a mile from their daughter's (my grandmother's) house where I live now. I never knew my great grandparents, or the house, and it's recently been bought by a lovely woman who is lovingly restoring it and who wants to know the history of the house and of our family as she moves in. It's beyond special to have someone there who wants to know and carry forward those family stories. We've had such a great series of emails over the last week, and it means a tremendous amount. I sat afterwards and sketched the house to have more happiness in my journal from this time. My favorite thing, aside from getting to see the place, was finding out that the sunroom off the main bedroom was called "The Joint" because it was jointly owned by my dad (with his bed there for weekend visits) and his grandfather, who kept his desk in there.

I've been having fun sketching Mr. Darcy, always my best muse, with my new Sailor fude fountain pen. It's also a quick, easy way to sketch in the forest on our daily walk, so I've been getting used to this pen as I walk and also sit on the couch in the evenings. I'm really enjoying the feel of it and the varied width of lines I can get.

I've never done a CSA before, and for years now I've traveled too much to even consider it. This year, however, I will be staying home, and I'm trying to shop as little as possible. Plus I'm tired of my same cooking, so it seemed like a good idea to branch out, support fantastic local farmers Whitton Farms, and learn to cook some new things. Boy howdy, it's a lot of food for one person though! I can see that I may be sharing some with my folks as we go along, but it's exciting and very beautiful to paint. This week I am going to learn to cook beets (which I usually just buy cooked and ready to go), and I think I'll try my hand at a beet/goat cheese salad. Or feta, depending on whether I can get some goat cheese easily. And I haven't had sweet potatoes in a while. It's good to bust me out of my routines.

I also did a nest sketch. The mama goes off occasionally for short periods, so I sat up on a ladder (inside my kitchen, not near the nest!) to peep down in. It's quite a deep nest, and I'm hoping another egg or two is hidden on the near side that I couldn't see. But it was fun to glimpse the one speckled one. I didn't even know what a cardinal egg looked like. I'm so excited about a baby or two.

My sister gave me a gorgeous book called The Boy, The Mole, The Fox, and The Horse for my birthday. It’s not only gorgeous and wise and kind (and about cake to a pretty good degree!), but the drawings are superb. Charlie Mackesy has a lovely IG feed with more drawings, small readings from the book that are kind of perfect for now, and also time lapse videos of his pen doing these drawings that vary from very thin lines to very thick ones. It reminded me of what I’d heard about fude pens, and I decided now was the time for a new toy. I can’t put it down. I got a Sailor fude (navy, 40 degree angle instead of 55) plus an ink converter, for right about $20 total, in case you’d also like a new toy.

The line variation is delicious. I’m still learning how to hold and vary it, but I’ve had such fun playing with it the last two days. In fact, I think I’m heading over to the forest now with my sketchbook. The forest is so beguiling for line drawings, and it’s a glorious day. I’ve had a ton of commissions lately, which is excellent, but it felt good to finish the last of them (for now) last night. So today I’m making art, but making the art that feels like fun because it isn’t due or required for anything.

I’ll probably come back with more, but here’s the total crop right now. I’m using a basic black, water soluble ink right now, but at some point I may try waterproof so it won’t run with paint. I’ve really enjoyed my waterproof marker and colored paint in the Quarantine Journal project lately.

I’ve never done a small test/sketch print before. I always do drawings first, but not prints. However, with the new larger size I’m working (at least part of the time), it suddenly makes more sense. That’s a huge time commitment, and I saw a printmaker I follow on IG do a test print and thought, yes! Also it’s a chance to print at several different places in the carving process and see what I think. So here is a small test print of a tree tunnel just outside of Auvers-sur-Oise, just up a small path from the cemetery where Vincent and Theo are buried together. I went two years ago and went back several days later to sketch it again. Both times I got distracted by color and texture and straightened the tree out more than I meant to. So when I went to do a print, I pulled out my reference photos along with the sketch. The sketch captures what grabbed me about the scene, the photo helped me get the shape truer to what it is. Here are the sketch plus my more careful drawing for the print.

I almost never do reduction prints because once you cut away, you can’t put it back again. And I have trouble planning in my head several layers without being able to see them put together and then adjust them. So I usually do several blocks. But for this small test print (and a simple, two part image), I printed the green at two different stages first and then cut away more for the black to go on top, printing the solo black somewhere between those two stages. I still cut away more of the green than I think was good. I’ll go back in with markers or paint and play on top of these proofs before doing the bigger one. But I think it may be possible, with that level of preparation, to do a simple reduction instead of doing two separate blocks. That would definitely be less carving and also less expensive, buying one larger block instead of two.

Here is what the two different base layers of green looked like before I printed on top of them. I wish I’d left the green a little higher along the horizon line. That’s one thing I’d like to play with and likely change in a larger version.

It's a glorious day, I got through the Farmers Market early enough to feel safe being there, and I came home with the most beautiful eggs I've ever seen. I sat on the back porch and sketched them, had my lunch, and watched Papa Cardinal chase off a Blue Jay and a mockingbird. I had grand plans to get back to my seagull block this afternoon, but I may take a nap instead.