A behind the scenes look at canvas stretching this morning. I got full face licks from Mr. Darcy as I got down in the floor to work. More paintings to come....

I've got so many paintings in my head right now that I'm just pouring them roughly out onto canvas without taking a lot of time to fiddle with the details, though I've spent a couple of days on this one and still have a bit of work to do. It's from a sunset down on Mud Island a few months ago, just before I left town. I've kept thinking about this image and wanting to get back to it. I'm really enjoying the idea of painting water, though it's been harder in this one than previous paintings in this series. You can see at the bottom where I started. The first image is where the painting stands now.

I’ve had an intensive week of painting. It’s been a couple of years since I did oils on canvas. I’ve been painting on my printmaking paper, and I like the texture and immediacy of that, but this week I had a sudden urge to paint larger. I’ve been thinking about several images for a while now, and I just dove in. I bought three 30x40” canvases and took off. None are quite done, but it’s a nicely solid amount of progress.

The first one I started was one of Mr. Darcy in the lake out at the farm. I rode out with my dad after getting home and took several photos as he walked into the lake to get cool. This is a composite of those photos.

I got to go to a great house concert over the weekend. My banjo mentor had seen a group from Johnson City called Bill and the Belles and liked them enough that he arranged for them to play in Memphis when they were passing through on the road. They were marvelous. Old time swing, lots of songs from the teens and twenties, a good dose of Jimmie Rodgers, and a bunch of new songs that sound delightfully old. As usual, I sketched as well as listening. This group is used to artwork too. They're the only band I know that has an original linocut of the group for sale along with the usual cds and stickers. It was as old timey as they are, so of course I came home with it, along with my own sketches.

I got behind on my scanning coming back across the country. Here are some of my last week sketches. I went to the Cascadian Farms roadside stand for my favorite ice cream on my last day. I also realized I hadn't scanned a previous sketch of that place. I've been enjoying the direct watercolor, but I also am still in love with this green ink and pulled it back out for the garden. It's a lovely place to go and sit.

I did more driving and less front seat sketching than I had going across in the spring, but I did stop at a couple of the parks and sketch. Here is Pompey's Pillar, a place with Lewis and Clark history and also a beautiful spot in Montana along the Yellowstone River. I met a neat couple there. It's fun traveling with a dog and a sketchbook -- both are introductions to people you wouldn't otherwise meet.

My other stop with my sketchbook was at Theodore Roosevelt National Park, a beautiful place to spend the morning of the 4th of July. We had 9 hours yet to drive after leaving the park, so I only did one sketch, but it was fun to see the moon setting over the rock formations and have a bit of memory of that in my journal.

I've really enjoyed having this month challenge of doing direct watercolors. It's expanding my watercolor skills and making me think about using the paint differently. I've also learned some other techniques from the book Direct Watercolor by Marc Taro Holmes. I did several more over the weekend, and the one just above is my favorite so far. It's a view I'd been looking at and meaning to paint for a year now, so I also had it firmly in my mind. It was great to get to finally have a go at it. 

Below is a front porch sketch. I love sitting and sketching from a front porch. These are alder trees at the place I was house sitting over the weekend. 

I had people waiting on me for the next two. They were nicely patient, but that's always a distracting force fighting inside my mind with the work I'm trying to do. I end up self editing, even if it's not being asked of me. So these were quicker (and also a simpler subject matter). Two views of the same bay from the same pebble beach. The first one is Chuckanut Mountain, whose shape I had also been looking at as I drive around the region and wanting to paint. I'm hoping to get downriver and take another swing at it at some point. 

I've been able to get to a couple of figure drawing sessions out here for the first time in years. I haven't done a life session since I started watercolor, so it's been a great new thing to practice. The sessions have 10 two minute poses to start and then 4 twenty minute poses after that. I do line drawings for the short ones and watercolor for the longer poses. 

I'm definitely rusty, but it's been a lot of fun. 

I've been on the road a lot and out of my normal routine, which makes it harder for me to stay disciplined about what I'm putting in my mouth. It gets easy for me to graze without paying attention as closely when it feels like I'm on vacation, and I was beginning to creep up a little bit on the scale. It wasn't time for a full fledged diet, and I'm not a big fan of feeling deprived. That seems to sabotage me over time. But I decided it was time to be more mindful and intentional about what I ate. Also the direct watercolor challenge had just started, and a sketching food journal seemed like one good way to participate. So I decided to keep a week's worth of food journal in a large watercolor sketch book. I've also been trying to up my watercolor painting size, so this was a good project across the board. 

It's less fun for any dinner companions you might have, so I only did it for a week or so, but it did help me. If I have to want a snack badly enough to get out the paints and add it to the journal, I really am hungry. It was fun, and when I'm back to my solo living life, I may do another week. In the meantime, here are a few of the days. You can see that I was more painting for the moment than trying to keep a list of my intake for future reference. Chicken or lasagne aren't always that easy to tell what they are in a quick sketch done before food goes cold. But it served its purpose for the moment. It was also a good exercise in composing a large page of multiple images. I had fun and am overall pleased with the big, colorful double pages. 

One day was busy enough I decided to do just line drawings instead, which had a different feel. That was fun too. 

My knitting group out here is from 5-8, and I don't do late dinners very well, so I was eating early and in a hurry. That day I let myself just do breakfast and lunch, but I kind of liked this one. It's the last one I'll put here. I don't switch my food up that much, so they got a little repetitive, but it really was a fun project. 

There's a challenge this month to paint "direct watercolor" (no or minimal lines first, just paint) from one of my favorite urban sketchers whose painting I admire, Marc Taro Holmes. I've got his book Direct Watercolor, and I've learned a lot from it. So I'm working on stretching my technique. Last night I took a gentle walk under a gorgeously dramatic sky with Mr. Darcy. I had tucked my small sketch journal in the pocket of my rain coat, but I was longing for real watercolor paper. I did my best with what I had, and I also took a quick snapshot (below), and this morning I decided to use real brushes instead of the handy but less fine brush pen and more absorbent paper and give this scene a second shot. It's such fun playing with clouds. 

I've been doing some sketches along in my journal, but I'm behind scanning them in, so here are a bunch of recent sketches. Above is the view from the table in the window of my favorite diner. Below is the view from the front porch (looking over the houses opposite, anyway).

There's a 30 day "direct watercolor" challenge online right now, and I'm mostly playing along, trying to do watercolors with little to no line drawing first. These are a couple of larger journal sketches as practice.