I've been so busy with Christmas commissions and shows that I haven't made it out with my tree journal lately. The weather Christmas Day was sunny and quite warm for December, so my present to myself was a couple of hours in the forest between family events. It was lovely to spend that time sitting with trees (and Mr. Darcy) and doing a little art just for myself.

And just because it's a beautiful spot, here's the morning walk photo I took earlier in the day. I'm thinking of doing a painting in this light.

I love my park. It's such a huge part of my quality of life.

I've been running a little nuts up here painting a ton of itty, bitty Christmas lights, so I haven't been posting every day the way I try to when I'm traveling. But here are a few of the watercolors I've been doing.

Above is the porch of the Blue Pig Tavern. And below is the porch of the Virginia Hotel. They have marvelous porches here.

And here are a couple of beautifully decorated lobbies. Congress Hall first and then the Virginia. They do really lovely details everywhere here.

But, man, lots of little, bitty lights....

I sat outside today and painted the Red Cottage, my favorite of the Victorian cottages owned by Cape Resorts. It's got a lovely tower you can't see in my close up. Over three years of painting here, I've become much faster at painting architectural gingerbread.

Here's my set up. At 39 degrees, I figured none of the guests would be fighting me for a porch chair...

All the architectural gingerbread made me crave the real thing, so I warmed up afterwards with tea and a cookie.

Another page in my new tree manga features a poem by my sister, a talented wordsmith. It has become not only my favorite of her poems, but one of my very favorite poems period.

Here is the text in a more readable form:

A Good Life

Does a tree broken by lightning in its prime

bewail its fate?

Does it mourn that it had no chance

to grow taller, broaden its base,

and live out all its lichen-covered days?

No, it falls with majestic assurance

and solidity of intent,

gracefully inverting its upward career.

It rests peacefully,

branches lightly touching the earth,

saying softly to the ground from which it grew,

"Did you see the way I danced with the stars?"

Marian Kelly

I had an utterly gorgeous day today. It was 70 degrees here in Memphis. Cloudy and windy, but beautifully warm, so Mr. Darcy and I headed for the forest right after lunch and stayed till just after sunset. We sketched a good bit but also sat and watched birds and just drank in the beauty of the forest. I figured a day like that at the end of November was not to be wasted.

I've got a new project I'm really excited about.I even dreamed about it last night. I've been reading more graphic novels and travelogues, and it recently occurred to me that what I would most like to do a graphic book about is trees. People and plots are both hard for me. Trees would be perfect. And there are several lovely photography books on trees, but I don't know offhand of an illustrated one.

So I've started a dedicated sketch book just for trees, to see what happens on the page. Of course, my tree book may not be immediately discernible from my regular sketchbooks, but I'm being a little more intentional about it and playing with layouts across the page.

When I saw the Hokusai exhibit in Paris this fall, he had made a huge series of books that he called Manga. I had no idea the word was so old. In his time the word meant "diverse drawings," and he used these manga to show art students how to draw a myriad of things. There are collections of drawings of mountains from all distances and angles, of people in all forms of activities, of animals, and the list goes on. So I'm starting a tree manga.

I would really love to publish a graphic book someday. My graphic travelogues of North Carolina and then of Paris this fall were my first steps toward experimenting with the genre, and this is another. We'll see it goes.