Martha Kelly Art

This is the cardinals nest that was just outside my kitchen window this past spring. It featured prominently in my Quarantine Journal several times, but this week (long abandoned) it had to come down to make more space for my A/C unit to breathe properly. I brought it inside, reluctant to have it just gone, and realized immediately I had to do a print of it. I set it on my desk and drew it, though I added the eggs I’d drawn from life back in April. It’s been fun to have a print just push on out since I’ve been doing so much watercolor work instead lately. I’m going to sit with it and see if I want to thin it out any more, but at the moment I’m enjoying the “noise” and energy of the extra pattern. This one happened so fast it will be good for me to hang it up and look at it a while before making any irrevocable changes.

I've been really enjoying Saturday mornings this spring and summer. For the first time ever I signed up for a CSA, a standing vegetable order of whatever they have any given week from my favorite farmers. It's pushed me out of my cooking ruts, and it's a little like Christmas every week. I also love that for the first year they're at the market nearer my house, at the other end of midtown, so I can loop through lovely older neighborhoods, pick up my produce, and loop home through the park. I mix up the streets I take, but it ends up being just over 10 miles round trip. Today my carrot greens hung way over the side as I cycled home, and I felt pretty healthy and virtuous. Which I immediately rectified by cooking myself blueberry pancakes for brunch, but that's another deeply happy thing I've done for myself occasionally this summer. Small treats are good for big challenges.

Yesterday the Mail Center let me do some curbside shipping. I can usually print my own labels at home, but I had prints to send off to Europe that included customs forms and other complications. I appreciated the outside service, and I sketched Huey's across the street, my favorite burger joint, as I waited.

I got a precautionary covid test today before my upcoming camper adventure. I've got a fantastic house sitter booked, I'm trying to get the forest book done (at least the artwork) before leaving, and things are falling into place. It was an impressively organized experience. Fifteen minutes, start to finish, and you never leave your car. I did a couple of quick sketches in line, but then I was home again.

I also did a sketch this morning in the forest. I loved that arching grape vine across the path. It felt like a portal to somewhere magical.

I'm still carrying my sketchbook every day on my early dog walk. Mr. Darcy is feeling the heat, so sometimes I sketch to give him a breather, sometimes I see a bird I want to try to capture, sometimes something just catches my eye, like the first one above. I used up all my ink on that one, so now I need to refill my pens before tomorrow.

This is not the adventure I meant to have this year, but not much about this year looks as we expected it to. I've been trying madly to finish my book lately, so this is my first Quarantine Journal entry in a while. It felt good to just sketch again.

The book work has slowed down (and the journal work almost disappeared) as I've been trying to get the final layout/extra pages/last few letters done, and as I've started scanning in and cleaning up (mostly letters that got out of hand in thick fountain pen on bumpy watercolor paper). I'll have to do yet more digital work to put each on on exactly the right size file and make sure there's enough border and also make sure than ones like this with a little overlap will meet up in the right places. Definitely the less fun part to come. But I'm really excited and have drawn out all the pages now, with only three plus covers to color. It's coming. My printer is getting me proofs on the paper he intends to use, and then I'll just have to dive into the scanning more intensely.

About all that's going on over here right now is sketching in the forest on my morning walks and work on the forest ABC book from those sketches (and a bunch of old ones). I've also had a quieter weekend, visiting with my dad and a couple of friends from safe distances. I'm hoping to wind up the artwork for the book quite soon, and then I'll have to figure out all the digital stuff -- get the scans the right size, obtain an ISBN number, and all the less fun but still satisfying stuff.

Here's a shot of my back porch table (where I've been working except a handful of the hottest days, because the full summer heat makes me want to stop working and nap) with the line drawings for the book in the center surrounded by a host of older sketches I'm using for reference. I'm grateful for all the years of forest sketching I have in old books. It's proved more valuable than I dreamed.

And here's one more pair of recent morning sketches with my newish Sailor fude fountain pen that I'm still really enjoying. It's what I'm using for the book as well.

My Quarantine Journal is taking a serious back seat the last couple of weeks to this book project, but I figure it's always good to go with the thing that's strongly calling your name (unless you're on a different kind of deadline). It's good to be able to ride a bit of momentum on a project too. I'm having a lot of fun with this book and simultaneously trying to figure out how to push it on out into the world once I'm done. It's so local that I'll likely self publish, but I'm exploring a few options at the moment. It feels like a lot of years' worth of sketching in the forest have really come together all at once in my head. I'm grateful for the gift of that, unexpected and lovely.

I had a funghi kind of morning on my walk today. I caught a brief glimpse of the owl hunting as I walked (I heard the ruckus of the smaller birds trying to drive her off) but the fungi held still and posed for me today. I’m testing out the 55 degree angle Sailor fude pen. I’ve been using the 40 degree one, and this one feels very different. Thicker lines overall, but I can get the thinner ones if I concentrate. I also found out today that the Noodler’s permanent ink, which is supposed to be water fast to use with paint on top of, has a longer drying time that my fast sketching allows for. I got a bit of bleed when I moved straight onto watercolor. It’s doing great for the book project where I’m leaving it to cure overnight, but less great for sketching in the field where I don’t want to sit around and wait for the mosquitoes to find me.

I was supposed to go teach a workshop for the art guild in Mountain View, Arkansas, this month. I went last year and had a great time with the marvelous folks there, and they had been kind enough to invite me back. Obviously that's not happening anytime soon, and I've been thinking about that group on my morning walks lately. I decided to put up a new page on my website about the pen I've discovered this spring, how I'm using it, and a couple of different sketching projects that have been saving my sanity. All of that is on the page Sketching Tools if anyone else would like to play along. Sketching is a great way to notice new things in familiar surroundings as well as find new delight in those same places, something we all need at the moment.