I've been lucky enough to meet up with my friend Christina for a series of sketching meals over the last month. I love getting out with a friend or two, enjoying some food, comparing sketching materials, and drawing together. You're not ignoring your dinner companion if she is also sketching. It's companionable and full of joy for me. We met up at Cafe Eclectic on 901 day (September 1st mirrors the Memphis area code, for those of you out of town, and we have a bit of a civic celebration that goes on.) I had fun with the red umbrellas and then sketched Christina in graphite with my newish graphite Kaweko mechanical pencil I got out west that has a huge, juicy, fat column of graphite in it.

I sketched at the Slider Inn with a dip pen and the Ancient Copper ink by Diamine I've been really enjoying lately. I didn't have the mental energy for watercolor that night, but it was fun to record the evening and play with line.

Finally was lunch at Boscos after the Memphis Urban Sketchers meetup. The same dip pen with a warm purple ink, but we lingered longer and I enjoyed adding the watercolor.

I went to a fantastic Coastal Landscapes show yesterday at the Whatcom Museum in Bellingham. I’ve always loved the arts and crafts era of western landscapes, and this was a great mix of California painters with some up the coast to Washington from the turn of the last century into today. I was delighted to see so many women represented. The first piece is by Mary DeNeale Morgan. It was my absolute favorite for light, tree shapes, color, and brushwork, and I hope to see more of her work in the future. Many of the paintings had super glossy varnish, and it was tricky to get photos without glare, so forgive funny angles and bits of glare.

A block away, right next to my favorite second hand bookstore with an enormous art department (Henderson’s) is a neat little letterpress/stationery store. Jude found a super nifty Kaweko mechanical pencil with a thick tower of graphite, fully retractable, instead of a skinny little lead. I love sketching in pencil but also hate having to remember a sharpener. I was delighted and headed back to the museum for further sketching while he took a longer lunch break and waited for me to surface again. A kind guard offered me a stool, since the benches are never next to the paintings I truly want to sketch.

That was all the sketching I had the time and energy for, but two other favorites from the show were this exquisite woodblock print by Elizabeth Colbourne from 1933 and the large landscape by Euphemia Fortune (VERY bad glare, but the best name ever! She was in a recent Dixon show of American Impressionists). If I were home I would be going back with colored pencils and sketching weekly in this show. It’s delightful.

I've been working the last couple of months on a memoir about a life changing trip to Greece that followed my divorce in 2003. I wrote the first draft while I was out west, knowing I would need to come home to my journals for more detail, but wanting to get an overall framework in place. I dug out various journals from that year and was delighted to discover more sketches and photos from my trip than I had remembered doing. Sometimes your past self leaves a surprise present for the future. Today after doing some prose work I scanned in the drawings and some of my photos as well. This book, if it ever gets that far, won't be a graphic book with every sentence corresponding to a drawing or two, but it will be illustrated. It's fun to play with a whole new kind of project for me, but I'm also enjoying revisiting these super quick pencil sketches I did on the fly around Athens. Mostly ruins (Parthenon and the Temple of Olympian Zeus) but also a quick one of my neighborhood market in the Athens suburb of Aghia Paraskevi.

I’m in Washington State for a few weeks and away from my scanner. I’m mostly giving myself vacation time, but I’ll post snapshots of my sketches here instead of the cleaner scans I do at home.

First up were the welcome flowers, including some amazing stargazer lilies. (I love that name!) A couple of days later we went to the youth symphony to see Jude’s granddaughter play violin. I always love the juxtaposition of bodies with instruments, so I had fun sketching through the concert. I used my big, fat, water-soluble graphite crayon with a water brush over the top of it for quick, dense shadows. Loose and fun.

Henry has been looking ridiculously cute today on his back on the sofa. These are both done with a big, fat, watersoluble graphite crayon. It's fast and fun and loose to use.

Here are a random batch of sketches from about a week ago. I've had a super slow week, doing print and commission work in my lap on the sofa, so no really recent sketches. But I had a ball meeting a friend at this gorgeous Tudor revival for an estate sale and drawing a house we wouldn't otherwise have had access to.

Next was a misty morning at Shelby Farms with a pair of great blue herons flying overhead. After several passes, one sat in the top of a tiny tree and posed for me. Henry was patient while I got my sketching things out. He's learning to be an art dog as we go along. He would always rather walk, but he's getting more used to the stops.

Finally another graphite sketch of Henry from one of our sofa sitting sessions.

Another batch of Henry skeches in water soluble graphite crayon with water brushed on top.

Soon after getting Henry I was excited to have a dog hanging out on the sofa with me again, and I wanted to take full advantage of his modeling opportunities. So I bought a 7x10" multi media spiral bound sketchbook, nothing fancy but pages thick enough to take a little water. I have a big, fat, graphite crayon that I love to play with, and it's water soluble, so you get a lovely depth when you brush water over it. With a water brush (almost a pen, but with a brush and a reservoir of water inside), it's a quick, not at all messy, easy to grab way to sketch, so I've got those three things (and, of course, some other sketching stuff too) within easy reach on my coffee table. I've filled up half a sketchbook at this point, and I woke up early today and scanned a bunch in. You can see from the shadows that the paper has buckled a little with the added water, so it's not totally flat on the scanner, but I didn't fiddle with these to get that all smoothed out. I just wanted to be able to share the progression. Here is the first batch of my favorites (plus one watercolor), starting from early September.

I had a wonderful New Year's Day. I'm slowly feeling more and more like myself again, and yesterday I started the day at the dog park watching Henry frolic. Then I had a walk and a visit with my sister in from out of town. And then I went to an all afternoon music jam. That's been my main new years celebration for years now, but like many gatherings, we took the last couple of years off. It was a delight to play tunes out in the sunshine of a 75 degree day and see old friends. I came home and sketched the graphite sketch above with a banjo, dog, books, and painting, to set my intention for the year and celebrate the day that had been.

NPR had a wonderful story on the difference between resolutions and intentions, saying resolutions tended to be both negative and specific (lose 10 pounds or stop eating certain foods), and they set people up to get discouraged and quit. Intentions are looser and more positive, like taking time to be creative or (and I loved this one) "being in your body", including taking a walk/run, reveling in a bath, breathing deeply, or remembering to check in with all your senses. Intentions feel like they have a measure of grace built in, like my favorite hashtag #dailyish, which I have always described as intention plus grace. It lets you focus on a goal without the self flagellation and pressure of absolute daily homework.

My intentions for the new year personally are to check in with my body regularly, breathing, stretching, using more senses than just my eyes (where I often get stuck), and hopefully working back towards more regular exercise. I had just been getting in shape when covid hit me, and I'm taking a long time to get my energy back. My word of the year, even before hearing this NPR story, is grace, though, so I'll take it gently. I'd also like to sketch more often at the dog park, since Henry and I spend 45 minutes to an hour there each day. It will be weather related and energy related and not daily, but I'd enjoy sketching more people again after the isolation of the last few years, and dogs are always happy to sketch.

I have a whole list of professional goals, but those are the more personal life ones (though, as always, personal life and art blend together pretty seamlessly). For my work, I want to keep working on the Rowan Oak tree print series I have going and find a place to exhibit it. I'd like to make an M is for Memphis book to go with P is for Possum. In a related goal, I want to figure out the handwritten font tool I bought last year and not have to hand letter the entire book. A font would keep all the words the same size, which I have trouble doing freehand. I want to keep working on "sequential art" (graphic essays or more narrative sketches that tell stories). And I want to get better at saying no to commissions that don't fit with what I want to be doing and that take me away from the art I most want to put my time towards. There are probably a couple of others since I'm not looking at my list, but those are the main ones. It's fun to look back at that goal page in my monthly art bullet journal and see how I'm doing as the year progresses. I met every goal this year except making a new graphic essay, so I felt really good about my year's work.

Yesterday and today I made a start at sketching at the dog park. It helps that this week is warm enough I don't want to just shove my hands in my pockets to keep them warm. But I've also been knitting hand warmers (fingerless mittens) to keep me warmer and leave my fingertips free to grip pens, so I'm preparing for the rest of winter. Here are the first three double page sketches. And happy new year!

Once again I'm doing mostly commission work that I can't show here, but I have been doing some Henry sketches in the evenings just for me, and last night, after a week of rain, we had an actual sunset. I celebrated by sketching it quickly from both memory and a phone photo when I got back in from a short pre-dinner walk. It felt like a moment I wanted to mark.