One of the things I love about Paris is that it is created for beauty. The details on so many of the buildings are exquisite and fascinating. I began to have an idea about them and spent walk home from the Orsay sketching a good number of them (which tripled my time home, but it was so worth it.

I love the Orsay. One of the benefits of being here for the month of August is that it makes sense just to join the museum and go frequently. The last several years it has fed my work, sitting in there and drinking in Odilon Redon, Vuillard, Van Gogh, Manet, Klimt. Yesterday was my first day on my own (without meet ups with lovely friends), so I headed straight there. Sadly there is little Redon this year (they constantly change up their exhibitions, which is another reason to keep joining — it’s a different museum every summer), but they had a huge Vuillard donation recently, and there’s a whole section devoted largely to him that is absolutely exquisite. Including one of my favorite pieces of his that is back on display after a couple of years of missing it. I mostly just wandered and looked, but I did a little sketching late in my stay. I stumbled on a lovely Swiss piece by a painter I didn’t know, and it’s got the same feeling I’ve been exploring lately of a sole person in a large world, so of course I sketched it.

Nearby was a room of Pompon’s sculptures. He’s the one who did the enormous polar bear that is the mascot of the Orsay, but there are a number of charming, smaller pieces upstairs as well.

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 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. 

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.