There are three options for calendars this year. I've got my traditional Memphis one, but I also put together one of watercolors from my family trip to England this past summer. I'm having a show of the England work at Playhouse on the Square from Nov. 7-Jan5 (opening Nov. 14th), so I want an England calendar to go with the show, but I don't want to end up with a bunch of leftovers. I'll be ordering some Memphis ones to sell at the Pink Palace Crafts Fair,  Burke's, Trolley Stop Market, and WinterArts again this year, but I don't want to pay for leftovers, so I won't be ordering tons.

Here are the images for the My Memphis calendar:

Here are the England images:

And here are the Overton Park images:

I have apparently lost my mind this year, with three calendars to keep track of. But I'm very grateful to my local printers directFX for being willing to juggle three sets of images and not make me have a separate minimum order for each. They are marvelous, if you happen to need a printer. Chris Warner there will take good care of you.

I did a watercolor commission this morning, but the rest of the day so far I've been editioning prints. This involves cleaning any ink smudges off the margins, and signing, numbering, and dating each set.

I also have a record book of prints in which I keep information on the details of printing (color mixes, how many blocks, what color and sized paper, etc.) but also a running tally of how many prints have been pulled for each image. You can see it open at the top left, with color samples of the ink I've used so I can match colors for the next batch. Unless it's a small run of letterpress images (like the letterpress "posters" below), I don't usually print a whole edition at one time, since I do all my printing by hand. My drying rack gets filled up, and I get tired.

I've printed a third to a half of each edition of the England prints above (editions of 30 each). It's been kind of nice to sign so many prints "2014" and realize how much work I've actually gotten done this year. And there are definitely more prints to come. I've also been scanning in all the watercolors from England and haven't even started on the Paris ones yet, so that's nicely affirming. In spite of all the travel (and also because of it), I have a good array of new work for the fall and holiday shows.

I'm sorting and counting and trying to figure out how many prints I need to do some more of before the Pink Palace Crafts fair in October and my show of England images in November. Next I'll have to start packaging them all....

I spent one afternoon painting down by Notre Dame. It had been my favorite subject last year, but I hadn't painted it this year at all. I wanted to see how it would look with my thicker, more layered approach to watercolors that really took hold during my England trip earlier this summer.

I wasn't able to paint much in the mornings that last week. Mornings seemed to be socked in, but the sun would break through (still with rainy periods) in the afternoon. So I'd linger with my tea, book, and banjo in the mornings and paint in the afternoons.

The second watercolor is the bridge from Ile St. Louis (just behind Notre Dame) looking back to the Right Bank.

It was latish, and I was going to head home after two, but I walked past Notre Dame again and couldn't resist the blue skies. Nice to be able to linger and paint at will. That's the fun of traveling by myself. (There are other lovely compensations for having company.)

I moved back more to watercolor the last few days. It was raining off and on Friday, but I manages to find a couple of protected enough places to paint. One was the Carnavalet museum garden, where I could be under a covered walkway with a great view of the mix of formal boxwood with kitchen garden plants --- tomatoes, beans, and cabbages. Utterly charming.

I also went back to paint the fountain at the Place des Voges after doing a couple of marker sketches there earlier. It was drizzling slightly, but the thick tree arbors there gave me plenty of protection for painting.

I included a halfway done picture of this one. It shows what has been so hard for me about watercolor. For years in pastels and even in oils, I could do the entire background in the dark colors and then just pull the white of the fountain on top.

With watercolor, I have to be very conscious right from the beginning about where the water is and leave it completely clean as I'm working. It takes a lot of concentration, and there's no real recovery from a mistake. But I'm having fun with the watercolors, and their compactness is just marvelous for traveling, so it's been worth learning the mental shift.

On Saturday I had the marvelous treat of hanging out with Rene Miller and Stephen Harrison as they played music all afternoon. They set up just beside a Left Bank cafe, and I scored the table right next to Stephen and his bass. So I had the comfort of a chair and table to work at while I listened to the guys play their excellent music. A perfect afternoon. I did one longish watercolors and a couple of quick sketches of the guys playing.

This is one of my favorite places in Paris. It was Rodin's home, and he left it to the state for a museum of his work. There's something extra special being in the space where an artist actually did his work.

Plus there's a lovely garden, dotted with his sculptures, where I love to draw when the weather's nice. This was definitely an inside kind of day, but I still had a great time.

These are all Stabilo pen sketches. I'm trying the pens without using any water for wash.

Then I switched over to my Lamy fountain pen plus the Pentel brush pen that has a lighter, warmer black (really a grey) ink.

I love the flourishes in the house itself and how the sculptures look in that setting. This sketch has a little more of the house.

I also took a selfie there, along with the Prodigal Son sculpture I'd sketched earlier.

Here's the main hall. I'm totally tempted to do a block print of it. I love the black and white tiles.

And an Edvard Munch painting of Rodin's work, in the garden of a mutual patron. Two artists I love in one painting. Perfect.

Ok, I'll stop now. But it's my favorite museum in Paris. Please go if you have the chance.

There are a series of covered passages with shops and restaurants and tea rooms in Paris. They were built in the late 18th and 19th centuries, and they remain private roads with private owners but are mostly open to pedestrians. This one, Vivienne Gallery, was built in 1826. I love the vaulted window roof, the mosaic floors, the architectural curlicues.

It's also a great place to head on a rainy day, which is what happened with me yesterday. I had a slow start, but when the rain slowed to drizzle, I took a long walk and ended up here to paint.

I'm using part of this trip to Paris to try to get the hang of marker sketches. Tom Pruett has been posting his on the Memphis Urban Sketchers blog, if you'd like to see what's inspiring me. (I don't think I can include a link doing this on my phone the way I would from my desktop at home. A google search will come up with it.)

I'm having only limited success so far getting the effects I want, but it took me a while to get the hang of watercolor too.

Above is the Seine. Below is the Bastille monument sketched after making my busking debut at the market nearby. I played my banjo for an hour and a half and garnered 4.50 euros plus one indecent proposal. I never thought If art as a solidly reliable day job, but I guess everything's relative. I had fun, but I feel lucky to be doing this instead.

I tried busking again and earned 10 euros in the same time in the Marais district. Then I bought myself a gelato, sat in the Place de Voges, and did two sketches of fountains.

To make all other sketchers feel superior, I'll include this one, which is not at all what I had hoped. And which may be the reason I mostly switch back to watercolor for this trip. But we'll see.

While I was sketching at the Marche d'Aligre the first morning, I met not one but two urban sketchers, and it so happened that the Paris group had a meet up the following day.

I had met up with them when I was here last spring, and it was fun to get to go out with them again. We spent the afternoon drawing in the Luxembourg Gardens, and I took my full watercolor kit for the occasion. I loved the light filtering down through the trees, and it was fun to sketch a little, chat a little, sketch and chat some more.

My jet lag caught up with me before the final meet up (not till 6), so I headed home because I had a long way to go. But it was fun to have such a social weekend right off the bat.

So I made it. My first full day was a Saturday, and my friend Rene Miller told me he was playing at the Marche dÁligre. He and his part time musical partner Stephen Harrison had been so kind to me last year and really made Paris a welcoming place for me when I was here for a good while on my own.

So I turned out to listen to him (top right), and I just hung out and sketched the market while listening to Rene. I went light and didn't take my full watercolor kit for the first day. I'm still experimenting with these markers in more of a sketching format than a painting one. I'm finding it's an uneven result for me so far, but I hope to improve this trip.

I continued to walk and sketch in the afternoon. This is the first day's set. The very last one has a watercolor wash sky along with the pens. Otherwise, it's all marker and brush pen and fountain pen.

I've still got a number of prints in progress right now. I've been trying to get a lot of them drawn out and maybe carved before I leave on my next trip, so I haven't been moving just one or two from start to completion before I begin the next, which is my more normal way of working.

This print is the road down from the moor and back into the village of Levisham. I walked it at least once a day while I was there, and the final day I realized I really needed to do a watercolor of it before I left.

I'm still trying to streamline the printing process, so you can see that with the clouds being fairly removed from the ground, I can ink the grey on the same block as the green without the two getting mixed. Then I deliberately mix the yellow into the green for a little more depth and interest. Below on the left is the block with the ink rolled on it, and on the right is the print on paper.

Once the color part of the print dries, I can print the "key" block on top. That's the block with the main image and pattern, usually done in a darker color. I tried this print on several different shades of paper, so below are those color tests. Warm grey, natural, and a fawn (light tan) on the right.

Here is the color proof. I've done a bit more carving to keep the yellow from creeping into the sky and to get some more of the Queen Anne's lace staying white, but I haven't gotten a chance to print a final version yet. And I won't for a while. I'm lucky enough to be house sitting in Paris again this year (I'm so grateful they're having me back), so I'm off tomorrow. I'll be posting photos of sketches and watercolors from there. I'm glad I got most of the England prints I wanted to done, and hopefully I can pick up the threads of the few I still want to do when I get home. It's been a good month to be home working like crazy, but I'm excited about the next trip now.