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'm still playing around with new pens in between intense bouts of printmaking. My friend Natalie suggested we go together to Blues on the Bluff this past Saturday night. It's the best fundraiser ever, put on every summer by WEVL, Memphis's volunteer radio station.

It's right down on the bluff overlooking the Mississippi river, and they get marvelous local blues bands to do five sets of music while you eat Central BBQ (Memphis's best, though I know those are fighting words for some) and watch the sunset. This year was beautifully and surprisingly cool, so it was even nicer than usual. I enjoyed sketching, as I often do when listening to live music.

Don McLean, the husband of a friend, was sitting next to me watching me sketch, and he asked if he could take this photo of me. It's fun to get to see the process from over my own shoulder.

Natalie suggested getting there early enough to poke our heads into the preservation tour of the U.S. Marine Hospital, just next to the National Ornamental Metal Museum that hosted the fundraiser. It was built in the 1930's (with a back building from the Civil War era), and it's obviously been sitting vacant a good while. It was neat to get to roam at our own pace, unlike last year's Urban Sketchers group in a similarly dilapidated (but much higher and vaster) Sears Crosstown building. If I'd known we could just stop at will, I might have gone down to sketch this one too. It's frustrating to be herded along as I'm trying to sketch.

Anyway, I took a few photos that I'm posting for the fun of it, in case anyone is interested.

I've continued to play with the new pens I bought after our weekend Memphis Urban Sketchers meeting. I really like the top drawing with the Pentel light black brush pen. It's a warm grey that goes nicely with the cooler black of my fountain pen, and it doesn't hide my lines.

I'm doing less well with the colored markers. I always really WANT to like markers, for the ease of them, but the colors are so strong and unvaried. I tried a quick sketch in the forest on my walk the other morning, but I wasn't pleased with it.

The weather has been utterly gorgeous here, so Mr. Darcy and I went back over to the park yesterday evening, and I did a couple more sketches sitting on a blanket with him. The color one is a bit better, but still not nearly as satisfying as watercolor would be, and I think I regressed on using the brush pen. I'm hoping it was just too late in the day.

Tom Pruett, who inspired me to try these Stabilo felt tip pens, just posted some of his work on our local Urban Sketchers blog. He's amazing. Be sure to scroll down to the last one, which is my very favorite.

He's not working to get the actual color of things with these pens. He's just using blue and brown for more or less monochromatic sketches, blending the two colors for various greys. I tried more of that tonight, sketching Mr. Darcy as he lay on the couch with me. I'm not getting as much blending/washing as Tom is, but I'm going to keep playing with them.

I've been in a bit of a frenzy since getting home from England. I have a number of prints dancing in my head, based on the watercolors I did on site while I was traveling, and I'm trying to get them out and carved before they dim and vanish. I occasionally have these strong bursts of creativity on a certain project, and I try to ride them as long and well as I can. They usually end up in work I'm pleased with.

Here's the proof of the first one. I haven't tried it in color yet -- I got distracted carving the next two instead. But I just bought a whole sheaf of paper today to start printing on.

Here are color tests for the second block, a row of trees I kept painting along the top of Levisham moor. I'm trying it on different colored papers (natural, grey, and blue), and I may print on a variety of colors, as per my friend Peter Ceren's suggestion.

Drawing out the third block, this one from my day in Derbyshire.

In spite of a partly rainy day (necessitating a nap, darn it), I did four paintings my last day in Levisham. I did this first one from the road above Levisham. You can see the village down in the valley between the trees. It was a goodish uphill pull for this Delta girl to get up to the top of the moor, but nothing like scaling the side from scratch.

I did two more actually out on the moor, and I felt like I'd managed to paint everything I really needed to at that point. That's a good feeling to have as you're getting ready to move on. In Derbyshire I left with a pang, knowing there was much more I wanted to paint in and around Hartington. But it's also never wrong to have a good reason to go back.

Then on my way home, there was a vivid band of purple underneath this row of trees I'd kept looking at, so I perched precariously on a stone wall to give me enough elevation to paint it. I kept seeing things standing up that I wanted to paint but couldn't see from sitting on the ground. Someone needs to invent a lightweight folding bar stool for plein air painters to get our sight lines up over the wheatfields.

It was a good way to end the painting intensive portion of the trip. I plan to play tourist more in York and London. It's really the countryside I wanted to paint.

My most excellent father is taking his bride, my sister, and me to England. Given that he's now married to our favorite high school English teacher, who got all three of us hooked on Jane Austen, we're going to do a bit of a tour of JA country -- places she lived, worked, wrote about, and died.  I did a similar trip many years ago with my best friend from high school who wrote her master's thesis on JA, and I'm looking forward to revisiting some of the places we went.

I'm also going to go north on my own and paint for a week in Yorkshire. I fell in love with the North York moors when I was an exchange student in college, and I've been trying to get back ever since I started to seriously paint outdoors when I traveled. I can't wait.

Above is the stack of watercolor blocks I bought for the trip, and with luck I'll have to buy one or two more....

Watch this space for updates from the trip. I'll be posting snapshots of my work as I go along.

Tower Grove Park, one of my most favorite parks (and places) had an anniversary picnic on Sunday, and the board of directors put on an art show to go with the food trucks and concerts. What a beautiful idea. I really wanted to go, since I love making art in that park, and it was fun to get to show it right there. Thanks to the park board for letting this Memphis girl crash the St. Louis party.

My friend and fellow artist Bonnie Hopkins was kind enough to ride up with me for the night, help tote stuff, and just keep me company. I was so glad to have her along. And I was also really grateful for seven of my dance friends who made the effort to come out on a Sunday night and support me.

In between visits, I did a small sketch of one of the original composers' busts that circled the 1870's band stand in the park. It's now inside the Piper Palm House, where the exhibition was.

Below are two sketches that were in the show of the Palm House. It was originally a Victorian greenhouse to supply plants for the park, complete with stained glass at the top of the arched windows. Amazing. They have a Sunday brunch inside it each week, and otherwise it can be rented for weddings to support the upkeep of the park. A perfect venue.

More of my Tower Grove watercolors are here, along with a bunch from the Missouri Botanical Gardens as well, both of which were founded in the 1870's by Henry Shaw, one of my heroes.

Karen Jackson and Dan Klarmann were two of the friends who stopped by, and Dan took this of Karen and me talking. I love how it captures the afternoon light and the way the stained glass paints the floor in the afternoons.

At the end of the show, Bonnie and I visited the food trucks and sat outside in a gorgeous evening to hear the last few songs of the jazz band. Perfect. I took a food truck self portrait.

Then we took advantage of the late light and perfect temperature to walk a circle of the park, especially since Bonnie had never been there. Here's a catalpa tree we stopped to visit with as we walked. It's one of my favorites.

The new moon was rising over the bandstand as we circled back to our car.

Finally we joined the rest of St. Louis in treating ourselves to Ted Drewes frozen custard. They talk about it every single night on the baseball radio broadcast, and I always go when I'm in St. Louis. Amazing stuff.

I don't do a tremendous number of people sketches, but for some reason I really love drawing musicians. I'm lucky to both know a number of fine musicians and also to live in a city rich with live music. These sketches are usually in pen and wash, since it's a quick medium that lets me try to capture fleeting moments. I found a whole series of these sketches that I hadn't scanned in when I picked up a sketch book recently, so here they are.

The Mighty Souls Brass Band.