After all the stress of fire and fears of fire, no electricity, setting up a generator, yesterday was just a nice, normal, and pleasantly dull day. The usual daily chores got done, things were cleaned and straightened, the yard cleared of debris. My fig tree is also pruned and ready for its next crop – the first new tips are already pushing their way into the world and bulbs are sending up new growth. Little things like this make for a much better day.
I got to see all this, and then settle onto a patio chair just to look around. With wind and cold, being outside was not much fun, and certainly not a place to sit with pen and ink. With it gone, I could settle and sit, enjoying the warmth of the day. And draw . . . above is a sketch of my dead foxgloves – the leaves are dried and flopping over the edge of the pot, under and over each other, and into the milkweed plants.
A friend gave me a wonderful pen, a cheapie from Amazon. The ink is waterproof, and the tip is fine. The paper I am drawing upon has a bit of tooth, and the result, for me, is wonderful. When lines are drawn more quickly, the ink breaks up and gives texture. The pen point is sharp enough to deliver beautiful dots. In between, the lines are steady and solid. All together, a great drawing experience.
A few years ago, Josh and I spent a number of days in Decorah, Iowa, and there I found a lovely little stationary – art supply store. An inexpensive set of pan paints was available, and I have found it to be perfect for adding color to an ink drawing. The colors are intense but not overly so, and seem to be of a transparency many fine watercolors possess. I have been using it a lot for such pictures. The colors mix together well, and with a light touch with water and brush, these paints (with a bit of help from yours truly) work very well with delicate drawings.
Ink, pen, watercolor on multimedia paper. About 5 x 10 inches.
We were without electricity for two days. We lost a lot of perishables and frozen food in that time period, so I dumped it all and went shopping for a few days’s supply, fresh and dried and canned. We ordered a generator to Josh’s specs that should arrive Monday, but who knows. We need a generator as I think things are not going to improve, and we have put off getting one long enough – I’m cheap. Travel along major roadways is doing okay, but with the winds picking up, who knows what will happen.
So, I got to play with money!
Meanwhile, there are many people who are still with electricity well into Day 5 – and it looks like another 5-6 days of winds are still ahead. Until the winds die down, I am not stocking up with a lot of food – enough for 3-5 days, but with trips to the market as needed. Rather, I am trying to lay in a few things we need – want – to make life more comfortable. One thing is a manual coffee grinder – we use whole beans. Another is a power charger for our phones – 70% charge in an hour seems like a good thing to me. While we ordered a generator, we don’t know when it will arrive, as well as we don’t know when the electricity will be shut off.
No electric lights, only flashlights and battery-powered lanterns. Two days of how to live without the computer, TV, cell phone, oven, or refrigerator.
Our house tends toward being dark, depending on the time of day, so I moved around the house as well as in and out depending on the wind and temperature. For awhile I went to the community center and charged things, drove around and got a pastry and some coffee, as well went shopping a bit.
At home, I pulled out my hand crank Singer 99 sewing machine from the 40s or 50s, and flannel that I couldn’t iron because of no electricity. I started some jammy pants out of a gaudy flannel print, and had a bit of fun. The flannel is wrinkled and rather messy, but they are only jammy pants and who cares? Lay the fabric out, cut out the pattern, and sew away! I decided to do French seams as flannel ravels, and am about halfway done. More on that project later today.
I have made a lot of these jammy pants for winter pajamas. The pattern is now perfected in size and length, and my wardrobe of jammy pants is a bit crowded now. I am looking to lighter weight fabric for summer, but I may stick to nightgowns then for sewing projects. Cotton jammy pants below . . . I’ll have a star-studded derriere!
And then outside . . . when the wind calmed down, the day was warm – about 74F. My garden is rather dreary, but with the warm weather lavender is blooming and a succulent has sent up the most outrageous stalks with flowers. It’s a strange plant, but fun to draw. The flowers, a pale red-orange clusters of bells and the leaves are fat, spiky, and green with black.
I drew them late in the afternoon as the sun was going down with a waterproof ink pen on some watercolor paper. The results were to my liking quite a bit!
I may add some wash to the ink, but for now I like the complexity of the drawing. Since I really like the drawing and did not know if the ink would bleed if I used a watercolor wash, I decided to draw a llama tape measure sitting on my desk. The llama’s tail pulls out and goes back in when you squeeze the critter’s sides. My MIL, Judy, gave it to me, and it cracks me up whenever I use it, which is quite a bit more often than I thought I ever would. He’s not easy to lose, either . . .
His backside needs some of his fur glued back in place – another thing to do!
The completed llama. Below is the painted llama. I like llamas, and silly poems about them, too.
So, I spent my 2 days in the Land of No Electricity drawing, sewing, reading, and mucking about. Yesterday and today I helped the economy.
And now, the silly llama poem, thanks to my fave, Ogden Nash:
No, I don’t mean life. I mean trees and piles of leaves and undergrowth – all the stuff that makes up a good fall scene! Some trees have dropped a bazillion tons of leaves and others are hanging on to them. Years of detritus build up on the ground, creating a fertile place for new growth, plant, fungal, insect, which in turn supports other life in the wilder world outside the super market.
Anyone who has taken a walk in the woods or tried to photograph or paint this jumble knows exactly what I mean – it is really a busy-ness of color and texture and shape.
This is my sketch, done with a fountain pen and some Carbon Ink by Platinum. The paper is a bit rough so it could be what caused some difficulties with the pen nib – or the pen itself is not the best – or both. I tried to convey light and dark and texture with different pen marks. Straight lines to show trees and texture and the shadows of the trees across the pathway. Contrast is suggested rather than emphasized as I wanted to use paint to give the sense of shadows and so on. With that in mind, I pulled a palette of my out-of-the-tube paints rather than pan paints, cleaned them up and went to work.
As you can see, light and dark are more emphasized with the use of color, as are the colors of the leaves and the complex shapes of trees on the left and undergrowth on the right. The leaves that have fallen have some variegation, depending on when they fell and how long they have been there. Green grasses and weeds peek through. There are a few rocks, too, and leaves on the pathway. Tree shadows fall across the trail and up onto the tree on the right. There is a brightness to the day despite the murk of the undergrowth.
After adding color, I waited for the picture to dry. I made some color adjustments. And then, back to the waterproof ink pens. This time I used Micron pens and my Uniball waterproof pens. Micron pens come in different nib widths (here 0.1, 0.2 and 0.5) and the Uniball is labelled as “fine” but in reality makes a darker, thicker mark than the Micron pens.
Overall, I am more pleased with today’s ink and wash sketch than the one I did yesterday of the plumeria. As usual, I did not do a preliminary pencil drawing but just worked from the end of the path and then moved back and forth to establish areas. I really like my tangled tree in the lower left and the shadows on the big tree on the right. The brightness of an autumn day is expressed. Now all I have to do is get to scuffling through those leaves and it will make my day.
Pen, ink, watercolor wash, on Strathmore Vision 140# CP paper, 9 x 12.
A package I am eagerly awaiting is supposed to be delivered today. I want to be home for it even though it is not required – I just don’t like leaving things on my doorstep even though I live in a good neighborhood where porch pirates don’t happen as far as I know. I mean, people leave their garage doors open all hours! Me, I batten my hatches and lock my doors because I prefer to, even though a part of me so wishes I could be that trusting.
And so, what to do whilst I wait? One thing is always to go outdoors and sketch. My plumeria plant has been beckoning me for some time, as a sketch and as a painting. Today, ink and watercolor wash on some Vision watercolor paper.
First, the scanned pen sketch. Waterproof ink always works when using a wash over ink. The pen itself is not especially fine, but with a lighter or heavier touch, line variations can happen. I did this without a preliminary sketch with pencil.
Then, nap and coffee and now, ready for the watercolors, I chose just a few colors – a magenta, green, yellow, blue. Mixing magenta and green produced the greys of the stems, greens and yellows the greens, and the blue and greens the background wash. The idea was to keep the colors minimalist as well as create a consistency throughout the washes.
The scan is not a good one but it does give the idea of what it looks like on paper. I am inclined to think that the background wash is not ideal and the next time I do a sketch like this I will just leave the paper white. Too many times I have been disappointed by such scans, and even with the original paintings.
Time to go knit in the sun with a good audiobook!
Watercolor, pen and ink, Strathmore Vision paper, 9 x 12 inches.
I might do more drawings of my container garden as the next few days pass, but it’s hard to tell. The heat is up here with it in the mid-90s F, so sitting outside to sketch is an early morning thing rather than a mid-day thing.
My vegetable garden this year had some oldies which I know work well, and some new ones, some of which worked and some of which aren’t worth the effort. Above, orange habanero chilis. We usually do pretty well with these.
This drawing is of my heirloom Strawberry Crown Squash, a hard winter squash. I planted a bunch of seeds in a 20 gallon pot, and pulled all but 4 out. I have never planted winter squash, much less in a flower pot, but they seem to have done quite well. The vines grew and flourished and produced a lot of flowers. The vines were about 20 feet long each and moved across the dirt of the back yard with the sun.
But, I only have 2 winter squash for all that! I haven’t harvested them yet, but expect I will in a few days. I wonder if I need to learn about the art of winter squash gardening – but why?! Pumpkins are so prolific!
I don’t have room for a garden as I don’t have any place that isn’t lawn or just dirt. The back yard is a disaster as I still need to remove 11 or so trees whose roots jut out at all angles in the back yard. Until the trees and roots are gone, to the tune of a small fortune, container gardening it is.
These were sketched in a fan-fold Chinese sketch book. The paper is a creamy yellowish color, a bit tan, and very absorbent. It sucks color up so I had to do a bit of scrubbing to even lay in a wash of any size. Scanning, too, was difficult and that can be seen in the drawing of the winter squash. The differentiation between the dirt and squash leaves is not as muddied as it is here.
Ink, Yarn & Beer 