Category: Sketchbook

Playtime in the Land of No Electricity

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:

The one-L lama, he’s a priest.

The two-L llama, he’s a beast.

But I will bet a silk pajama

There isn’t any three-L lllama.

How Busy Can It Get?

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.

Plumeria

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.

Summer’s Harvest

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.

Watercolor and ink on paper.

Trees in the Back Yard

For the past few weeks it is as if I fell down the rabbit hole – nothing made too much sense! The main thing was getting the walking boot off and getting used to being a bipedal organism after weeks of sitting around, walking here and there in the house or at the market, only taking minimal steps. It may sound weird, but for me, actually walking became an almost surreal experience. I am doing fine, too, but my mind and body had to coordinate it all once again. Jumping away from a moving car to save my skin was great, but spending 2 months recovering, and then some, from a badly bruised and messed up ankle is something else.

Doing nothing much sort of leads to a torpor and little desire to do much. I admit, I watched a ton of TV and movies, and played bits and pieces of music, but the motivation to do much of anything was very much missing. But now autumn is in the air, cooler days and cooler nights, light shifts and just that wonderful sense of change that comes with seasons – and being able to gad about – have me emerging.

Classes also help! A couple of painting classes, a ukulele class, and digging out my pen and watercolors have got me moving. Today, my ukulele class is at 5, so I decided to just sit out in the back of the house with pen and ink and pan paints and a waterbrush and sketchbook. As the season changes, leaves change color and drop.

This is my first sketch. We have a beautiful crepe myrtle tree with a rather vase-like base. Large branches spread out from the trunk like a V. It’s the prettiest of the local crepe myrtles, I think, because of this shape. Its flowers, too, are not the usual bright pink but a deep red violet. I decided to sketch with its flowers even though they are mostly gone. The leaves turn an orangish green with the end of summer. I made them greener. At the base of the tree is a small bush that has pink flowers in the spring.

These are podocarpus trees which line the back fence. They are ridiculously fat and poorly spaced – I am innocent! I didn’t do this! – and way too tall. I need to get them removed. They are really rather messy trees, and drop leaves year round as they are not deciduous. Despite these drawbacks, I really rather like drawing them as their trunks have an abundance of texture and the leaves seem to appear in clumps so that colors vary in shades of green depending on the light.

And there we are! I think I am beginning to feel like my life is returning to normal, and for the past year it really has been odd. Breaking and injuring my bones seems to be this year’s theme, so let’s hope it is not going to become a tradition. I would rather spend my time rambling around outdoors, enjoying what there is!

Later . . .