Lost and Found Artwork, Part 1
My three week summer vacation went by way too fast and now I am back to school and pushing through my last semester. Although I did a lot of drawing on my vacation, I have gotten out of practice and…
Category From My Sketchbook
Small Travel Break
I had a chance to travel to Pennsylvania for my childhood friend Gwenn’s engagement party (watch a cute video of her engagement story here). I haven’t been to visit for 10 years, so it was really nice to see a…
Free Fun Friday at Tower Hill Botanic Garden
At the end of July, I took a day off from my studies to go out sketching at Tower Hill’s Free Fun Friday event (free admission for the public). As a member, I had never attended this event in the…
One Year Ago Today: New Guinea Impatiens
This was a disjointed sketchbook page, as life got in the way as it often does. I remember going out into the back garden to sketch after a rough day at work due to short staffing. Midway through my drawing,…
Sketchy Sketches
Dismiss thoughts of ‘good, bad, right, wrong, success, failure’ – be spontaneous. -Josh Goldberg Even in my sketchbook, I tend to be very precise and make slow-going, detailed drawings. These two pages were exactly the opposite for a change. I…
Small Scale Specimens Drawn from Life
I spent a lot of time making slow-paced drawings from life during the break between the spring and summer semesters. These two drawings were of some things I found on my daily walks with Cate. I realized first hand how…
Minimalist Art Supplies
A few weeks ago I came across this blog post about how to implement a minimalist strategy with art and crafts supplies. Some of the author’s opinions are a little extreme and I prefer high quality materials even for sketchbook…
One Year Ago Today: Nothing to do but Relax
What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives? -E. M. Forster I’m looking back into my sketchbook from one year ago today. I made this…
Trying out new paints: Prima Marketing Watercolor Confections
Recently I got an email from a reader asking me what brand of watercolor paint I use. I generally use Winsor & Newton and M. Graham, but I recently purchased a new set of watercolors and spend the last few…
Butterflies!
Over Spring Break I delved into my reference photo archive and sketched some butterflies. I have a nice collection of photos, some from the butterfly conservatory and some from outside. I tried to identify the butterflies in the last two…
One Year Ago Today: Sketching a Dandelion
A look back to see what I was doing in my sketchbook one year ago. Even without all my annotations, I remember everything about that experience perfectly well!
Warm Woolens
February can be a rough month for me, mostly because I am so sick and tired of winter and its unpleasantness, such as driving in snow. On the other hand, I think winter is a visually beautiful season and I…