More men and women in black...

Work in progress...

Women in Black, continued...

I have a few more of our friendly waitresses from on the road...missing a few details (Allyson, Tamarack Restaurant, Green River, UT) but good enough to post before I get too far behind.

We are staying here

in the heart of Santa Fe. And feeling pampered.

Sketches on the road

I am drawing each of the servers

And faces along the way.  I will keep updating my progress.

 It took days to ready for trip, pack, and prepare for house and cat-sitting but we are on our way to the sunny Southwest. Took several days for planning and packing art stuff, two hours for packing clothes...On the other hand, packing for the warm southwest is easy-peasy, though we are missing our warm sweater today in Idaho and Utah.

I invite you to stay with me and hubby on the road. We said our good-bye to Ziggy and Rose. Zig will not miss us much, but Rose might. A couple of hours anyway. They like Joan who likes them back. Food. Water. Sleep. Repeat.

15 years ago and coulda been yesterday....

I have posted a video of one of my past visual journals in my quest to get them all up on the Red Chair website. To encourage you to visit there, I'm sending you over with the link instead of posting the video here.

Preview.....

I struggle a little with the whole idea of posting these anywhere. Art journals are the rage and they are all over the internet. I enjoy looking at what others have done and being inspired by them. I kept visual journals for a long time before they took off. Mine were never meant to be public, although I hope they will be passed on after I meet with the angels. I love revisiting them, and often do, filling some pages left undone before. Some of them are less about "art" than being"visual" in journal form, though I use the terms interchangeably. I use these journals occasionally for celebrating and for some venting about little frustrations - nothing too deep and diary-personal here -but mostly for making art, experimenting with ideas, and recording the times in which I live. I let the bits of news I save and the quotes I use reflect my opinions. (It probably wouldn't take long for someone to figure me out.)

Creating videos of these journals is a ridiculously long process, and I am wavering whether worth the time it takes. Then again, it feels a little like the book you write but never publish, the journeys you take but never record, and the shared histories you never share.

This is my friend, Claire....

...who creates the most lovely watercolor travel journals, photo books, and artistically-rendered class notes.

They are for the most part, in style, the exact opposite of my own. So I love to travel with her via these delicate watercolor images, surrounded by serene white space and lettered masterfully. I asked her to share a few pages from her recent travel to Paris which she graciously has done.

Claire Russell

Claire Russell

Claire Russell

Claire Russell

Handcrafted front to back, Claire Russell

We have a mutual love of travel and other sketchbooks and journals and probably would win prizes for our collections of them. Both of us find obscure titles and proudly share them with each other, as well as the other new artful goodies we have found. At our last lunch, she showed me this accordion photo book she created. Her work is immaculate - another trait I admire but pretty much lack in my own style.

Her name is Claire Russell. You won't find her on a blog or web site, because she doesn't have one! I am working on that...trying to convince her to do it!  But you can find some other work she has done on Molly Hashimoto's site here.

Walking Jordaan

My first walk in Amsterdam took me through arty Jordaan on a gorgeous day. Loved finding the "Gevelstenen"...artistic plaques on building fronts that served as early "house numbers" or advertised the trade within. 

Oh I have been busy with teeny things that grow into big things. Lots of hours on the phone with Apple support (and can't say enough about the quality of their support, which is awesome...) trying to work magic with Photos and iPhoto (which no longer really exists) and how to keep my photos from being EVERYWHERE in DUPLICATE but not being able to find ONE special one in all that that prints and that "events" no longer exist, unless you want them to, but they are really "albums" quite surpassing the albums formerly known as "albums"....And moving files to the new desktop Mac without migrating them (who wants to move all the junk that accumulates on a computer after awhile, huh?!) ... Well, you get the idea. Also sewing up a little apron for my friend Carol's charity event, and tweaking the page above which took a whole lot more time than I meant it to.

Also, our temperature  yesterday matched a record high 95. Yuk, too hot. But today is cooler and quite nice and the rest of the week should be typical beautiful Pacific NW summertime days.

Pulling it all together. A beginning.

 I have begun to pull together photos, sketches, and memories into a couple of travel journals for our recent trip to Amsterdam, Budapest, Paris, and points in-between. I also have a couple of short videos I played around with apps that are kinda fun, I think!

There is a YouTube video on the 1934 Jordaan riots. It's from newsreels of the time. The first part contains image of the working class, depressed Jordaan neighborhood. It's quite interesting to compare it to the yuppie neighborhood it is today. (Are there still yuppies? Well, whatever we call them today.)

and a quickie video or two…



https://youtu.be/kjnnab0sHZ8



https://youtu.be/xgW7u09zhWc
Go here for "Walking Jordan," a more fun version of this one.

Wise words from Rick

It is fitting that in today's paper is a column from Rick Steves on the virtues of travel,  here.

"Traveling thoughtfully, especially in challenging times, is one of the best ways to put current events in perspective. It forces you to see that global victims of poverty and natural disasters aren't just faceless staistics...but humans. You can't help but feel empathy."

As I pack (see below 😄) for a three-week adventure down the rivers of Europe, I am reminded how valuable travel is to thoughtful perspective and tolerance. It doesn't have to be a grand and glorious journey. I have always marveled at how even a short weekend in the other part of our state or across a state border widens my knowledge of how the world works. Sometimes it helps me cope with a problem or stress by the mere act of getting away from it. Traveling to the Southern U.S. - a whole other world from the Pacific NW  helps me understand - if not agree with - the existence of a wholly different perspective on the issues of the day. A reminder of assumptions incorrect. An opportunity to connect. A dependence on kindness of others (lost, anyone?). Partly because I am on the farther side of my life and partly because I am drawing the everyday details  of life around me, I am enjoying travel more and more every trip I take: I watch for new things, for the unusual or quirky, for children at play and grown-ups at coffee. Some things are the same elsewhere; some are quite different.

In an effort to procrastinate packing chores, I sketched:

Gone but not forgotten

…the pink explosion in our backyard, otherwise known as dogwood blossoms. As pink as can be. I tried to capture them here, for "draw a tree" challenge 2, Everyday in May…

fold out to….

and here.

Every Day in May

An annual event, this is the first time  I've signed on to this "assignment' to myself. We are provided a daily drawing task, similar in format to Everyday Matters and Sketchbook Skool. Since  I will be cruising down some European rivers starting in mid-May, I thought it would be fun to sketch or draw something each day in a different location. We'll see if I can keep up with this and how well the internet cooperates. It's so much fun to look at what other participants do

Today our task was to draw a favorite food. I have oh so many, but the artichoke reigns. If a dish or recipe includes artichoke, I usually look no further. With melted butter?  Oh, my.

On the left, drew first in permanent ink (Uniball vision), then watercolored. On the right, painted green shape first with various greens. Then inked it. 

Ready to cruise down a river or two or three...

This week I finished and sent off 7 travel journals for the seven other couples Bob and I will river cruise with pretty soon. The eight couples (from 4 different states!) will cruise together on the Viking longship from Amsterdam to Budapest. Several will spend extra days before or after in various places, but the book I made focuses on the 15 days of the cruise itself, 

I used the deconstructed journal format Jill Berry talks about in her video and in whose retreat workshop I participated, taught in Jill's place very ably by Caitlin Dundon.

 To make it my own, I added pockets lots of pockets, personalized stickers and tags, a little envelope with more crap ephemera and a "kit bag" with a sharpie, permanent tape (currently all pages are in with removal adhesive tape so that pages can be taken out while on the trip, then reattached afterward more permanently.







Usually, when I am needing to do more than 1 or 2 of the same of something, I get bored by the time I am at the 3rd one. Really intensively bored and hating it by the 5th one. This time, I enjoyed it all the way through and gave myself the time to do the extra things with variety. (Variety is the spice, you know, especially for this earthling.)Each one is unique but similar to the others, so it kept me interested. I loved having the opportunity to use some stamps, rubbings, and doo-dads (see above paragraph ha ha).



Tyvek is a girl's best friend.

A couple of updates and another shameless plug

First, at the risk of being a  nuisance, let me post this article that was in the Seattle Times today about the wonderful Boys in the Boat, which, if you haven't read still, please do yourself the favor. Human spirit, persistence, and all that good stuff.

http://www.seattletimes.com/sports/uw-huskies/boys-in-the-boat-gives-rowing-a-boost/

Next, I recently posted a notice and video of the upcoming Sketchbook Project tour, pleading to my friends in LA to put their dates on the calendar. Now, the whole year's schedule is available, and oohboy, they are coming to Seattle again. Whoo  hoo!  And it's the last tour, so saddle up and check it out!  I absolutely promise on my Sapphire and  tonic, you won't be disappointed.

Here's the full schedule:  https://www.sketchbookproject.com/events

https://www.sketchbookproject.com/library/12829

And here's another plug for my own entry called Hometown Journeys submitted in 2013,

which I would love for you to look at.  Because I did some fold-outs, not all of the pages scanned very well, but I hope you get the idea. You can instead view the separate pages on the Flickr link in the  right column or here.

It was hard to give up the real thing which represented a whole lot of time and work, but I visited a slew of new places and loved the challenge of integrating my photos and my own drawings.

A Mobile Sketchbooky Treat

Heads up, my California buddies! The Sketchbook tour will be in LA June 26-28! This will be the last Sketchbook Project tour. You'll have to go to Brooklyn to see the sketchbooks after that!



and to Atlanta, Austin, Miami, San Francisco, Seattle (see my smile), Chicago, and Toronto, dates to be announced.

If  you love looking at sketchbooks and visual journals to your heart's content, you will enjoy. There is amazing art out there. Details below, but first:

Korean artist Min Jeong Bae sketches from photo inspiration https://t.co/yfOwZ4QeEC pic.twitter.com/4d4OLHhdYc
— Sketchbook Project (@sketchbkproject) March 25, 2015

• LACMA
• 5905 Wilshire Blvd - L.A., CA 90036

• June 19-21 / Austin, TX

  • Umlauf Sculpture Garden & Museum
  • 605 Robert E. Lee Road - Austin, TX 78704
  • June 19-21
  • 
    

  • June 5- 7 / Atlanta, GA

    • Ponce City Market
    • 675 Ponce de Leon Ave NE - Atlanta, GA 30308

An anniversary of sorts.

This was my first post on Blogger seven years ago almost to the day. Just for a second look, okay? As old as this post is, it truly is in the category of buried treasure.

I had been blogging for a few years before that with the Mac web app that looked great but didn't work all that well and then was discontinued by Apple anyway. We Maccers had to scramble for something else. Which was fine; it was time. Except most of my genius was in those blog posts, ya know? Gone forever. Probably a good thing. You can't go home again.

Colleen McCullough

Wow. Lots of news last week. The first that I wanted to respond to is here….but by the time I was done, lots of others faces in the news.

When first I read Colleen McCullough's obituary, I was offended about the reference to her looks, even before the reaction from others made the news.  To further irritate, was the skimming over of her lifelong talents and skills (she was a neuroscientist, for Pete's sake, and wrote 25 (!) novels).  Also the apparent surprise that she could be witty and warm, despite being "plain" and overweight. Huh???

So glad to see the reaction this obituary by Australia's national newspaper received.  Neil Gaiman said it well: "Although his beard looked like he had glued it on and his hair would have been convincing as a wig, he married a rock star #myobituary.

Meanwhile, I further insulted her by having to write the headline right across her face to cover up an error I couldn't fix. Terrible, unforgiving paper to do watercolor on. Sorry, Colleen.

Faces in the news

Today's Seattle Times:

As far as has been announced, only one of these speaks French. 

Answers to the questions lie below:

Starry starry sky

While listening to Under the Wide and Starry Sky by Nancy Hogan, I drew "Louis" - Robert Louis Stevenson.  I think I would have liked that handsome, skinny guy….

You're only young once, Francie.

I drew Francie Peterson-Baugh with my  "Pencil" and Paper 53 on the iPad. Bit of a learning curve.

How to Write Your Name….

...in case you didn't know.

I wrote a slew of draft posts waiting for one thing or another I never seem to get to or complete. Here's one I started a ways back. I imagine I held it back until I could post a photo or two of  the books I had just received from her direct from the UK.  Love this artist. I have mentioned her several times here. I could never replicate her style, nor would I want to. She is her own style, as it should be. And I do not have her patience and deliberateness and if the good Lord said either draw like that or eat liver, I'd have to eat the liver.

But oh I do admire her talent and humor and approach to life's little treasures. And since she is a featured artist in Sketchbook Skool this semester, I'm sharing this with you now.


http://youtu.be/0NJcMc4QYAo

Quick sketch at Starbucks

This woman was a serious worker at her computer the whole time I was there. Even after I drew her using Paper app on iPad. Still on a learning curve with the app.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad