Summer time means vacation time, a great opportunity to sketch!

This is the time of year that we all take vacations, it is also the perfect opportunity to capture that wonderful trip in your sketchbooks. By taking the time to journal and sketch you will preserve your trip forever. You can relive that special time for free! I find I would much rather look through my journal than through a photo album.  

Here are some tips for keeping a successful travel journal.

  

1. Travel light, take a journal, a mechanical pencil, eraser, small paint box and a water brush.

2. Remember that this is your sketchbook and it should represent the scene, not be a perfect studio painting. Here I quickly painted in the bushes and trees capturing how green everything was. The Elk was a bonus!    

3. If you want to take the time to capture more details like this pencil sketch in Yosemite, start it and then take a photo with your camera to work on later.

4. Sometimes it's hard to take the time away from family or friends if traveling with others. Try to grab a few moments and paint or sketch and do all of your journaling later at night before you go to bed. I traveled in Italy and I would paint during the day and journal in bed at night. I am so glad I did that too since many of the wonderful adventures might have been forgotten since we crammed so much into a few weeks. Here I have left room on the left to journal later. 

5. Remember its your journal so capture the things that are special to you! Journal about your adventures, both good and bad. Sometimes the view out of your hotel window is a perfect thing to sketch. 

6. Add pockets or glue in ticket stubs and special napkins from restaurants and collage them onto your sketchbook page before you sketch and paint over them. That can make for some great sketchbooks pages. 

7.Maybe sketch your suitcase or the clothes you are packing. Make it a whole sketchbook of your vacation and have fun!  

Happy Summer Vacation!!

Color me Happy with yellow Sunflowers and more!

Being an artist you begin to notice all the little things. We notice the things that other people miss in the busyness of their daily lives.  It's so easy to forget that we have been given a special gift of awareness. A gift of seeing an abundance of colors when others see only gray. Have you noticed how as summer approaches the colors begin to shift from the pastels of spring to the bright yellows of summer.

The sun is directly over us and it lights up the garden in a different way. It's now becoming time for sunflowers and rudbeckia, for marigolds and peaches. They light up the yard like little beacons of sunlight and I love this time. 

When we take the time to sketch and paint we really become intimate with the thing we are painting, learning each curve, the colors, the turns and twists of the line that will reproduce it onto our paper or fabric with our own personal dynamic.

Take a moment to look around and to see something new today, something that is brightening up your day.  Take a moment to really take it in with that special artists appreciation and vision.

This month my Mug Rug Club received a sunflower template for their pattern. I not only showed them how to do some reverse appliqué but I made a book bag with my little mug rug and sent them my first video insert!  Sunflowers are everywhere!

Here's to filling your days with warm sunshine, sweet aromas and bright yellows! I hope you have a happy, sunshine sunflower day!