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!!

Quick sketches in crowded spaces

I love to carry a small sketch book and pencil/pen with me in my purse. It is perfect for a quick sketch when you seem to have lots of time on your hands. For me it seems to be waiting in doctors offices or for a prescription. I take advantage of this time by sketching people. It's hard to do and not make them nervous with all the stares. Quick glasses and fast sketches work best. It's fun and remember it doesn't have to be perfect, it's practice.

Capturing another moment in my sketchbook!

My grandsons came to swim. Blake, who is four, spent every minute in the pool but the baby, Bryce cried everytime we put his toe into the pool water. So I spent most of my day enjoying his giggles as I kissed on him and played with him. Mom and Blake were then free to swim together. It's taking time to record these moments that will transform your sketchbook from a book of scary white pages to something you treasure.

I decided to do a two page spread showing different angles, some more challenging than others. I did some live and some from photos I took. I quickly layed out where I would put each little head and the size. I got carried away as I was sketching and just decided to go with it and have one of his portraits be in pencil! 

Big brother and mommy got to enjoy their time together in the pool. 

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!

Have fun and improvise!

I happened to be cleaning out a fruit/vegetable bowl that I keep on the counter. In this heat the things don't last quite as long as normal. I had lots of lemons and oranges that had just started to dry out so I was going to throw them out but decided to cut them in half and make some painted stamps. It can be done with anything so I would encourage you to try different things around your kitchen. I love the designs and textures you can achieve with different areas and different cuts of the oranges or lemons. You can make up a stamped page ahead of time and paint over it or just use it as a journaling page, a page just to write about the day.

I let it dry for a few days so it wasn't so juicy and then painted watercolor over it. There are so many possibilities, different colors, outline, make labels. stamp wedges, paint seeds. Have fun

Friday Challenge- Bugs

For our first challenge I thought  we should stay in theme with my last post, all about BUGS. Keep your eyes peeled for something interesting and not poisonous. I caught a moth in a jar so I could sketch it and then let it go. I also have been fishing things out of the pool and painting the dead! LOL I cant wait to see what you post, remember, even bugs are beautiful!

I had an idea for the summer! BUGS

I had an idea for the summer. I am going to be watching my grandkids several days a week and I love to have them outside with me. The other day we found several bees floating in the pool, one of which was a Carpenter Bee. Rachel tried to save one of the honey bees from a watery grave and got stung in the process. This made them all decide that my pool wasn't safe! It had too many bugs. So we ended up that day with a bunch of casualties which were laid across the pool decking like a war scene.

After the kids left I thought I should draw them, the bugs I mean. Then last night I was sketching out back since it was so beautiful. One of my favorite things is to pick fresh veggies from the garden and prepare them outside in my outdoor kitchen and eat outside. It is a dream come true for me every time I get to do it! So anyway, back to my crazy story. As I was sketching I noticed a huge moth on the wall of the building. We caught it in a Mason jar and I thought it as a tobacco moth which lays the horned worms that eat your tomatoes and look like creatures from another planet. Actually, once I looked at it and looked it up I found out it was a White Lined Sphinx Moth not the tobacco moth. And although in the same family I am not quite so repulsed. So I caught it and decided I now almost have an insect collection! 

I took one of my pages in my sketchbook and took the mason jar and set it on the page and outlined around it so I have circles all over my page. I decided it would be fun to make the kids each a page too. Now every time we find a bug this summer we can record it by drawing it first then looking it up. I will let you know how it goes!