Paper and Threads

We are at the beach this week with friends - who we met in the 1960s.  There are early morning beach walks, afternoon pool swimming, and lovely dinners on the house patio.  Three of us sketch together, so we are creating visual journal pages and having great fun doing "labs" from Carla Sonheim's new book entitled Drawing Lab.

These are the visual journal pages from Mon-Wed.  Mon and Tues we went to the beach.  This morning we had a huge thunderstorm just as we were leaving and we spent the morning in the sunroom identifying bugs.

I'm taking photos of my journal instead of scanning the pages, so even the white bacground is slightly blue....

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Our group met at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Saturday, instead of in Central Park, because of the threat of inclement weather.  Our first drawing session was a major challenge - the Starn brothers bamboo structure on the Museum rooftop.  I decided to really limit my scope and to focus on the method that they used to connect the bamboo and creat a structure which supports many people on internal walkways. 

Our next drawing session was in the current exhibit called The American Woman - from the costume institute.  I already sketched some of the fashions in the exhibit on a previous visit and this time concentrated on the room called "The Heiress." 

Our 3rd and final sketch was in 19th C. European Paintings.  I am studying Cezanne's card players over a several year period and this time did a simple line drawing of one of the card players.  For more information about this project and my 2007, 2008, 2009 paintings, click here.

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Moleskine lost a customer forever, when they ignored requests to make their watercolor journals in a portrait format in addition to a landscape format.  I now make all of my watercolor journal sketchbooks in a 6 X 8" size using 140 lb Fabriano Artistico soft press paper.  Recently I decided to make my own book cloth using fabric that I create with procion MX dyes.  Here is a picture of #5 and 6 in the series.

The book cloth on the left was created using the pole-wrapped shibori technique.  The book cloth on the right was first dyed with thick procion MX dye - blue to green - and then stamped with one of my newly made fun foam stamps using a darker color dye.  The cotton cloth was then fused with 45 gm Thai mulberry paper using Wonder Under.

The covers of this new series of journal sketchbooks are so "busy" that I used solid color Mi Tientes paper for the end papers.  There are so many colors available that I can always find one that I like.  And the weight of the paper is perfect.

More Bookbinding:  Our small Journal Study Group made Tag Books at our meeting in June.  I made one previously, based on a Gwen Diehn design, and we used the same method to make these.  The books hold many shipping tags which are  our "Art Trading Card" equivalent.  When we are working together, everyone needs to make enough of the same tags to give to each other.

These are the books we made:

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We just returned from a Holiday weekend with our children and their children.  This is the first photo that we have of all 6 grandchildren this year - and I'm thrilled to have a new one.

I sketched every day in my summer watercolor journal - in which I try to paint something that will help me remember the day.  Here are 4 pages.

 Blue Mussel Shells:  I bought a wonderful laminated shell identification card which Callum calls "the map" and we tried to ID shells that I brought home from our beach walks. 

Our 3 and 4 year old grandsons made great progress "swimming" this weekend and spent lots of time going back and forth between their parents and the wall without floaties.  This is a pair of goggles that were abandoned on my chaise while I was watching them.

We waited for our car AC to have freon added and I was sitting next to this planter and flag - which looked especially forlorn after the holiday was over.

I take sea gull pictures each time we walk on the beach.  These are several drawings of one gull from those photos.

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