We took a long walk through Belgravia on our last day in London and I sketched the huge basket of flowers that hangs from every light pole in these areas of London and one Hibiscus flower that was blooming in front of a terrace house. In spite of higher than normal temperatures, these baskets always looked fresh and beautiful.
We've returned from our wonderful London visit and this morning I scanned some of the sketches that I did of buildings. These include: the house that my daughter's family is renting, clouds overhead after a rainy day with details of their balcony, my 3 year old grandson's nursery school, Greene & Stone arts supply store, and Osborne & Little's windows. All of these places are on or near King's Road in Chelsea.
This was a full family vacation and for much of the time I was with one or both of my grandchildren - ages 'just 3 and 19 months. I carried my supplies with me and tried to make very quick sketches and then added watercolor washes - both from memory of the colors and occasional photos taken immediately before. The clouds (EDM Challenge #74) need a little tweaking after scanning, but I have no time at the moment to do it.
The journal was a linen watercolor by Cachet (7 x 10" spiral bound). I used Pigma Micron pens, Niji waterbrushes (small and medium) and a Daler-Rowney travel watercolor set. Since my goal when I started sketching recently was to be able to keep an illustrated travel journal, I am pleased with my progress. I purchased Graham Byfield's "London Sketchbook: A City Observed" before we went and realized very quickly that wonderful watercolor paintings of major London sites probably take days and days en plein! I love looking at his magnificent book, but can't imagine creating it.
I have had many types of mailboxes in my lifetime: mail slots in the front door, rural and suburban mailboxes with flags, and mailboxes with combination locks filling entire walls while at school. Our "mailbox" in New York City is really our mail table. Mail is sorted in the morning into cubbyholes in a large rolling set of shelves and then the apartment staff moves the shelves into the elevator and delivers the mail to our hallway.
I love mail and as a child home during the summer could hear the mail truck move down the street approaching our house. Several letters changed my life as I was accepted into college and then medical school. But the best mail was the daily letter I received from my boyfriend, then fiance, then husband as we both went to medical school hundreds of miles from each other. We have two full boxes of letters that some day we will open and reread.
I didn't have many orange items to paint - and will soon be leaving for London - so I'm uploading a few of the completed sketches/paintings before the month is over. My warm and cool reds and yellows produced oranges that were very similar. The colors in my Daler-Rowney travel set, which were used for the lily, produced much more varied and interesting colors. This ends 6 months of using my current palette - one cool and one warm red, yellow, and blue - which I used for an entire month of painting each primary and secondary color. When I see my 18 month old grandaughter in London, I may be inspired to work with pinks! Until then, I'm done. The scans were more difficult than usual today - maybe because the paper was more buckled.
I'm still doing a minimum of one page per day in my sketchbook because I'm determined to improve my drawing and painting skills in 2006. I still feel most free working in my inexpensive spiral Aquabee Globetrotter sketchbook, so I'm not making much progress moving to the Moleskine or Cachet watercolor journals that are waiting on the shelf. There are several threads on the forums at Wet Canvas about sketchbooks and I'm comforted to know that many others share my "Fear before action" (see my EDM challenge #70 entry). I found some of the proposed solutions hilarious as those who have no trouble using "special journals" try to coax those who do.
Someone in the Everyday Matters Group announced the new Wet Canvas Drawing Basic 102 Classes and I'm working my way through Class 2 assignments on creativity. I posted the sketch made with a 1:4 ratio view finder earlier this week and these are the next assignment: 4 progressive sketches starting with a kitchen object and then leading to more and more abstraction as each sketch becomes a starting point for the next one. The 3 smaller sketches can each be enlarged. It also is one of my "color project orange" pieces - since June is my month for orange, the last of my secondary colors to explore.
The Wet Canvas website still confuses me so I was very glad to have a link posted by one of our group members - so thank you.