Nature Drawing and Journaling Trips with Irene Brady

Nature Journaling in Belize 3

2012-01-16T11:25:00.001-08:00

I tried out two cabanas while at Macaw Bank Jungle Lodge. This one is Butterfly, and it had a desk that would make a better drawing table than the one I was using in Macaw Cabana. Henri graciously helped me move, about halfway through my stay.

Mostly I only used the desk in the evenings, to add color to my drawings. If it rained during the daytime ~ and it did occasionally rain, 'cause this is the jungle and rain (and heat) are what MAKE it a jungle ~ I sometimes sat in my open doorway and drew from there. For the most part, though, the warm, mostly misty rain was nice to be out in and I just hooked an umbrella to my belt with a carabiner if rain looked eminent.

[BTW: I was using watercolor pencils to add color to my drawings, and discovered, on about the fifth day in the jungle with 100% humidity, that when I'd try to make a mark with the pencil the the pigment point would BEND! As a workaround, I dabbed color off the end of the pencil with the paintbrush ~ this works fine, by the way, but it's not how one expects to use watercolor pencils. As they absorbed moisture, the "leads" got limper daily, soon becoming about the consistency of lipstick. Then, to my dismay, the softening, swelling pigments actually split their wooden pencil casings!

Since my return to Oregon (and, roughly, 30-45% humidity), they've returned to their former hardness and the split pencils have regained their usual shape. So be forewarned ~ if you plan to use watercolor pencils in a humid place, either store them in a drybag or use regular watercolor pigments instead.]

Sketching en pleine air, a fancy way of saying "outdoors," isn't always feasible, and sometimes I took photos with the intent of drawing from the camera later. This is really easy with the newer digital cameras with large viewing screens.

For instance, Tallulah, the resident coati, moved like quicksilver as she zipped up and down trees searching for insects under loose bark or attached to the undersides of leaves and stems. Even the camera sometimes only caught a blur. So sketching would have been a losing prospect as I scrambled through tangled undergrowth trying to keep her in sight. But I did manage to get a couple of photos from which I could make this sketch.

Other subjects also posed difficulty. Butterflies, of course, would NEVER alight long enough for a good sketch, the cinnamon-red bracket fungus was on a steep hillside in a pile of branches and sticks, and the wasp nest attached to the underside of a thorny palm really didn't lend itself to a close inspection, much less a lengthy drawing session! Frequently, bullhorn acacias, inhabited by nasty, hot-headed ants which apparently craved an armed encounter with me, kept me from getting close to some other subjects. No, sometimes drawing conditions were not ideal, by any means.

Other times I got lucky. One day I discovered huge, 5" tall contribo flowers, with their 12" tails, hanging over a trail. I found this spent flower lying in the path, so I carried it along and sat on the riverbank for a couple of hours sketching and coloring it. Despite its lovely aspect, the contribo is a really smelly carnivorous plant, and uses a pitfall system similar to that of pitcher plants, trapping and disassembling insects in a pool of digestive fluid. But it was great fun to draw. Its specific name is Aristolochia trilobata.

Since I had a new camera, I spent some time playing with one of the really neat features, the panorama button.

On the bank overlooking the river was an ancient Ceiba tree which was estimated by a visiting botanist to have been a sapling when the Mayans were building their temples. It was fun trying to encompass its entire height in one picture, but even so I couldn't back up far enough to include the amazing width of the buttresses in their totality.

Buttresses (long, skinny above-ground root-like fins) prop up many species of really old jungle trees. Jungle soil gets so much rain that it washes away and never builds up a deep loam on the ground. Trees are consequently anchored in a thin layer of soil and could be easily blown down in a hurricane without their buttresses.

I sketched this magnificent 20' buttress that anchors one of the other old trees near the river.

Alas, my eleven days at Macaw River Jungle Lodge were nearly ended. One warm, humid day I carried a big black innertube upriver, passing through a wide savannah to put in upstream of the lodge. Then I spent a couple of dreamy hours slip-sliding down the Macal River past huge trees draped with hanging lianas and decorated with hanging ant nests.

A couple of rapids added excitement ~ but not too much, since I was on my own and not really seeking high adventure ~ and several huge orange iguanas sneered down at me from their high roosts above the water as I passed beneath.

On my last afternoon, walking in a melancholy Eeorish manner along a river path, ("Oh dear, my last day. I'll probably never see this tree again. I'll never walk this path again. Oh dear!!") I was rewarded with the appearance of this delicate lacy-skirted mushroom called a Veiled Lady. Definitely cheered up, I drew it on the last page of my journal.

So. We have traveled together, dear friend, through the seventeen days of my sojourn on Belizean beach and in Belizean jungle.

There are 24 pages in my sketch journal, and I invite you ~ in a couple of months ~ to visit my website to download a copy if you are still interested.

Thanks for coming by! Leave a message if you have enjoyed this, so I'll know whether I should bother to blog the next journey I make. I'm considering one to South Africa........

Nature Journaling in Belize 2

2012-01-15T12:18:00.000-08:00

The jungle is a fascinating place if you keep your eyes open and don't jump at every crackle or strange noise. This lovely passionflower was glowing right beside the trail on one of my forays.

But there were lots of crackles and strange noises, most of which could be attributed to birds, squirrels or just the breeze rustling the fronds of a papery palm leaf. There were probably eyes watching me at all times, ones I had no idea of, but hey, that's part of what makes people watch horror movies ~ that desire to be living on the edge of excitement. So I welcomed in all of the strange things (well, not the ticks!) and had a great time.

Ron warned me about ticks. Only one other guest, he said, had ever gotten ticks, and that was because they were crawling about in the greenery looking for insects. Hmmm..... "But," he said, "while they do itch, they don't carry Lyme Disease."

So since I planned to be poking around in the shrubbery, I decided to take my chances. I got a few, but they were teensy things and easily plucked off. I get ticks all the time around my house in Oregon, anyway, so it was no big deal, and worth the adventures.

I mean, look at that curious mantis staring (guiltily?) back over its shoulder at me. It looks like someone "caught in the act," doesn't it? I met that little fellow off-trail.

And I was totally entranced with this amazing Clearwing Butterfly. You can see right through its wings. Butterflies are normally not my forte, but Belizean butterflies seemed to be tamer and less likely to fly than most butterflies I've tried to photograph before, and this picture was taken from about two inches away.

I fell in love with the Macal River, which flows past the end of the trail from the lodge. Cattle egrets swooped in every night to roost in these trees, spangling the darkening riverbank with sparkles of white. Kingfishers clacked up and down its length, diving for the small silvery fish that flashed in its shallows.

I spent a lot of time down there sketching, and actually spotted a crocodile species which hadn't been known to spend any time in the immediate vicinity. That was a Morelet's Crocodile, a small, docile creature which has, on occasion, dined on a cat or other small creature, but wouldn't THINK of bothering big folk like me. Or you.

And look at this colorful king vulture that landed in a big tree just across the river from me. Imagine a vulture being so winsome as that.

Well, as you can see, I was having the time of my life.

Every night, Ron and Al cooked delicious dinners, and we chatted afterward by the light of kerosene lamps. I really enjoyed those evenings. The lodge has electricity, but only kerosene lamps are used for lighting in the thatch-roofed open-air restaurant, which gives meals a charming intimate air.

There was always hot coffee and toast ready for me at breakfast time (I eat a small breakfast ~ I think Ron was distressed at my deficient appetite because he delights in creating delicious breakfast fare and toast doesn't quite cut the mustard). When other guests were there Ron spent this time helping them figure out how to spend their day, how to get to interesting places, and connecting them up with their tour guides if they were off to see the sights.

I was having such fun (and I was on a limited budget, too) so I only did one outside tour during my stay, a visit to Caracol, an ancient Mayan ruin, for about $85. This ruin complex measures 12 miles across and once had a population of more than 140,000 people. We just visited a tiny part of it, but it was amazing.

There are still a lot of undiscovered or unexcavated ruins in Central America, and many of them just look like hills. You can see from this partially excavated ruin at Caracol how you might mistake the tree-covered hump of a ruin for a hill! Henri took me to see some ruins near the Jungle Lodge, which are totally unexcavated, and if I hadn't been told they were ruins, I'd never have guessed.

Once they're excavated and restored, however, they can be MOST imposing. Here's the main (so far) ruin uncovered at Caracol. It is much bigger than it looks here (there are people in that photo).

The Mayan people still live all around this area. Both of the young men on the Macaw Bank Jungle Lodge staff, Henri and Angel, have Mayan roots.

I'm still learning how to do scenery, so sketching the ruin was a real challenge for me. I wanted to show some of the glyphs, too, so I did a detail to show them up close, then an arrow points to where they were on the ruin. You may have to squint at it to get the full effect of the glyph!

Some people go out every day on a new sight-seeing tour, but I was glad I had set my sights on Seeing One Little Part Of The Jungle Well.

I had daily adventures just a few feet from my door ~ watching a "hand" of bananas mature over the deck of my cabana, for instance. Discovering several colonies of brilliant red mushrooms. Finding trees covered with huge thorns.
EVERY time I went out, I discovered wonders that left me saying "Wow! and "OMG!" ("Omg" is really hard to say, y'know! Try it! )

Anyway, more wonders tomorrow!
See you then!

Nature Journaling in Belize

2012-01-14T11:41:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I blogged about how my gear worked in Belize here, so today I'll tell you about the actual trip itself.

The journey from Oregon to Belize was something of an epic trek, taking 32 hours from the time I left home til the time I checked into my room at Ak'Bol Barracks Yoga Retreat. Of course, that wasn't all air time since I did have to travel from the airport to the water taxi depot, then take a launch for a couple of hours to get to Ambergris Caye. There was a 9-hour overnight layover in Miami, however, in which I was trying to sleep on the floor. I think I've finally decided to act my age next time, and bust out of the airport to rent a room with a real bed for the night. My bones didn't LIKE that floor!

But it wasn't just a matter of "like" or "not like" ~ the big problem was that I was so tired I was either sleeping in my room (cool room, by the way, with bathroom down the stairs for $35/night!) or half asleep for the next two days of my four-day stay on the beach!!! Ouch! Lesson learned!

But once I revived somewhat, I had a great time, renting a bike to ride into the little town of San Pedro and explore, beach-combing along the crushed-coral beach in front of Ak'Bol, and admiring the roseate spoonbill, wood stork, ibis and herons that fished in the lagoon.

The name Ak'Bol means "heart of the village" and the people there were warm and friendly. To help me regain my poise, I signed up for the best massage of my life from Milio. He and Kirsten, who teaches yoga out in that little thatched place at the end of the pier in the image at right, own and run the place.

There were lots of things to enjoy, including the warm, moist breeze (heaven to this cold, chapped face from wintery Oregon), the huge orange conch (say "konk") shells washed up on the beach and used for decoration everywhere, the marvelous Wish Willy lizards ~ close kin to iguanas, kayaking in the mangroves which enclose the lagoons in the center of the Caye (say "key"), and other pleasures such as sitting in the little open-air restaurant drinking piña coladas.

If you were following my blog from Kauai you will have read about my panic attack whilst snorkeling there and understand why I might not have gone snorkeling in this amazing snorkel heaven on the barrier reef just off Ambergris Caye. If I had been in tip-top condition, instead of tired and a bit run-down, I might have gone for it. But.....trying again while I was tired and not truly in top condition would have been pushing my luck. Next time, maybe.

Alas, before I had enough time to explore everything it was time to catch the cross-country bus from Belize City to the Maya Mountains in the western part of the country, about 70 miles to the west. The bus passed through the mangrove lagoons of the flatlands on the coastal side, with moist 93° breezes streaming through the open windows and between the packed passengers, and finally started climbing into the cooler hills. It took a little over two hours, but at about $3, who could possibly complain! I was hesitant to photograph unsuspecting folks, so I only took this one picture of a big-eyed child on the bus.

At about three that afternoon, I was met by Ron at San Ignacio and driven the seven miles to Macaw Bank Jungle Lodge, an ecofriendly retreat nestled in a dense jungle which Ron and Al have created in the jungle. EXACTLY what I had hoped for!

Ron, Al, Angel and Henri looked after me royally for eleven days while I roamed the banks of the Macal River and the mysterious jungle paths, most of them trimmed 4'-6' wide to make getting lost impossible and to make the jungle accessible and, for many people, not too scary.

I definitely was not scared, content to spend hours wandering just a few yards, with cool things to see and explore. Atta (leaf cutter) ants, for instance, whose diligent trooping back and forth from a "victim tree" to the nest with their booty wore 6" wide paths across the trails.

Here's one ant on a leaf down by the Macal River making its arching cut across the leaf, and then you see a stream of them marching stolidly across the trail with leaf, bud, or flower held high overhead. Be sure to look at these images close up!

I spent Christmas Day exploring dark jungle trails, about as excited and pleased as it is possible to be. When I returned to my cabana, hot, dirty, tired and supremely content, with a handful of purple blossoms yet to sketch, I found a bowl of exquisitely ripe starfruit and oranges waiting for me on my deck railing. What a delightful and unexpected treat! I think both Ron and Al were a bit worried that I would get bored during my eleven day stay, but I knew there wasn't much possibility of THAT.

Okay, I'm going to sign off here, but I'll add more tomorrow, probably, since there are quite a few more adventures to be shared (with Mayan Ruins, an innertube trip down the Macal River, and some incredible flowers, butterflies, iguanas and mushrooms to show you). See you then!

Back from Belise, with lots to say

2012-01-13T10:11:00.000-08:00

Belize was terrific. One of my sisters wondered out loud why anyone would ever want to go to such a hot, humid place, ever, but I loved it. I love being in a place where houses don't need windows, where birdsong pours into your bedroom when it's time to arise, and where you know exactly what to wear for the day because the temperature/humidity in your bedroom is exactly the same as it is outdoors. Also, because it's warm in winter and I can go outside, hike, and sketch any time I want to!
That's me, emerging from a tomb in a Mayan ruin. Only a little sweaty.

Since the last blog was about packing, first I need to put closure on how things I packed and took with me worked, so you people who are interested in the packing and use of the packed items won't have to wade through my blog to get to the details:

Tripbook: I make tripbooks containing all my important paperwork to use when I travel. This tripbook contains:

1. pertinent pages from a purchased and downloaded Lonely Planet book on Belize, printed out on my office computer.
2. printed copies of online confirmations and reservations I made.
3. copy of my round-trip airline itinerary
4. internet gleanings about sights and sites to see in Belize
5. TripAdvisor reviews about lodgings I had reservations at, so I could make sure I did or avoided doing things they mentioned
6. general advice on traveling in Belize
7. directions on how to get to my lodgings from the airport and point-to-point in the country, including taxi and bus information and advice.
I took the loose pages to a printshop where they punched and rolled a plastic spiral onto them for $1.80.
Tripbooks keep all your papers in order and are an invaluable travel aid. I referred to it regularly. It tucked nicely into the side of my fanny pack, alongside my re-built spiral-bound bird guide (discussed in the previous blog).

Travel Gear: I was able to tuck my fleece blankie (which came in VERY handy at night in the mountains of Belize, by the way) into my pack, but I wanted the neck pillow to be more available while I was traveling. Two carabiners (the metal D-shaped things attached to the corners of the pillow in the photo) made it easy to clip the pillow to my pack or fanny pack when I wasn't using it. You can find carabiners in camping goods stores or Walmart. They are useful for things around the house, as well, being practically indestructible.

Pills: When you're traveling, you need to keep any pills you take handy, and I was using the plastic box shown at right. The little sliders pull out so you can dump the pills into your hand, but it only holds a 14-day supply for me (I take quite a few vitamins). So for the pills I couldn't cram into the box I used a long skinny plastic bag, put in a day's supply of pills, partitioned it off with a rubber band, put in the next day's supply, etc. (see photo).

As it turned out, the plastic bag was a far better solution in the 100% humidity of Belize. The pills in the box, which isn't airtight, got moist and were almost impossible to get out (they stuck to the sliders!). They may also have become degraded from the moisture. The pills in the bag stayed dry and easy to extricate. Next time I'll just use a plastic bag.

Things I Carried Around On My Person in Belize: In addition to the camera, I carried a sun hat, which tended to pull at my throat when it wasn't on my head. Half-way through the trip I discovered the tiny clip on the strap that let me clip it to my shirt so the string wouldn't chafe my throat. This hat shades the neck and is extremely light-weight at 2½ ounces.

I never went out without my binoculars, smallish ones, but decent quality. I think, though, that I need to replace them with waterproof ones if I plan to do more travel in the tropics. I really worried about them getting moldy!

And I never wandered out onto the beach or into the jungle without my sketching kit, shown here at right. It contains my sketchbook, binoculars, eyeglasses, ballpoint pen for sketching, and watercolor pencils (sometimes). It also has a tiny bottle of pain relievers, an energy bar, a pencil sharpener, and clipped via carabiner to the zipper tab, my sitting pad which I cut from a ½" foam camping pad.
At left is the sitting pad opened out on a hard rock. Sometimes I don't even disconnect it from the sketching kit ~ I just doff the kit onto the ground beside me, spread out the pad and sit. The attached strip of white ribbon with red polkadots helps me find it if I walk off without it (don't laugh ~ it happens!).

Camera: I had been saving for some time to replace my old camera gear, which weighed slightly over a pound. When you are tired or have a headache, this is difficult to carry. I was finally able to afford a little point-and-shoot the size of a deck of cards, which comes with a dedicated battery and charger. I ordered two extra batteries so I could always have a charged one in my camera bag and one in the charger back at my lodging.

In the photo above is all my camera stuff, and a nylon "id packet" I got once at a convention. It is about 5"x6" and hangs from a nylon cord. It has a large pocket which the camera fits into, a zipper pocket that holds a battery and photo card, and a place to slip in a business card in case you lose it. Fully packed with the camera, an extra battery and an extra photo card, it weighs only seven ounces. The photo at right shows the case packed, with the charger beside it. At seven ounces, I sometimes don't even remember I'm carrying it, and have to pat myself down to locate it. I'm wearing it in the opening photo. The business card is essential ~ I lost my camera bag in Kauai last year, and it arrived in the mail a month later from some kindly fellow who picked it up in a parking lot!

Dry-bag: I planned to do an inner tube trip on the Macal River, so I took along a dry-bag, available in a camping goods store (or Walmart) to put my camera into between photos. I could have used a slightly bigger one and put in my sketchbook, too, but I seriously didn't want to get that sketchbook wet. The camera can be replaced ~ the sketchbook can't!
The other essential part of this set-up was the 4' length of nylon cord I always carry along. One end tied to the dry-bag, the other end was tied around the innertube. I was really glad for this when I went over a riffle in the river and it fell overboard. It bobbed along beside me until I could snatch it up again. If you fold the dry-bag over the wrong direction, it will leak, but I experimented beforehand and had no problems. In retrospect, I think a large dry-bag might be nice for keeping clothes dry in a humid climate. Hmmmmm.....

So that's the report on gear. I've beebled on so long that I'm going to have to hold off on the trip details until tomorrow.

I sent out a letter to my family and selected friends when I returned, briefly outlining my trip and the high points. I told them I was going to just put that letter up with some nice photos on my blog, but when I started looking through the photos I found so much I wanted to share that I simply can't limit myself.

Tune in tomorrow or so for the next installation. If you leave your email moniker in the little box in the right column of this page, you'll be notified when I blog and you can come read it. Those are my toes, by the way, pointing to the Ak'Bol Yoga platform on Ambergris Caye, Belize, my first stop in Belize.

So, 'til next time...

Gettin' Ready for my trip

2011-12-04T13:23:00.000-08:00

On packing for the tropics.....just a little update.

Since I've packed for the tropics before (Hawaii, Costa Rica, etc.) I have by now gotten my packing list nicely honed down to essentials. I've also got a good To-do Checklist of things that need your attention during the week before you leave, such as calling the credit card company to tell them where you're going and when you'll be leaving so they won't cut you off during your trip when they see activity in a foreign country. That could be disastrous.

Although you will have different interests and focus, different needs, pets, house-sitter arrangements, etc., you can use my list as a useful jump-off point for creating one tailored to your personal needs.

Since I pack for carry-on only, so there's less chance of losing luggage, I keep the weight around 25lbs. And since my focus is on sketching and journaling nature subjects and hiking on beaches and in the jungle, I don't pack an evening gown or heels.

Obviously this wouldn't be the trip packing list for, probably, MOST people But if you're reading this blog, you might be the sort of person that can appreciate the way I pack ~ and make use of the lists I'm offering.

In my last blog I was trying to figure out what to do with five pounds worth of field guides to Belize birds and mammals ~ well, I have now sliced the picture pages out of my two books and I'll take them to the print shop next time I'm in town to get them punched and spiral bound into a MUCH smaller book that will fit in my pack. It weighs ten ounces now instead of five pounds!

I'm making another thin book, also, printing out and binding together useful pages from the web about my accommodations, how to get around (taxies, buses, water taxies, ferries, bike rentals) in Belize, maps to places I want to go, plus interesting places mentioned on web pages. That's about 12 ounces, and that should about do it for my reference materials. Oh yeah, I bought and downloaded Lonely Planet's guide to Belize and printed out pages (for my little reference book I'm building) that refer to things that interest me. That's a lot more to my liking than cutting up lovely printed books, but those books weren't offered as downloads, so I didn't have any choice.

At the moment, I have the bags roughly stuffed to make sure everything will go in (and to weigh them to make sure I can still carry them easily). My goal is 25lbs, and I'm guessing I'm going to make that goal. Remember, clothes are washable, so I have only two changes of clothing for the whole trip (and I'll be rinsing out things to dry overnight ~ that's where the travel undies come in handy, as they really DO dry overnight, even in humid climes).

So feel free to use my lists if they will help you pack for your vacation. If you don't plan to be traveling soon, you still might print them out and stick them in your bucket-list bucket. When opportunity strikes, you want to be ready!

p.s. In case you were wondering about that purple fleece blankie, well, I have 12 hours of layover in Miami/Atlanta both coming and going, and it's nice to have a fleece to ward off the air conditioning, block out bright lights, and/or use as pillow or padding to get comfortable. I think it will stuff in the pack, but I won't know for sure until I have the pack ready to go. If it doesn't, I can fasten it to the pack with the velcro strap, as shown in the photo.

A new sketch/journaling trip in the wings!

2011-11-28T10:34:00.000-08:00

Summer is over, alas, but I made it last as long as I could after it got chilly, going out to sketch and journal in my fleece hoodie, long underwear, leggings (the longies inch away from the socks sometimes so I cut the feet off an ancient pair of knee socks and bridge the incipient gap with the warm tubes), sitting on my canvas chair swathed with a fleece blanket.

I can get an hour's worth of sitting and reflecting, observing and sketching outdoors at 40° with this set-up if it's calm and sunny. But it's a stretch, and to be honest, I guess the daily sketches are a thing of the past for this year. I'm inescapably a fair-weather pleine air sketcher. Foo.

Well, that means I will be eager as a spotted pup to get outdoors in the spring, and when the morning sun shines through shooting stars and fawn lilies (above) out my window in April, I'll be out there, too.

Yesterday I finished uploading my most recent set of Oregon forest-life sketches, the October-November set. You can get to the others by scrolling down to the links below the images on that site.

But in order to try to keep the spirit of summer in my studio, a couple of weeks ago, before it got really cold, I bought a 5-gallon aquarium (that's 16" wide, 8" front to back, and 10" tall) and positioned it in a spot where I can belly right up next to it to observe. I poured about a gallon of coarse sand in the bottom, and placed three lumpy 4-6" rocks along the back side to give it some character.

Next I took a bucket and a yogurt container out to my little pond and my wildlife water tub, and dipped up about 3 gallons of water, various pond weeds, and several containers full of mud and goo from the bottoms of both, making sure to dig down deep enough to collect whatever might have burrowed down a ways.

Bringing this slop back into the house, I dipped it all into the aquarium being careful not to disarrange the sand in the bottom. What a dirty mess it looked, all silty brown water and gloomy water plants lost in the murk. But by the next day, it was a gorgeous little miniature pond, with the lamp shining down into it, all green and yellow from the light passing through the plants, and alive with little animalcules zipping through the water.

I often stop and observe it for a few minutes as I go from my studio to the kitchen for a cuppa, admiring the way the duckweed is sending down long roots to try for the bottom, the strap-like valisneria sending up leaf blades, the coontail growing like crazy (I'll have to start pruning in there soon or it will be packed solid green!).

And all the crazy creatures! Rising up out of the mud are little 2" worms which wave back and forth like cobras. There are limpets on the glass, and if I search carefully I can find them moving snail-like on the rocks and plants, their soft innards protected by a conical lid. A large (1/8") water mite zips around in the water like the energizer bunny-cum-schoolbus, a nearly-square bundle of frenzied activity. It gets its food by sucking the juices from little waterfleas, which sometimes come to rest on the glass ~ I saw it happen! If you sit back and squint a little, the aquarium looks like a little forest scene with lots of little waterfleas, ostracods, amphipods and copepods buzzing around like insects.

There are also CLAMS in there. I've no idea where they came from, but they're about the size of my little fingernail, and they move along by sticking a foot out of the shell and hunching along. The water is pretty cool since I only heat the part of my studio that's under my computer desk, so they're not very active, but it's neat to watch how they move from spot to spot, day by day.

Of course, I can't sit and watch the aquarium all day every day, and I'm already tired of this cold weather outside, and Christmas is a'cumin in (a good thing to avoid if you aren't with family) so I am in the throes of planning for my next sketch-journaling foray ~ this time to Belize.

Choosing Belize was an accident. I was planning another go at Hawaii, to try another island. I've been on the Big Island now, and Kauai, and I was aiming for Maui or Molokai, but I didn't start looking until November when the prices had already started going up. Way up. So with some consternation I started checking airfare to other places of interest, and finally snagged a flight to Belize for only a little more than half the price to Hawaii. It was a freak price, and was gone within a couple of hours, so I was lucky to find it.

So now I am starting to pack. This time I have gotten smart and ordered a wheeled pack, so I can carry it or pull it. In the past I have exhausted myself hauling my pack around on my back. Sometimes in airports with slick floors I would end up dragging it behind me (that's hard on packs and really tacky-looking to do) because I just couldn't carry it another step. It's not that it's so heavy, it just gets heavy after what seems like trotting miles from one terminal to the next when one has already been traveling for 20 hours with not much sleep. FedEx just brought the new pack this morning, and it appears to be the luggage of my dreams. It's considered a kids' schoolbag, so it's fairly small and lightweight, but although it was inexpensive, the online reviews were good and it looks like it's well-constructed. Now I can begin to get ready in earnest.

It's time to line up the house-sitter/s, get my clothes and sketching gear in order, and I'll be ready. I've already chosen and paid for my accomodations: four days on Ambergris Caye and eleven at a jungle lodge in western Belize on a calm river near Mayan ruins.

This is another bold jump for me, so it's a little scary. When I went to the Amazon last year, I was cared for from the moment of my arrival in Peru ~ picked up at the airport in Iquitos by my eco-lodge hosts, carted off down the Amazon to the lodge in their launch, and later returned by them to the plane for my trip home. I felt very safe. This time, I have made all the arrangements and have to find my own way to my lodgings via ferryboat and bus. It's daunting, but I'm sure I can do it.

Belize is a good choice for this: the official language, if you can believe it, is English. The Belizian currency is 2BZDollars = 1USDollar (simple!), and there is a good solid tourist industry infrastructure which makes it easier to get around than in more remote places. I plan to rent a bike for my stay on the Caye, and I won't need a vehicle at the jungle lodge. The hosts will pick me up on arrival in the nearby town and take me back at the end to catch my bus

So my sketching is preordained: four days doing beach things on the Atlantic right next to the world's second largest Barrier Reef, which is less than a quarter mile off the Caye where I'll stay. Maybe I'll TRY snorkeling again (after my embarrassing debacle on Kauai last spring ~ read this journal page for the gruesome details) in the shallow waters if I feel brave.

I have been assured that I'll be able to wander the jungle trails alone, sketching and journaling and keeping an eye out for snakes, howler monkeys and jaguars, of course. I wonder if I can take my pepper spray in my carry-on luggage?

I'm going to close down here now to start pawing through my summer gear for things to take to Belize. As always, I'll pack for carry-on only, so there's less chance of losing luggage, and I'll be trying to keep the weight around 20-25lbs. That means I'll have to rip up the Belize bird & wildlife books I just got, extracting and binding the pictures into a lighter-weight book, because the books together weigh 5lbs, a quarter of my goal! Also, I plan to take a dozen energy bars so I can skip expensive lunches and still make it through the day. The rest of my gear will be a change of clothes, my medicine bag (sunscreen, travel ailment remedies, mosquito repellent, etc.), a rain jacket, and my sketching kit.

I'll try to write more later, to keep you clued in as to how this is all going, in case you're planning (or dreaming of) a similar trip. Maybe you can learn from my mistakes!

Big hugs to all my followers!
Irene

My Sketch/Journal is now a Slide Show!

2011-10-27T11:15:00.000-07:00

I didn't get eaten by a bear although I thought I might at one point ~ read my journal entry here! (you should be able to read the pages if you click on the image).

It's been a fantastic summer, but as one of my blog readers pointed out, I haven't blogged since the end of August (!). Sometime around then I figured out how to create a slideshow and I got sidetracked. Now I've put my Sit Spot Sketch/Journal entries on my webpage as a series of slide shows (although I'm not quite up to date).

They're in two-week clumps, with links to additional slide shows in the series just below each slide show. If you haven't seen them yet, I'd love some feedback!

But in the process, I got way behind on blogging. My apologies!

This has been a momentous summer for me. I have lived in this woods for thirty-one years but this year, for the first time, I have begun to get really acquainted with it. Every day from July 22 until just this week, I have gone out for an hour or more nearly every day and observed, journaled and sketched what I discovered around me.

Now the weather has turned cold and I'm in the process of fetching in wood from the forest for my woodpile before the rains set in, so I'm in a time crunch and my sketch journal has to take a back seat until I get my winter preparations taken care of.

All summer, sometimes I found things to draw, sometimes things to draw found me.

Upon completing a page (sometimes I added color on the spot, other times I worked on pages in the evenings) I would bring my sketch/journal pages into my studio, scan them into the computer, and tweak them to make them legible. The text I tweaked quite a bit, correcting ballpoint ink blobs, misspelled words, and wobbly letters, but the pictures I left as I drew them. Improving the art would be cheating, in my opinion, but you have to be able to READ the things, so tweaking the text is okay.

As I got the pages finished, I joined them together into the slide shows. So come see what I have been doing ~ and consider trying this yourself. If you live in the southern half of the U.S. your weather should make it possible to do it year-round.

For the rest of us poor souls, up here in Winterland, well, maybe y'all can go out before it gets too much colder and collect cool things to draw in the warmth of your living room or art studio over the winter: pinecones, leaves, beetle-chewed sticks or bark, oak galls, feathers, seedpods, shed insect or snake skins, etc. (the oak branch drawings here came out of my woodpile!). I've collected a few such specimens for myself to draw later, and I can also sketch the scene out my windows, as well. And hey, a few minutes drawing out in the cold air won't kill me this winter.

It's okay to draw from photos, too, so maybe a quick tour around your yard, local park, nearby woods or fields, etc., can give you some good subjects for your winter sketching. If the idea is to explore your local vicinity, your own photos would probably be your best source of subjects.

And if you are thinking your skills aren't up to such a project, you can very likely get yourself up to speed using my little workshop workbooks, designed to take you from your own personal skill level to wherever you want to go. To find a workbook that would suit you, click on a cover below to visit the workbooks's page.

The Mosquito Solution

2011-08-23T17:44:00.000-07:00

Mosquitoes really know how to ruin a perfectly lovely outing. They're masters at it. I'm a total mosquito wimp, and in many locales that's a very good thing to be due to Lyme disease, [oh dear! Kathy Walker has corrected me on this ~ see her letter below and substitute "West Nile" for "Lyme disease" above! ] etc. (to say nothing of the problems engendered by scratching your arms off at the elbows ~ it's SO hard to sketch and journal, after that...).

I first wrote about my problem with the mosquitoes on this page:

So whilst being plagued by the little beasties as I sat in my sit spot one day, I dreamed up the perfect solution. It required a trip to the garden shed and an additional trip to the camping goods section of Bi-Mart, plus a few of those paper clamps (see (d.) below.

Oh yeah, wire cutters were needed, too, and six of those "twistems" ~ the wiry things that fasten loaves of bread and clumps of celery shut.

When I was done, I journaled the results in my journal. Since I'm not certain it's totally clear how it is constructed, I've also created some diagrams to make the directions easier to follow.

You'll need:

wire cutters or pliers which will cut heavy wire
a cone-shaped wire tomato frame (see a. below)
a 5'x7' piece of mosquito netting (it comes this size in the package, but you might want a bigger piece)
6 pieces of light wire, twistable by hand
3 or more paper clamps, clothespins, or some other fastener
a comfy chair to fasten everything to.

Cut the middle and bottom hoops of the tomato frame open, next to one of the legs (b.) and spread out the cone until the legs are in a more-or-less straight row. Fasten the wire legs to the chair, and bend the frame as needed to make the top hoop level (c. and e.). You can bend up the cut ends of the two wires to make hooks ~ I hang my glasses on one to keep them inside the net (f.). You could hang your false teeth on the other hook, mebbe...

Fold the mosquito net in half and put clips along one side, starting at the fold (as shown in d.) . You don't have to clip the entire side, as gravity will cause it to fall down and close itself.

Open up and drape the net over the frame, with the corner with the first clip above the center of the top hoop (f.). The drawing isn't perfectly accurate, because there's a bit of a corner splayed out on the ground on each side of the chair.

Even with this size of netting your feet might not be totally covered. So you'll need to wear socks if the beasties are biting your ankles. I was wearing 2 pairs of socks on my final day in my #2 sit spot, which I think is what finally did me in there, since I had simply SWARMS of mosquitoes around my net ~ so many that I could feel their tiny little vibes yearning for my blood. It was unnerving. But for lesser visitations, it's great!

This only takes a few minutes to make once you get the tools and supplies together, and it is so light that you can carry it in one hand from one spot to another. Sitting inside your little haloed dome, there will be no netting dragging against your face or head or hands or sketchpad, and you don't have to wear stinky repellent. You'll need to wear pants, though, since your knees will be against the netting and the little boogers will notice this right away (oops!).

I hope this turns out to be useful to you, if you live in a skeetery place. If you make one and try it out, I'd love to hear your experience with it. Mine makes it possible to sit out on the deck on a warm summer evening in perfect comfort, reading sketching, etc.

Of course, it's not nice to sit on the lawn under your net to chat if your chatee doesn't have a net, though, so you may need to make nets for everyone to be polite.

Let me know if you try this, okay?

BTW, I've replaced, moved, and changed the box where you ask for notifications when I blog ~ now it's on the right near the top when you first enter the blog. If you signed up for but haven't been getting notices, enter your email again now.

Madrone trees and shiny beetles

2011-08-19T19:29:00.000-07:00

Have you ever visited a nearby spot and discovered something major you've never even heard of? For instance, the first time I traveled through the South I was amazed to see the miles-wide blankets of kudzu draped over the trees like green quilts. I'd never even HEARD of kudzu before.

A similar thing happened to me when I moved to southern Oregon. I'd previously lived in various parts of Oregon: Hood River (on the northern edge by the Columbia River), Corvallis (west-central Oregon) and Eugene a bare 120 miles north of my place) and I'd neither seen nor heard of the magnificent red-barked madrone trees with their green skin which tans just like human skin during the hot days of summer.

Since my house is nestled deep in a madrone forest, madrones are now a major part of my scenery, and I thought I'd share their fascinating beauty with you, writing from my sit spot underneath and beside their glamorous trunks and branches (to say nothing of the midsummer leaf fall now descending in glorious golden cascades).

There's an actual piece of bark glued to this journal page because their color is so obviously impossible I thought I'd better prove it. But as you can see, I didn't even go as far as reality in my painting. The bark comes in many shades, though, so the color I chose is accurate for many of the trees.

What about the green? It's true! The skin is really that green on many of them at this time of year, while others have a more subdued tone, and all of them tan with age until they're the deep orange or red of the peeling parts ~ the red bark is LAST year's green skin.

And then, of course, I discovered some little black beetles so shiny that when I looked at them through my magnifying glass I could see my reflection looking back at me from their polished black backs!

I hope you like this journal page. There are lots more to come, including a journal page about my invention of a mosquito net contraption that's easy to make and could allow you to sit on your lawn or deck in the worst of mosquito times ~ without slathering on stinky insect repellent.

Stay tuned.

Sit Spot Ear Envy

2011-08-16T14:17:00.000-07:00

Humans have such duh ears! I am really jealous of wildlife who have decent sound detectors. In fact, I spent one whole session meditating, journaling and sketching about our rotten ears and my Do-It-Yourself invention to put us humans on a slightly more level playing field.

Here is the journal page for your enjoyment. I hope it gives you a giggle, because I had a lot of fun creating it.

Of course, as I was sitting out in the woods at the time I did it, I looked up (and listened up!) frequently to make sure I wasn't missing anything. And since it was a VERY quiet day, without any passing-through deer or brouhaha in the bird world overhead, and with nothing but mosquitoes pestering me, I had plenty of time to devote to this important page.

So, click on the image to get a readable size, and I beg of you, experiment with your ears for a few minutes to find out what I'm talking about ~ and then maybe even make yourself a decent 'Earing Aid as shown. NOTE: If you are a Grown-Up, abandon your dignity and try this.

All you need is one or two yogurt containers or paper cups, a pair of scissors, and some glasses ~ an old pair of specs without any lenses in them will work just fine. If you (or your kid) wear glasses, you have an instant advantage.

Cut the cup as shown, flatten it on the side that will go next to your head (a paper cup would have the advantage here, but you can just lightly squash a plastic yogurt cup with pretty good results) hook it over your ear, and slide the glasses on, poking the earpiece THROUGH the big end of the cup and out the "bottom."

And then, go outside and play. It's a lot of fun, and if you have kids, they'll have a blast with it! Especially if you do it with them. Try whispering to each other across the yard. How far away can you hear a whisper?

Poison Oak is Turning

2011-08-05T13:29:00.000-07:00

This morning marks my 20th page from my Sit Spot, and to celebrate, I herewith offer it up.

Here's something funny that happened. While drawing this I accidentally wiped a drop of "water" from my sketch page, not realizing that the water-droplet-looking-thing was poison oak blood from the broken stem. Then I realized what I had done. Duh!

Still, there's a wonderful antidote, Tecnu, a solvent which you can rub on, even hours later, then wash off, which nullifies the oils so that you don't bubble up like a pudding and itch like crazeee! So I continued to work, but I was hypersensitive about touching the leaves in any way.

Later, when I had finished coloring my sketch of the red leaf and the lower green one, and was painting the top green one, I happened to set the side of my hand down on the lower green leaf of my drawing ~ and SNATCHED my hand back up (don't touch the poison oak!). Then, of course, I laughed and laughed. I wonder what my brain was doing to process that. Does that mean my subconscious thinks my sketches are the real McCoy? Weird!

Interestingly enough, over the course of about an hour and a half, the poison oak "blood" darkened from colorless through orange, cinnamon, dark-brown, to nearly black where it was concentrated. The less concentrated area is still brown. I wonder if it will all darken to black.

And I did remember to apply the Tecnu as soon as I returned to the house about an hour after contact. So far, so good. Wish me luck!

No Prdibit In Sight

2011-08-02T11:15:00.000-07:00

I tried an early sit this morning, getting out to my spot before seven, waiting in the dim dawn light with sunshine on the mountains in front of me. Read my journal page to experience my morning adventure (that's a slight exaggeration, but be kind to the poor puzzled sitter, please!).....This page looked a bit pale since I haven't yet had time to add color, so I did some "painting" in Photoshop before I saved it:

Below is the original version. Do you have a preference? (let me know with a response below, if you don't mind!).

So there's today's adventure. Yesterday I found a teensy stinkbug trapped in an Agoseris puff (like a big 2½" dandelion puff) but it had escaped by this morning. Ooooooo~ big deal! (:-O

Still, I am so enjoying these silent waits. Even if nothing extraordinary passes by, I feel as though by observing, considering, sketching and journaling I am more a part of the real world than I am when I sit inside at the computer all day.

Let me know what you think of the two versions above, if you don't mind.

Sketch Pages from My Sit Spot

2011-07-31T11:46:00.000-07:00

I promised to show you some sketch/journal pages in my last blog, but before I do that I'll set the scene again. Here's the view from my Sit Spot:This scene is from my chair, looking down across a long meadow, with a fairly steep downhill slant. Although it's nearly invisible, my house is behind the trees at far right.

And here's a sketch/journal page showing the little sand chair I use (a short-legged, webbed aluminum frame designed for basking on the beach). Click on any image to get a larger view.

I've been going out for an hour or so every day, at different times, just to see what I can see. You'd think it would be boring, just sitting there looking around, but I find I am usually quite content for an hour or more, and it's often only the mosquitoes that drive me away.

I concentrate on watching for movements: birds, insects, lizards, anything that moves; sniffing the breeze for scents (deer, up close, smell like a barnyard!); watching the weather and noting the breeze direction and how it knocks down showers of madrone leaves; listening to the birds ~ alarm calls will likely alert me to incoming fox or bobcat (or bear) long before they arrive. The birds don't announce fellow prey animals like deer or squirrels, though.

In case you're wondering, the orange trees on my sketch pages are madrone trees. They have green leaves year 'round, and have smooth bark which is lime green when it is new, then "tans" to a lovely sienna or cinnamon color. Right now, at the end of July, they have tanned about as far as they're going to, and they'll soon start to peel, revealing the gorgeous new green "skin" underneath. The golden leaves you see are ready to drop, in mid-summer, because the new leaves are big enough to take over the photosynthesis.

The deer on this page were sketched quickly as they were passing through, but that was only possible because I've drawn deer so many times that I have a mental template for "deer" in my head that I can pull out of the bag whenever needed. I didn't even consider drawing the trees while the deer were still visible ~ they're not going anywhere, so they were drawn later. The color was added with watercolor pencils while I was watching TV the next night. But I decided I like it so much with just the cinnamon browns that I may not paint any more on that page. Maybe.

Sometimes it is very quiet, with nothing much happening, then I reach down beside my chair and pull up something interesting to draw. On this page, I didn't realize there was a tiny cricket on the vetch until I was well into the sketch.

Bugs, beetles, flies, bees, and other denizens of the woods occasionally offer themselves for a portrait, as well. Whenever I receive such an invitation to draw, I grab it. They may not stay for long! It helps to have a mental template for insect legs, and a general idea where they attach underneath, to allow you to get it down before the little critter makes its get-away. Actually, a nice see-through container might be useful for drawing insects. A magnifying glass would also be useful.

Be Prepared. I have a little pump bottle of mosquito repellent and reading glasses which I leave on the log next to my chair. On days without a breeze I tuck a mosquito net under my arm as I go out the door (mosquitoes can be really pesky when there's no breeze to blow them away). I keep something else important at my Sit Spot, too. But you'll have to read the sketch pages to find out what it is.

So far, I have created thirteen pages, and I know for sure that I have only dipped the tiniest tip of a toenail into the amazing pool of possibilities in that one spot. What insects will present themselves for a sketch? What kinds of lichens live there, and why are they mostly only on the oaks, not the madrones? What wildlife life will come by as I sit silently? From my studio window (from which I can SEE my Sit Spot) I've seen foxes, bobcats, skunks, bears, pileated woodpeckers, squirrels, deer, wolf spiders, goldfinches, juncos, rufous-sided towhees, Steller's jays, and any number of other creatures passing by. No reason I shouldn't see them from my Sit Spot if I'm just sitting there waiting for them.

I'm thinking that I might also draw progressions: a wildflower in bloom, then its mature seedpod or seeds, etc. Fawns now are about 24" at the shoulder, but I'll draw them as they get bigger, as well, if I stick to my plan. If I continue to draw through the seasons, what a record I will produce!

[BTW, to create a mental template of something you expect to be drawing frequently (like deer or bug legs) all you have to do is practice. If you don't have the genuine article in front of you, practice from photographs. After a few sessions and an occasional refresher if necessary, you can create your own set of mental templates. It's sort of like investing in a set of paints or colored pencils or pens you regularly draw with ~ and just as important.]

I'll try to blog some sketch pages from my Sit Spot every now and then.

See you later ~ I'm off to my Sit Spot to journal and draw!

Can You See Me Now?

2011-07-23T19:02:00.000-07:00

Well! That was An Experience! I haven't had such a great time in years! As soon as I had gotten my latest journal uploaded (Kauai ~ A Beachcomber's Sketchbook Tutorial) I left for camp.

For a whole week the Raccoons (that was our group of adult nature bootcampers) tented in a mountain meadow, crept through the woods in camouflaging mud, rotten log debris and ashes; followed the beat of a drum blindfolded at night; learned how to make fire with a bow drill; made cordage (string); learned to walk (relatively) silently in the forest, and lowered our stress levels several notches. And now we are Fox Trail graduates, still merely on the lowest rung of the woods lore ladder!

We slept in tents; ate in the dining hall; circled the campfires for breakfast and dinner (all campfires were started by bow drill); learned forest lore; shared secrets; and experienced a remarkable sweat lodge. One of our most valuable experiences happened every morning before breakfast when we each went to our own special Sit Spot to sit silently contemplating a beautiful mountain meadow and the surrounding forest as the sun came up.

I really enjoyed the fact that we never knew what was going to happen next. For instance, before going out to camouflage ourselves with mud, and to creep silently on hands and knees, toes and bellies through the forest, we were told only to wear something it was okay to get dirty. And HOW! Above is what I looked like all camouflaged (it is actually a photo of me Photoshopped to get me dirty). Alas, no one took pictures of us when we had mudded up, but the photo above is what the others looked like to me, so I probably looked about like this to them. Wow, huh? Kinda disappear into the landscape, don't I?

Did I mention that we then had to get clean by first plunging into a cold pond, then soaping AND rinsing in only 2½ gallons of sun-warmed water? It IS possible. Honest!

Learning how to make cordage from whatever fibers are lying around, including grass and bark, was fascinating. Here's some cordage I made ~ there is more than a yard of it there ~ and below is my journal page about Step 1 of making cordage ~ preparing the fibers.

A great deal more happened, but to tell it all would reveal secrets essential to the enjoyment and appreciation of future camp-goers to Coyote Trails courses. You'll just have to sign up for a class and experience it yourself!

Now I have established a Sit Spot in my madrone-black oak-ponderosa forest behind my house. I've set up a little sand chair between a dead snag and a tall stump (to soften my silhouette), and I've been journaling as I sit and observe. Here's the view down the hill and to the sides of my Sit Spot. The view in the photo is a full 180 degrees, forward and to the sides of where I sit. I'll show you a page or two from my Sit Spot Journal next time..

Goin' Off to Camp

2011-07-06T16:26:00.000-07:00

I feel like a little kid, getting my gear together to go off to camp!

This morning I uploaded my newest sketch journal tutorial: Kauai ~ a Beachercomber's Sketchbook Tutorial, which has consumed my time for the last several weeks. I'm very pleased with it, but I'm glad to finally get it launched, because now I can go play.

Recently I joined the Board of Directors of Coyote Trails School of Nature, here in Ashland, which on the 4th of July translated into riding on the parade float and howling like a coyote at frequent intervals (there's nothing like being in a parade to let you throw reticence to the wind and be a Wild Thing). On the advice of my friend Otie, at right, I decided I wanted to experience some of the courses they teach, at their forest camp on the mountain above Ashland, and I have signed up for a couple of week-long courses in nature skills.

Here's what I'm to learn in this first class (the Fox Trail Adventure):

how to build a stick and leaf shelter;
how to make fire with bow drill ~ without matches;
how to find safe drinking water in the forest;
stalking and methods of tracking;
nature awareness and observation;
how to move quietly in the forest without being seen;
ways of nature journaling;
understanding animal body movement and performance;
the philosophy of living with the earth
and the cultivation of the imagination and wonder

Wow! I will be a new woman! If you'd like to go visit the site, and maybe try this course yourself someday, here's the link. It's not just for kids -- they offer the same classes for kids and adults, but they don't mix the adults with the kids.

I've been checking things off their Supplies List, just bought a new tent I've been meaning to get for some time (whooeeee!) and I tried it out ~ on my deck.

Hmmmm...by 3am I knew the 3" pad I was sleeping on was too hard, so I wimped out and came back in the house to get some sleep.

The next night I tried my 6" foam pad, which worked well enough that I made it through the night without too much waking up. Using a mattress is kinda old-ladyish, but I've no intention of disabling this faithful body any further than it already is!

Jesse loves the new tent, and has spent quite a bit of time sitting in its doorway looking out into the woods. Since he generally sleeps on my bed, I was hoping he could figure out how to nose in under the flap, but he couldn't quite figure it out. He yowled and complained, pawing fruitlessly at the flat, feet slipping down the nylon doorway, but he couldn't quite fathom stepping over the sill down there by his knees. Since there are skeeters out there, I couldn't leave the flap wide open for him, so in the end I had to shut him into the house so I could try to sleep ......foo.

I think the Wild Things approve of my sojourn. Friday morning a perky little gray fox trotted past my studio window, casting a sly eye my direction before moving on into the forest. And night before last, I was treated to the longest coyote serenade I have ever experienced.

And then......night before last, two coyotes bark/yodeling from about 200 ft out in the woods woke me up at roughly 2:55am, embroidering a dream I'd been dreaming. I listened drowsily for several minutes, then realized that this was going on MUCH longer than their usual 1-2 minute song (especially since they'd been howling for quite some time in my dream) and I glanced over at the clock: 2:59. I listened in amazement for 14 more minutes, the last little yip trailing off just a few seconds before 3:13. That's at least 18 minutes of solid bark/howling (no, none of the barking was dogs), plus however long they were going at it before it finally woke me up. WOW.
(If you're not sure what a coyote howl sounds like, click here and listen to #1 and #3.)

So, with approval of my forest mates, I am finished packing and ready to go up into the mountains to the forest camp where I shall learn how to blend with trees, walk like a deer, and live like a Wild Thing.

Now I need to finish the list for the house-sitter, then I'm ready for my camping trip. The weeds I joust with every afternoon down at the nursery will just have to grow without me.

Sketch/Journal in Progress

2011-06-18T11:11:00.000-07:00

I've been up to my nostrils in preparing my latest sketch journal tutorial, but I wanted to surface for a minute to say hi, that I'm really still here, not disappeared down Alice's rabbit hole.

The weather has finally changed from long, cold, rainy, snitty spring (record cold temperatures and record rainfall, BOTH) to a still fairly cool but sunny summer. The vetch is out on the hillsides in glorious profusion (see above right). The bigleaf maples (at left) have just finished flowering (did you know some people pick these flower clumps and fry them in batter like fritters? I haven't tried that yet...)

Temperatures haven't even hit 90 yet, but that makes it great when I go down to Plant Oregon, Dan's native plant nursery, to weed every afternoon at 4 or 5pm. While the sun is still hot and the temperature varies between 60 and 80+, I weed in the shady spots, or alternate with sunny rows to warm up again. Then when the sun goes behind the western row of trees along the creek, I carry my weeding stool over to the once-sunny rows to weed. Birds are singing, bees are buzzing, it's nice.

But in the mornings I am at my computer, sorting out which photos (of some 730 of them) to use in the tutorial, which means I'm reliving my vacation in Kauai again, day by day, beach-crawl by beach-crawl, satisfying day by day. I'll experience the whole thing again when I put it together and write the tutorial. And then every time I pull the original journal down off the shelf to read it. How could you top that?!

But ya sure wouldn't want to do a tutorial for a BAD trip! Ouch!

Anyway, I thought you might be interested in how it's coming along, although I haven't yet started writing the tutorials.

For the Sea Biscuit tutorial page, I wanted to set the scene with what the beach morning glory vine looked like as I sat sketching. Here are the two photos I'll use for that, plus one I found later in bloom. It's a gorgeous, lush plant, growing on a hot sandy beach you wouldn't think could support such luxuriant growth.

The "sea biscuit" is so exquisite I spent about two hours drawing it. I was so entranced and sat so long my bum got numb. If you look at it close up, you'll see lots of little raised white dots. There was probably a spine attached to each one. I wonder if this is the remains of the spiny black sea urchin I saw earlier washed up onshore.....I don't have a good guide for sea urchin tests (a test is this calcareous skeleton left behind when the animal goes to meet its maker).

Then, since I journaled about the yummy mango that washed up on shore and ended up in my tummy (most of it) and Daniel's (the ridiculously small amount I could bear to be a generous person and share...), I'll include a photo of that, too. The crabs had eaten part of it, the pigs. Best mango I ever tasted!

This will all be accompanied with a discussion of how I approached the page, dealt with setbacks, worked out the symmetry of the test, and did the decorative Hawaiian style border on the right side of the page.

Another page, with brilliant red African Tulip Tree blossoms, posed entirely different challenges.

The original view from the window was too far away for drawing with any clarity, so I worked partially from a photo. Working from the screen of a digital camera allows you to magnify detail a lot, but even so, the details of that flower cluster were ambiguous, so I had to examine a fallen bloom from a different tree to see how the flowers were constructed.

The tutorial will discuss the possible pitfalls of working from photos, and also how to get strong, vibrant color with watercolor pencils ~ which many artists have avoided because they thought it couldn't be accomplished. It can be, as you can see.

So I'm working busily away in my studio looking out into the oh-so-green woods. That rainy spring may have been depressing, but it engendered some of the most riotous greens I've ever seen. The very air is tinted green, even in my studio!

I'm almost finished sorting through the photos in Photoshop, correcting the lighting, making dull, cloudy day pictures sparkle (yes, we had several cloudy days, and those pictures look a LOT better if I brighten them up a bit), and rescuing underexposed photos (hey, check out the before-and-after photo here ~ there's a lot of information you can rescue if you know how to find it, although some of it, color mostly, is lost). It's fun, and I love it.

I'll be done preparing in a couple of days, then I'll start assembling everything into the book in InDesign, the Adobe desktop publishing program I use for all my books, and you'll be able to download it in a month or so, I hope.

If you have put your name in the little bitty box near the end of the right column above, you'll be notified when I blog about uploading it so you can get your copy.

Until then, Aloha! And have a good summer!

Back from Kauai!

2011-05-21T10:55:00.001-07:00

Last time I went on a trip I was roundly scolded by a couple of concerned friends for blogging the information about when I was leaving and returning on my trip to the Amazon. Fortunately, a gaggle of thieves didn't show up at my house to squabble over the contents whilst I was gone a-tripping. Whew!

But those scolders did have a point, so this time I didn't blog a word about the fact that I was going anywhere ~ and I just got back from eleven days on the lovely Garden Isle of Kauai, the northernmost island in the Hawaiian chain.

It was a business trip, of course, because I took my sketch journal and every day I was busy on one beach or another, diligently beachcombing to gather up interesting sketching subjects, then sitting in the shade of the casuarinas (prehistoric-looking sorts of trees with droopy long-jointed needles and sorta-pinecones) and beach almond trees at the top edge of the beach, drawing and painting the shells and washed-ashore seeds I had collected and the scenery around me. It was quite a journey, and I got some really good drawing done.

Daniel went with me this time, and spent nearly all of his time either lying supine on the sand, watching the waves, snorkeling along the reef, or just wafting up and down in the ocean's swells a few yards out from the edge of the surf. Since it's spring, the surf was kindly, not huge and threatening as it is in winter when all the surfers pop out of the dunes to slice through the curls of killer waves. He finally got rested from his long days of labor at his native plant nursery, Plant Oregon, and achieved a marvelous tan in the process.

I'm not much of a swimmer, having been raised in rural Idaho where we swam in the irrigation ditch with stern reminders to "keep your face out of the water!" I just can't get into the spirit of it, and actually had my first ever, full-blown panic attack when I tried to snorkel the reef. What an experience!!! The occasion was mitigated, however, by the appearance of sea turtles who arrived to munch away at seaweed in the surf mere feet away from where I stood hyperventilating in shock from my failed snorkeling experience.

Other than that, it was a wonderful trip, and I will be putting together another tutorial, telling about all the interesting things we did and saw (and didn't see). We experienced a Hawaiian celebration on Hanalei Bay with little worktables where I made a lovely aromatic lei (which I wore all day); made a fish-rubbing and watched children beating mulberry bark for tapa cloth; listened to Hawaiian drums and music; and ate poi dipped in condensed milk (a local delicacy ~ we loved it!).

We visited the Kilauea Point National Wildlife Refuge where we watched Red-footed Boobies, White-tailed Tropicbirds and Frigatebirds, and watched Wedge-tailed Shearwaters billing and cooing in the open mouth of their den a mere four feet from the path.

Then we visited the Limahuli Botanical Gardens and walked around the stone walls of the taro paddies with taro poking up through the water (poi is made from taro corms/roots), and learned which of the plants were natives and which were introduced. We also identified plants we'd been wondering about ~ such as the house-plant Monstera, which grows wild here and twines up trees in a gorgeous solid cape.

We visited Manini-holo Dry Cave, where we walked back inside several hundred feet and looked out on the ocean, then bought a woven hat and decorated tapa-cloth lengths from a Hawaiian man sitting weaving hats inside the mouth of the cave. That's Daniel in his new hat at right.

We listened to house geckos smacking their lips over moth snacks during the nights, and were awakened each morning by a bird with a loud melodious cry of "I figured out ~ Weight Watchers, Weight Watchers EAT!" (shrieking "EAT" an octave higher than the rest).

And the Jungle Fowl! Kauai's unofficial signature bird ~ the distant crowing of the wild roosters in the mornings presented an unbroken wall of sound, rather like a crowd cheering a soccer game. Every beach parking area had its jungle fowl contingent, and it was quite entertaining to watch mother hens gather their chickies under them whenever a shower passed by. Did you ever see a hen with sixteen legs?

Well, you probably can tell by now that there wasn't a dull moment, and I was sketching and journaling a great deal of the time. So if you're interested in visiting Kauai with me, you can read all about it in the journal when I get the tutorial made, telling the story behind each page and how/why it was created that way.

An update on my store front, which I blogged last time: I've actually sold a few things, and met some great people in the process of setting it up and maintaining it. While it doesn't quite pay its own rent yet, I'm happy with its being there.

Alas, no original illustrations have sold yet (which is why I REALLY wanted it there) but I have been selling autographed books. I pre-sign them with "Happy Reading!" or, for the Explorer books, "Happy Exploring!" so they're good for any recipient. I've also been selling a few prints, so I'm pleased enough to continue with it.

If you haven't signed up for notices when I blog, there's a place to do it in the right column. That way you'll be notified when the Kauai journal becomes available for download.

My New Store is Open

2011-03-09T19:26:00.000-08:00

I worked on my new store in the Ashland Artisan Emporium today from opening time at 11 to almost 3 (with half an hour off for lunch). I promised you a blow-by-blow, so here's what it looked like when I got there, if you recall from last week.

Daniel lent me his Montero, which has a big cargo space, and fortunately, I was able to pull up onto the sidewalk in front of the Emporium to unload. A passing True Gentleman offered to carry in the bookcase and the toy chest, and I thanked him profusely as I amassed a heap of stuff just inside the front door. Then I parked the car and came back to tote everything back to my space, about 70' from the front door.
Here's what I brought:

toy box
bookcase
a small folding table
two painted cardboard display boxes for prints and unmatted artwork
two boxes of autographed books
a box of large framed art
a box of prints to put in display box
a box containing a bird mobile
step ladder
printouts of my booth plan and proposed arrangements
tool caddy containing pliers, scissors, velcro, tape, pegboard hooks, tape measure, paper punch, pen, tags, etc.

It all looked really confusing and imposing at first, so I unpacked the boxes of books into the bookcase to get started, then hung the mobile from a stout wire protruding from a pegboard hole and wired to a pegboard attachment. This mobile gives the booth some movement while being airy enough to not block the view. The birds are computer printouts of a painting I did, glued to black foam board and cut out closely, then hung on brass rods with fishline.

My first casualty was a hanger on the back of a large, heavy painting. The nail head was apparently smaller than the hanger hole, and it pulled out, leaving the hanger attached on only one side. So I unhung the promo piece which had supports UNDER it, and used the hangers for that to support the painting instead.

That left the promo without a hanger, but figured out that I could unhinge one side of the upper two bulldog clamps and hang the piece from that (see the image at left).

I wanted to hang the book display boxes with the attached books/magazines next to their paintings, but the magazine containing one illustration was fragile so I had encased it in a plastic sleeve. At first I had hung it beside its picture, but that put it above eye level and the plastic sleeve glared from the overhead lights (see the glare in the image at right). Putting it below its picture resolved that problem.

Finally I had the main wall tweaked, and worked on the two side walls, putting up a display of prints for sale on one wall and non-illustration personal art on the other.

BTW, regarding business cards, I didn't put any out because I am pretty well booked up and don't really want to solicit work at the moment.

Here's the final result. I had brought the little table to work on, and also had the idea that I MIGHT use it for something, depending on how it looked. I really like it there in the center, even though it isn't doing much.

And it hadn't occurred to me until I was standing there, exhausted, just looking at everything, that if I put the bookcase and toybox/print containers in the corners at 45 degree angles, the booth would look much more welcoming and inviting, sort of like open arms.

So there it is. I think I'll redo the banner later and NOT laminate it. It won't be as sturdy, but it won't glare from the overhead lights, either, which would be better.

I have to go back tomorrow to fix the broken hanger on the picture, and I also think I'll take some Blu-Tack, which is a kind of sticky clay stuff to press under pictures that aren't hanging straight. By tomorrow they should be hanging as crooked as they plan to, and I can straighten them.

I am elated that I managed to pull this thing off without forgetting something major ~ or even minor! This has to be a "first" for me!

If you happen to be in the neighborhood, the Ashland Artisans Emporium is at 1670 Ashland Street, Ashland, Oregon, the main drag coming into town off the freeway. I'm in booth 116, and I hope you will stop by. I won't be there, most likely, but feel free to browse and see first hand how it turned out.

I hope this has been helpful. If you have any questions I might be able to answer, feel absolutely free to comment below and ask! I'm always happy to answer questions.

Working on My Display Booth

2011-03-07T16:50:00.000-08:00

Last blog entry I was showing you how to make little hooks to hang small items on a pegboard. To show you how they look (and to give myself a working model of a pegboard panel), I punched some holes in the edge of a piece of cardboard with my paper punch, at 1" intervals and hung a couple of the prints in the plastic sleeves I had mentioned.

The horizontal sleeve was punched through the edge of the sleeve (the first image above). For the vertical print (second image), I attached a folded over piece of transparent tape, then punched through that double thickness (the third image at left is a close-up of that detail).

I went to a party yesterday afternoon and happened to meet a couple of other people who also have booths in the Artisan Emporium ~ it was just chance, not planned. It's really great to get a chance to jam with other people and match your burning questions to their experienced answers:
"Do you worry about theft?"
"No, the front counter is right next to the door, and nothing has disappeared yet."
"I know everything has to be tagged, but how do you attach a tag to a book?"
"Not to worry, just lightly write the info [booth number, item description & price] inside the cover"
Etc.

After the last blog, Christine asked about using business cards. That's a good question, because business cards can encourage return business.

Unfortunately, if you have a pretty card, some people will take it just because it's pretty. So that has to be taken into account since there is some expense involved. For a booth like this, with lots of visitors, you might want to create a relatively plain card which would only be picked up by people seriously interested in your items.

There are a number of other things to consider, too: whether you want repeat business AND do your business cards have the right information on them to allow them to do that? How much did they cost, and since a lot of people might just carry them away and never respond with more business for you, can you absorb the cost if they disappear quickly? Do you want to put them out there just for the taking, or should you attach them to your item? In the image above, I have glued a business card onto the back of a framed picture. This avoids the problem of people walking off with cards they don't really expect to respond to, and it also keeps your card with the item. It's one good solution to the problem

I've also seen people punch a hole in a corner of the card and attach it to the item with a string. This is good for large item, but it can overwhelm something small.

In my book Illustrating Nature, Right-brain Art in a Left-brain World, I suggest a way to make a small card holder you can attach to a display to make your cards readily available. Click on the image to see this page out of the book. You should be able to print it out to get the usable pattern if you'd like to make one. There is a lot of other good information like that in the book, in addition to illustrating instructions, in case you're interested.

Today I've been making sure everything I plan to display is labeled with either a tag or a written notation (those would be inside book covers, since I'm also selling autographed books in the booth). My biggest problem was visualizing the space so I could plan what and how much stuff to put in it. Even the photos I took of the booth weren't quite sufficient ~ I needed something tactile ~ I needed to do a pre-run.

So I got out my measuring tape and measured off an eight foot section of my living room floor, then outlined it with string. I laid out EVERYTHING I planned to put on that space, then climbed up onto the kitchen stool to look it over. Here was my first layout, (I tinkered with it after this photo, so things will look a little bit different, but not much). The banner was a trial version, slightly thinner than the final version, which is now hanging in the booth. With all the pieces in place, I could see what worked and how well.

I also laid out the four-foot side panels, but nearly had a disaster when Jesse discovered my little pre-run and went into one of his commando routines....executing a rip-snorting whackity snatch maneuver which left everything scattered hither and thither. I had to lock him out in the chilly yard for half an hour until I had "re-hung" that wall, photographed it, then laid out and photographed the opposite side. Poor baby!

So, the left panel is on the left here (the one showing Jesse making his evil plans) and the right panel is on the right. I was going to just hang prints on the right side, but after laying this out and looking at it for awhile, I decided to hang only a couple of prints, place the box of prints directly below them so people can paw through them, and use the rest of the space on that wall to hang some more matted originals. You can see how actually laying out the materials on a fake wall can be helpful. I will print these photos out to take with me when I go to set up the space.

So it's moving along. I emailed the newspaper and told the reporter that I will be setting up my booth this week, and she says they may do an article about it. That would be G.O.O.D!!!

Okay, back to work. My studio is an absolute impassable wreck. In the photo here you can see the rolling bookcase I painted green. Setting on the top shelf is one of the boxes for unmatted art and prints.

In the foreground is a toy chest I got at a big box store for $34. It was a floor model, already assembled. They had just quit carrying that model, so they sold it to me for the same price I'd have paid if I planned to spend an hour putting it together myself! Deal! Oh yeah, the reason for the toy box is to put extra pieces of everything in, so if I go and there is an empty space on the wall where something has sold, I'll fish something out of the toy box to put in its place. On it I will put the two identical green-painted boxes of prints/art.

On the rolling office chair is the piece of cardboard with the pegboard holes punched in it. Every surface is covered. I have to dance a dainty minuet to go from one place to the next. Yikes.

By the way, below is the diagram I made way back in the beginning to start thinking about the project. The middle panel is how I thought the booth might look from the front (well, it doesn't, but it got my brain moving). The left and right panels show what those panels might like if you were standing inside looking first to one side, then to the other.

In it, you can see how I plan to place the boxes for prints and unmatted art on the toy chest, and put the books in the bookcase. I think I'll also get a supply of picture mats which I can sell from a box on the bottom shelf of the bookcase. On the middle shelf I will put a couple of standing messages about copyright and other stuff. I may want to add another piece of furniture to hold other items. I dunno.

So... Next, I need to finish scoping out the contents of what I want to put on that right wall then start getting everything together. Tomorrow or the next day will be the big event, loading it all into Daniel's Montero (I could only get about half of it in my car, I'll bet) to take to the Artisans Emporium for setup.

When I go to set it up, everything could change as it comes together. Even having set it up on my living room floor, it might look better some other way when I get to the real thing. I'll try to remember to take lots of photos so you can see how it transpires.

On Pegboards and Hooks

2011-03-05T10:10:00.000-08:00

I've never been really fond of pegboard, but in terms of creating a base that will support just about anything, it is probably the most practical all-around foundation for the widest variety of uses.

Let's assume you are considering creating/designing/setting up your own pegboard booth, and I'll give you my thoughts about it in this and the next few blogs.

Pegboard is a thin masonite-type of board with holes punched through it on a one-inch grid. I've added a quick little sketch of a picture hung on pegboard with a pegboard hook, just to make sure we're on the same page here.

In former times, the holes were small, about 1/8", and hooks fit in firmly. But now they make them with a larger hole, about 1/4" in diameter. So if you plan to use old hooks from that can in the basement, you will find that they flop around in the hole a bit. In some cases, this won't matter, but you should be aware of the potential problem. I've seen large hooks that fit the holes, but they're not appropriate for most arty uses in a small booth (they're better for hanging up heavy tools). Smaller-wire hooks are still sold, and in the package are included ugly black plastic straps to hold them in place. The emphasis here is on UGLY. So avoid using them if possible (why don't they make them white, a much more common color for pegboard?).

The hooks cost between 20¢ and 25¢ each, and sell in packages of 8, so if you have lots of things to hang it can be a considerable outlay. Try to find old ones lying about in tin cans in a handyman's dusty workshop since most people at some point thought they'd get organized ~ then didn't. Those old hooks are still lying about. Also check garage sales.

I've been making some of my own hooks because a huge hook holding up a tiny picture looks ludicrous. Last night while watching TV, I busied myself with pliers and wire and created sixteen small wire hooks for the prints-in-sleeves I plan to hang. Here are some sketches of the wire and how to bend it. My first two or three were a bit clunky, but soon I improved my skills and they got nice and smooth. You can take advantage of my experiences here to make your own tidy little hooks.

The prints I want to hang are in sleeves about ¾" bigger than the print, so I'm going to use a paper punch to cut a tidy round hole exactly in the center of the sleeve edge (off-center will make the print hang crooked), so each can hang in its sleeve, ready to purchase. This should look a whole lot neater (and totally cheaper) than if I were to use the big ready-made hooks. And yes, I know the manufacturers make a lot of different hook shapes and sizes, including a smallish hook much like this one I've made, but I priced buying, say, 20 of these online. At 22¢ each, the price for 20 is $4.40. That's not too bad, but when you add in shipping, the price more than doubles, so it's not cost effective. Unless you're lucky, you won't live anywhere near a store that carries a selection (and has the particular ones you want!).

I also need to hang the book displays from the pegboard, showing an example of the book next to the art which illustrates it (I've painted all the boxes a light green using a flat water-based indoor paint). Hanging the boxes isn't hard if you think ahead.

I'll use the big hooks here since they'll be out of sight behind the book. The hook has to be able to punch through the display box, so use the hook itself to determine how far the hole should be from the edge. Punch the hole with an ice pick or some other sharp object that will give you a hole about the same size as the wire of the hook.

Then using a ruler to make sure you get the hooks the right distance apart to fit into the 1" grid on the board, punch the holes in the correct spots. The image at right shows one of the hooks inserted.

Here's what the book display looks like before and after the book is attached. You could use this technique for attaching any sort of container to a pegboard panel.

Attaching the labels is an interesting project, too. Since I like the looks of brass fasteners (and since they're reusable and hold things remarkably well), I use them to attach labels to anything I can punch them through. They work really well for attaching things to the lightweight foam board, too.

I posted instructions for making a box like this here. It's at the bottom of the blog entry.

More about labels, foam board, and brass fasteners next time.

A Slight Interruption

2011-03-04T19:13:00.000-08:00

I thought for sure I'd be finished with the Amazon Sketch/Journal Tutorial now. I would have been, too, except that something else came up that couldn't be put off: my number came up for a sales space at the newly opened Ashland Artisan Emporium, in Ashland, Oregon, about ten miles down the road.

If you've been following my blog, you'll know I have been trying to find homes for my closets-full of book and magazine illustrations from the last few decades, so I had put my name in a couple of months ago with no idea when, in the natural turn of events, an empty booth would come up: 8' x 4' in a bright, airy mini-mall.

So I was working along on the Amazon Tutorial ~ I have the first draft finished except for the last two pages, now ~ then I had to stop to get the booth up and running.

Frustrating, yes, but exciting in the other direction, as I figure out all the twists and turns involved in getting my unique setup set up. I've been slugging away at the plan in off moments here and there for the last month in anticipation, taking minor breaks from the tutorial lest I get moribund and turn to stone at my computer (NOT recommended!).

The second image is the space, looking at it from about ten feet before you get there. You can see how bright and spacious the aisles are, and to be honest, the quality of this artisan mall is FAR above any other I've seen (they can be pretty darned tacky, if not actually trashy).

The third image is my first appearance, flung up day before yesterday as a kind of "place holder." Because as soon as I got the word, I rushed in with what I'd prepared ~ a laminated banner that reads "The Art, Illustration and Books of Irene Brady" (hey, there's no room for modesty in a sales booth), a "Coming Soon!" sign, and a matted and sequestered-under-an-acrylic-sheet article that appeared in December in a local magazine (the magazine is called "Joy" and the section I was under is called "Soul" which leaves me a bit speechless. My!)

But it's a nice article, and if anyone stops to see who will be in the new space, they can get introduced in advance.

My studio is a shambles, filled with framed artwork I've been pulling out of cupboards, tables covered with items in preparation, etc. I'll be using a lot of the inventory I prepared for the December Art Show and Sale. For that, I didn't mat or frame anything that didn't already have a mat or frame, offering them in clear display sleeves (these are sometimes called "bags" in the industry). But for the booth I think I'll want to have everything framed or at least matted, so pieces that already have frames or mats will go up first.

Since the unique thing about much of the art in my cupboards is that they are illustrations either for books I have written or for books written by others, I will be displaying the open books so that people can leaf through to compare the original illustration on the wall with the printed illustration in the book. I'm using the same setup to hold the book that I created for the art show, but now they're painted a light green and will hang on the pegboard wall near the book (click on the image of the open book for a close-up) -- so a lot of things have had to happen to make that work.

Actually, I've decided to blog in some detail on the setting up for the sale booth since a lot of people expressed interest about the preparation for the Art Sale and Show in December. It will help me organize my mind, as well, so it's good for us all.

But that's going to have to wait a day or two, until I start the setting up. It's being a fascinating process for me, and I hope you find it interesting, too ~ maybe it will give you an idea of how you could do it if an opportunity arises for you to set up a booth some time in the future.

So, this is a kind of place marker. Stay tuned, as I'll be making regular entries for the next couple of days (and THEN I will get the Amazon Sketch/Journal Tutorial up online ready for download! YES!)

Final Day at Otorongo ~ December 29, 2010

2011-01-25T10:40:00.000-08:00

12/29
My Birthday! From the get-go I had planned a memorable day to console myself on this yearly occasion commemorating the regrettable fact that I have completely used up another of my finite number of years. WaaaaaaaH!

As a consolation prize, I had wanted to be able to say, "I spent my 67th birthday on the Amazon River!" And so I did!

But first things first: a trip to Jajun Cañon was in the offing. I was a little puzzled at the name "Cañon" because it translates to "canyon," and to me that denotes a deep cleft in the earth. How deep can you go with the water table a couple of feet down? And in the Google Earth flyover I made with Daniel before I left home, I hadn't noticed any mountains in the vicinity of the Oran River between which one could travel, as in a canyon. Hmmmm..... well, we would see.

Okay, now. Pretend you are charged with propelling a boat up a river without hitting any submerged logs. Now pretend that at the same time you are also charged with finding sloths for the guests you are escorting. This was the task of our boatmen, and time after time they pointed out sloths in the trees alongside the river.
Can you see the sloth in the image at left? Because that's the view the boatman has. Okay, click on it and see if you can spot it. That's a binocular view, and with that you can probably see the sloth-blob ~ but the boatmen don't have binoculars. My hat is off to their sharp eyes!

They also pointed out a troop of monkeys passing through the jungley mass at right. I saw an occasional moving black form but I'd never have been able to identify them. Anis (a large black bird with a honky beak), kingfishers, egrets and hawks were all over the place, and Osmar was jubilant when we passed under a huge tree decorated profusely with the hanging nests of oropendulas ~ right in the midst of two big mud ant nests and at least two large wasp nests. He had just been reading that these birds often seek out the protection of ants and wasps which become accustomed to them but attack unfamiliar outsiders (how smart is that!). And here was a perfect example. Be sure to look at both images. Red arrows point to wasp nests, yellow point to ant nests, and purple arrows point to the bird nests.

I think my favorite sighting, though, was a pair of turkey-sized, black Horned Screamers, Anhima cornuta, perched in the very top of a large tree (alas, we didn't hear any screams). Apparently these huge birds sometimes soar like vultures, high in the air. What a sight that must be!

At length, after a very satisfying outing, we returned for the last time to the lodge so that we could eat lunch and finish our packing. In the end, I was still confused about where the name Jajun Cañon comes from (I should have asked).

During lunch, Anthony discovered that Osmar and I had not found, during our Christmas frog hunt, the local celebrity, a poison frog as yet unnamed and found only at Otorongo (as far as anyone knows). He donned his rubber boots and went out to find one, returning awhile later with the most delightful little amphibian I had ever seen ~ it looked like a red frog immersed in a blue-green bubble bath. (In fact, it looks a lot like the Red-backed Poison Frog, Dendrobates reticulatus, but with much less red area and greener bubbles.)

What a beauty! It was irresistible to sketch. And what a cherry on the birthday cake of my last day at Otorongo!

I spent the last few minutes on the porch saying goodbye to Anthony, the staff, and that rascal Tio Juan, then we all trekked down to the dock and set off upriver toward Iquitos in the launch.

The weather was sunny at first, but as we chugged our way upriver toward the west, the fluffy clouds turned black underneath, and for part of the trip we rolled down the clear plastic curtains you can see along the boat's sides in the image below.

Here are some of the sights we saw: eroding banks on both sides, sometimes with big trees fallen into the water ~ this is a normal, seasonal occurrence as the river floods and recedes; a family crossing the river with an umbrella (good for sun or rain!); a river bus named Titanic III (any guesses as to what happened to Titanic I and II?)

We came upon a multi-decker tugboat ~ looking more like a wedding cake than a working boat ~ shepherding a raft of logs downriver. It didn't look very stable to me, but it must be capable or it wouldn't last long on this wild river.

Finally we began to see more and more mud steps leading up the bank, and we passed the community of Santa Isabel ~ which I only know because they had hung a sign on a tree at the foot of the mud steps. A large cluster of thatch-roofed homes announced the outskirts of Iquitos, and finally the dock, where most of the river traffic noses into Iquitos, appeared.

I was filled with real sorrow to see my Amazon River journey end, but there was still the prospect of one more exciting ride through Iquitos on the Motokars to look forward to.

Then, after some touristy shopping for trinkets along the Boulevard and a long chat with Osmar on a park bench in Plaza de Armas, I made my sad goodbyes to Osmar and Ivy and caught a taxi to the airport.

I would take this journey and stay at Otorongo again in a heartbeat.

But the less said about the 30-hr trip home, the better. It wasn't as bad as it might have been, though. When we were in the air over northern California, the pilot announced that there was dense fog at the Medford airport and we might have to fly on to Portland (oh no! Not another night sleeping on airport chairs!), but it lifted enough for us to land and you could probably hear the cheers from the passengers clear back in Iquitos. We landed at 11pm and my Daniel was there to meet me, wanting to hear about my adventures, glad I was home. A perfect ending for my Amazing Amazon Journey.

Here's to your own journey into the unknown!
May you have the determination and persistence
to do what your heart desires,
no matter how impossible it may seem at first.
Bon Voyage!

Seventh Day at Otorongo Lodge ~ Dec. 28, 2010

2011-01-24T19:34:00.001-08:00

12/28
Oh dear! My last full day at Otorongo ~ and still so many things not yet experienced. Time to rectify THAT!

The first "experience" of the morning was a gigantic catfish being prepared for the kitchen by our host, Anthony, here holding a typical Amazon River Catfish which he subsequently filleted for our breakfast. This one catfish provided plenty of food for us all. One can easily imagine that giant mouth vacuuming up everything in the vicinity as it cruises along the bottom mud of the Amazon! Be sure to appreciate the beautiful markings on this big fish.

I had told Osmar that today I wanted to explore the jungle to the north of the lodge. We had made a quick tour in that direction the day I arrived, but it had soon gotten dark and I now wanted to see it in daytime.

Besides, that first hike was MUCH too fast for me since we were hiking with the purpose of getting to the trees inhabited by the pygmy marmosets. This time I wanted to go at my own pace, stopping to look at and appreciate things encountered along the trail. Osmar had told me there was a high hill back there, and I was eager to see it.

So, decorated like a Christmas tree with my sketching bag, my binoculars, my string water carrier containing about a pint of water, and with my light-weight rain poncho (with sleeves tied about my waist since it was warm and relatively dry but I wanted it Just In Case), we started out.

I loved our "slow" hike. We headed out through the palm orchard, and soon were walking along a new trail. I asked Osmar to take my picture, and he insisted that I pose with the machete ~ and I'm glad he did. Here is my favorite self-portrait ever, drawn from that photo, entitled "Lean Irene, the Jungle Queen" (stop your giggling!).

Here are some of the things we encountered on our slow hike:
1. a bee tree with a bee just emerging from the hole. I don't know how they create that "starburst" effect around the hole, but it looked like the one I saw on the bee nests at the rum distillery. I wonder if it's made of wax. I DIDN'T touch it to see!

2. lots of mushrooms, including these little umbrella-types that looked as though they should be stuck into a tropical drink. One of them, though, had been overwhelmed by a fungus, and looked more like dandelion fluff.

3. an abandoned cassava farm tucked away in the jungle. This is an example of typical slash-and-burn agriculture, well on its way to becoming jungle again as light-loving seeds take root in the sun-bright opening. I wouldn't have realized this is an abandoned farm if Osmar hadn't told me. Very likely it was left to return to jungle when the cassava crops waned in productivity as the available nutrients were extracted from the soil.

4. these lovely pink and green buds and "flowers" look like bird-of-paradise blooms. I don't know whether they are actually of the same species, but I can envision the first one growing and elongating into the second, and they were near each other. Aren't they lovely?

5. This striking orange and black beetle, about half an inch long, was ambling across a log when I spotted it. I've no idea what kind it is.

6. The shiny black seeds in their fleshy red coats at left illustrate a perpetual problem in the jungle ~ trying to get sharp, clear photos in dim settings without using a flash. In my opinion, flash-lit photos look fakey with their black backgrounds, so I compromise by trying to hold the camera steady for natural-light photos. If I were alone, I would just work at it until I got a sharp image, but with a companion, even a guide, I felt constrained to "get on with it," so I didn't take time to get a sharp photo (gotta work on this attitude). Of course, I could use a tripod, but I hate carrying the extra weight. So you might call this image "soft-focus" if you feel generous. Otherwise, you can just say it's blurry. Sigh....

7. I was really pleased to spy this cicada, pressed close to a stem for camouflage. Its dark coloring works well to make it nearly invisible in the dim light. I had to do some fancy dodging in Photoshop to make it show up at all, which is why the forest behind it looks so washed out.

8. This purple bloom at left is on a shrub growing in one of the swampy areas near the lodge. Anthony had showed it to me a few days before, and now Osmar led me to it so I could photograph it. It's a tall, open shrub, and the flowers are an exquisite purple with interesting form. I can't remember what Anthony said it is, but I am properly impressed. Be sure to look at the blooms close-up!

9. Our final treasures appeared as we came back through the open orchard ~ these huge caterpillars all over a couple of trees, maybe fifteen of them in all. The head of the left one is blurred because when I'd get close they'd all started wagging their heads as a defensive measure. They're fully as big as my index finger, and about 4" long.

And that is my show-and-tell for my Jungle Queen Trek.

Lunch was being served up early to Ivy (at left), two guests, and their guide, Walter, second from left, all of whom who were catching the boat back to Iquitos ~ as we would the next day. Ivy spends much of her time greeting and shepherding guests in Iquitos, so she treasures her intervals at Otorongo.

Behold the bowl of bananas on the table. I managed to gobble up at least one and sometimes two or three of these little delights with every meal. Fat, sweet, and about 4" long, they are among the best I've ever eaten (El Remanso also offers wonderful little bananas like this. Wish we could get them here in the US!).

My afternoon was spent sketching the many things I had picked up during the week: seedpods, feathers and other curiosities; and adding color to pages of my journal while I still had the memories fresh in my mind. Figuring out how to draw this Monkey Comb had kept me stymied for days, but now I had to either draw it or toss it over the veranda since it was beginning to show a bit of mold. The drawing came out fairly well, considering.

[if you saw yesterday's blog during the first hour after I published it, you may have seen parts of this next section there ~ I got my days confused.]
At about 3pm I met up with Osmar for a final sketching session with the Ornate Hawk Eagle and the Harpy Eagle in the yard. Both are rehab birds (one of them is blind in one eye). They

are absolutely gorgeous. This session was mostly for Osmar's benefit, although I continued finishing up some painting in my journal. He had really wanted to draw the birds, but I knew he wasn't ready and would require some intensive coaching on pen techniques to learn how to show texture and shading.

With such an intense and eager student, teaching is a pleasure, and I was glad to spend some time helping him hone his skills. We worked together for a couple of hours.

At right is Osmar at work on his drawing, and below that is a larger image I managed to extract off the upper image to show how nicely he was doing. Osmar says he had never drawn before, so this is his fifth or sixth drawing ever. Not bad, huh? He spent more time on it after this, and made it even better, but I'm sorry to say I didn't get any more photos.

At dinner the staff brought out a plate of fried piranhas caught by one of the guests (who generously shared them with us). They were actually quite tasty, and it seemed a fitting fate for a fish with such a dire reputation. Actually, that bad reputation (reducing a cow to a skeleton in five minutes) is a bit inflated, although if you catch one and flop it into the boat, you'd better watch out for your toes. I nibbled at one's head until I had excavated an entire jawbone complete with teeth ~ quite a little chopping tool! (Don't tell anyone, but I brought it home in a bottle.)

As a parting gift, the guides took us out after dinner for a starlit drift on the Amazon. Motoring upriver for about a mile, they turned the boats around and we drifted in the warm, moist air under the incredibly bright and numerous stars (if you live in a city, you'll NEVER see stars like this!) past the mouth of the Oran, then Oran village. Rock music was drifting out from the futbol court speakers, and the light on the bluff shone brightly, but just as we came even with the village the generator cut off for the night and the light and sound blinked out. Stillness and darkness enveloped us as we floated under the firmament, punctuated by the frog and cricket orchestra onshore. It was a memorable experience.

In my room that night I began to pack up to go. Where my backpack had rested on the floor for a week was a large white patch of mold (obviously I didn't pay attention to details ~ see at left) which I brushed off as best I could. Into the bags went everything except my clothes, damp as always. I would wait until the very last moment to pack those, hoping to get them home before they turned to smelly slime.

I went to sleep trying to memorize the croaks, cheeps, whines and buzzes, and the light flutter of bat wings above the netted ceiling. Tomorrow would be the last day.

Sixth Day at Otorongo Lodge ~ Dec. 27, 2010

2011-01-24T11:17:00.000-08:00

12/27
We started this day really early with a 7am boat trip to Aysana Creek upstream on the Amazon. Another pair of guests started with us, but we left them off on the bank of the Amazon to hike while we went birdwatching. We'd pick them up on the way back to the lodge.

The Aysana was beautiful, with slow-moving waters, and we moved past small farms (although we couldn't see anything but the mud steps going up the bank, with a boat or dugout moored in the water at bottom). Suddenly, our progress appeared to end at a pasture.
Actually, we had arrived at the edge of a floating field of water plants. Flat and apparently impenetrable, it was made up of water hyacinths (which jams waterways in the American South), water lettuce (the same), and a plant that looked like a bit like endive. It appeared impossible to navigate, but not to worry ~ the boatman headed right into it, with Osmar occasionally clearing the way with a pointy paddle, and we motored right on through.

As we came into uncarpeted water again, mysterious vistas opened up, presenting strangler figs with hanging lianas, and huge trees with bromeliads, ferns, and other epiphytes, decorating their branches.

We saw LOTS of cool birds: Amazon and Green Kingfishers, lots of cacicques and long-toed Wattled Jacanas, Jacana jacana, and raptors such as this cinnamon-red Black-collared Hawk, Busarellus nigricollis.

I'd like to apologize for my poor bird photography. I'm not using any special camera equipment ~ just a simple Canon PowerShot A590 with 4X Optical Zoom, and I shoot on Automatic so I don't have to spend time fussing with exposures. So the bird shots are pretty dinky, and sometimes a bit fuzzy. Still, I'm pleased with the majority of my photos.

We came up on a fishing boat with its load of armored catfish and I think another smaller type of fish ~ I only had time for a quick shot or two as we passed.

Suddenly the boat motor shut way down and the boatman was pointing into a cecropia tree high on our right where he had spotted a 3-toed sloth. This was the fastest sloth I have ever seen, obviously spooked by our appearance, and in moments it had descended arm-over-arm down the tree trunk to safety (it thought) behind another tree.

To my great delight, the boat headed to shore and we climbed up into the jungle to see if we could get beneath the sloth's tree for a closer look. It was dark and tangled, and you could tell this area is underwater during the wet season. We pushed through vines and past thorny trunks until we stood directly under the sloth's tree.

At our appearance, the sloth apparently decided its smooth tree trunk was poor protection, and still in speed-mode it prepared to switch trees (by speed-mode, I refer to the fact that we could actually see it moving). Over a period of about ten minutes, it used its incredibly long arms to transfer to a nearby tree, stretched out horizontally for several excruciating minutes (well, it would have been excruciating for a human) until it could haul itself across the space onto the next tree. What a fascinating process!

It had been sprinkling off and on all morning, and as we turned back it got pretty spitty, but it didn't really pose a problem because I had brought along a plastic grocery bag (I keep it in the bottom of my sketch-kit bag) which I tucked my camera and sketch bag into. But I kept hauling out the camera to get shots like this Great Egret, Ardea alba, which kept flushing in front of the boat and landing a short distance further on. The boatman had slowed way down so that I could get this shot, and was very pleased when I showed him the results on the digital screen.

Working our way back through the floating plants, we came upon this clique of beetles sporting on the plant leaves, and near the mouth of the Aysana we passed a defunct boat, clearly past its prime. It will probably be taken by the Amazon in the next high water (unless someone decides to rescue it).

After lunch, I took a siesta in the hammock room ~ after I finished sketching it, that is ~ and worked for awhile in my journal, drawing this huge snail that Tio Juan had been tormenting (it was rescued by Ricardo, one of the guides, who gave it to me to sketch, much to Tio Juan's displeasure).

Awaking from my siesta, I had some time to spare before the afternoon's adventure, so I played with Tio Juan and did a photo shoot with Ara and Azul, the macaws.

At 3:30 we started off on our afternoon adventure, a visit to Oran Village, from which Otorongo Lodge hires its staff. The village sits out on the bluff at the mouth of the Oran Village, about half an hour's walk from the lodge. On the way, we crossed behind a whole section of grassy bluff that is falling into the Amazon. You can see the fissures in the image at left. Just inland from that was what remained of the pasture, with a pool full of lounging water buffalo (perhaps the source of our buffalo cheese at meals?).

As the day cooled, Osmar and I sat drinking Inca Kola (neon yellow-green and sweeter than sweet) in the bleachers above the concrete futbol court (that's the World's name for soccer, y'know ~ except for us Americans...), entertained by two little girls who took a shine to us.

We were joined by one of the other Otorongo guests, Leili, and her guide, Walter, sitting and comparing notes about our day, shouting above the blare of the loudspeakers' funky rock music, provided courtesy of a generator which chugs away in the village each afternoon from about 4 until about 8 or 9pm.

As sunset drew near, we meandered down to the village landing with the girls to meet the waterbus. As it drew close, a parade of mostly women and girls filed down the trail and boarded the bus with trays of drinks, fruits and cooked food for the people passing through. Water buses don't supply food for their passengers, but the long-distance riders need to eat, so the villages along the way have created a thriving business of meeting the water buses with edibles and other necessities. Down behind the boat and next to shore, we spotted Anthony and Paymon, Leili's husband, fishing for the big, flat catfish common to this part of the river.

Leili and I played with the girls, taking their photos and sharing the images with them on the cameras' digital displays, which sent them off into gales of laughter that bridged the language barrier. Within twenty minutes, the food was distributed and the water bus pulled away from the landing to continue on downriver on schedule.

Near sunset, now, we all decided we'd better get home to dinner, and headed off through the village, which has the amazing attribute of no streets or vehicles ~ just sidewalks. What a nice way to create a serene town!

Our path along the bluff edge, in swiftly descending darkness, was lit by the flashlights we'd brought along 'just in case,' and since we kept stopping to listen to and photograph frogs, it was "dark-thirty" by the time we got to the lodge, just in time for supper. Nice day. Busy, but very, very nice.

Fifth Day at Otorongo Lodge ~ Dec. 26, 2010

2011-01-22T15:57:00.000-08:00

12/26
I had hoped to be able to wander at will in the jungle behind the lodge, but the lodge owner, Anthony, is very aware of the ability of snakes to hide unseen next to the trail (and by now, I should be, too, although it's hard to watch every step you take when surrounded by the amazing things in this Amazon jungle!). He kindly but firmly discouraged me ~ exploring the clearing around the lodge was fine, but not melting into the jungle unaccompanied.

Sensing my disappointment, Anthony and Ivy personally accompanied Osmar and me through an area of Otorongo they're developing, diverting a creek to create ponds and trails, and creating a small hydroelectric dam for small-footprint-electricity. As we walked along with Anthony pointing out interesting mushrooms and plants and describing his plans, there was a crash directly behind us, and Osmar quickly pinned and caught a Giant Bird Snake whose branch had broken as it slipped through the canopy above in search of birds (okay, okay, I get the point ~ snakes are all around us!).

After getting some pictures of it then releasing it, we came across a gorgeous filareed mushroom. Anthony said that the lacy top part would grow and spread, finally reaching the ground like a hoop-skirt. I took a photo and planned to take another on the way back to the lodge to record its growth (hey, mushrooms grow fast). Delivering us to a good sketching spot, Anthony and Ivy returned to the lodge while Osmar and I set up to draw.

Much taken with the snail shells I'd been picking up as we hiked, I sat sketching their smooth spirals until a movement in the leaves caught my eye: a big millipede was crawling slowly toward me. Fortunately for my peace of mind, I decided it was the same species a guide had been handling near the giant ceiba tree a few days before, and millipedes are generally harmless, so I put my hand down for it to crawl into. It did. I googled it a little while ago, and it is apparently called a "tractor millipede" but that's the best I could do for identification. I had to sketch it coiled up because as soon as it would uncurl it would start to flow away ~ so I kept nudging it to keep it coiled until I was done. Its portrait ended up on the snail page, below.

Now, while Osmar drew a seedpod he had found, I moved my folding chair to the edge of a little swamp to sketch a tree decorated with a nasute termite nest. These termites build their mud nests in the trees, connected to the ground, where they forage, by hollow mud tubes through which they can pass safely hidden from predators. Look at the tube in the image at right ~ we broke through the roof of this tunnel on the side of a tree, but it would be repaired within the hour.

I had been planning to draw some jungle scenery, and this was the perfect time and place to do it. My pleine air (scenery done on site) sketching has been very limited, and this was a good opportunity to stretch my wings.

As I explained to Osmar, the success of a scene may depend in large part on what you leave out plus what you add in. Here are my scenes and the drawings I did of them.

I took some liberties, obviously ~ leaving out non-essential items and adding palm leaves and lianas from just outside the picture area. I still haven't painted them. Maybe I won't ~ I really like their spare look.....

Osmar, in the meantime, finished his seed with some advice from la profesora (me) and was busy sketching the same buttressed tree I was now drawing. It had been a cool, overcast morning (about 85°), but now it was thinking about sprinkling, so when our drawings were finished we started back down the trail watching for the lacy mushroom I wanted to photograph again. Alas, it was gone ~ eaten by some hungry passer-by. Foo.

Lunch was ready when we returned. On the table next to the kitchen, the staff had put out the racks of plates, glasses and utensils, and we came in just as the steaming serving bowl of soup and the slices of garlic bread, plus a plate of sliced buffalo cheese, were placed on the table. Filling my glass from the pitcher of pineapple juice fresh from the garden, I claimed a spot at the dining table and dug into my plate of good, simple food.

While I was at Otorongo, the number of guests fluctuated almost daily as people came for varying multiple-day stays. There were about five of us this day, plus three guides and Anthony at the table, sharing our morning's adventures with much laughter and joking. Suddenly there was a hail from outside the dining hall, and we abandoned lunch when we realized that one of the staff had caught an iguana for us to see. Brilliant green, with beady brown eyes, it endured our handling stoically as we took turns learning how to hold it so it wouldn't be frightened. At length, we released it, and it dashed across the lawn to the safety of the jungle, none the worse for wear.

I decided to do some birding and to explore the grounds a bit with my camera, putting off more sketching until later. I photographed a flowering vine in the yard with gorgeous pink flowers, and out in the palm orchard, Osmar showed me a wasp nest that looked almost exactly like a green fruit (see the image above). In the back yard was a fascinating tree with hanging fruits. There were wonders everywhere I looked, and I also spent some time playing with Tio Juan, the toucan.

I had figured out by now that the way to interact with Tio Juan was to first grab his bill. Then you could come in closer and play with him. If I kept my distance, his tendency was to peck at me. Holding his bill, I could slip a finger in his mouth and twiddle his eight-inch tongue ~ which looked like a long, skinny piece of plastic with a serrated edge. The toucan didn't seem to mind this exploration, and it was now that I discovered that his nostrils were situated on the TOP of his marvelous bill (check out the image close-up). I generally kept my hand on his beak so that he couldn't peck at my face (not necessarily with evil intent ~ but he IS a rascal).

It started to rain in earnest and continued for the rest of the afternoon, so I took a short siesta, then around 4pm, I fetched Osmar and we spent the rest of the daylight hours sketching and painting in the dining room ~ Osmar on his drawings, and I on mine.

His progress was astonishing, and it was a real pleasure to work with him as he learned. But we had a sense of urgency ~ I only had two more full days at Otorongo, and I wanted to leave him with his skills well enough developed that he could continue on his own. At the same time, I had no intention of shorting myself on doing every Amazonian activity I could cram into every day. So I started hatching out a plan. More about this later.

Fourth Day at Otorongo Lodge ~ Dec. 25, 2010

2011-01-21T14:39:00.000-08:00

Christmas Day
(more spiders, toads, snakes and alligator-type critters below, just so you know...)

Thunder and lightning overnight was accompanied by volumes of rain now standing in pools all around the lodge this Christmas morning. All the guests were wondering if the day's outings would have to be canceled. Osmar and I had planned to go visit a lake covered with giant Victoria Waterlilies, which had intrigued me ever since, as a child, I had seen a photo of one bearing a baby on its surface.

But the sun came out and the pools soon subsided ~ and after breakfast we, plus Segundo the boatman, motored across the Amazon and upstream a bit until we came to a little mooring with a boat tied to it. Climbing up the steep bank on steps carved out of the mud by the farmer, we skirted a couple of tarps covered with drying corn and walked down the aisles of a banana plantation. Then the lane crossed a cassava field interspersed with occasional sugarcane stalks. That's a cassava plant and the roots, at right, which are harvested to produce yuca, farina, and tapioca. Cassava is also known as manioc, quite a multipurpose plant, but the roots and leaves are poisonous until they've been soaked and cooked.

A papaya tree beside the lane was encircled by a termite (or ant) nest, but that obviously hadn't kept off whatever birds (likely caciques) had been eating the ripe papayas (you can see one that has been shredded, and another freshly opened in the clump of papayas near the crown).

Ahead in an opening, we could see what looked like a black igloo built on a platform. Up close, I could see that it was made of mud and grass, beaten firm with a shovel (there's a drawing of it on the sketch page) . Osmar explained that this was a charcoal kiln, and under the mud coating were cut sticks slowly turning into charcoal due to the fire that was smoldering under the platform.

I grew up on a farm that wasn't terribly prosperous, and I know what lengths a farm family must go to in order to make ends meet. So I admired their initiative at the same time I mourned the trees that were cut to make charcoal (I can't even stand to see trees chopped down on TV).

A half-dismantled house ~ a pole frame, thatch roof, and wood planks to make a floor about 7' off the ground ~ stood nearby. Osmar said that the bank of the Amazon was collapsing there and would soon take the house, so they were moving all the reusable parts back from the river to build a new house. At left is one way roof thatch is prepared, using palm fronds like the ones leaning on a tree at Otorongo (above) waiting to patch a roof.

We passed an open-sided house where maybe fifteen people were sitting around listening to music, talking, and drinking beer and rum to the accompaniment of loud canned music (probably off a CD) ~ celebrating Christmas the Peruvian way. Kids were playing underfoot and stopped to watch us pass as we turned onto a small path leading to the lily lake.

And finally, we reached the giant waterlilies ~ I was not disappointed. Such a leaf could indeed safely hold a baby ~ at least until it started wiggling!

Osmar set up my folding chair at the edge of the lake and I sat and sketched for nearly an hour, reveling in my good fortune of the calm, sunny day in a place I had fantasized about all my life. At length, happy with my sketch, I finished up and we walked back to the boat and returned to the lodge under a bright blue sky decorated with fluffy white clouds and one amazing, towering thunderhead.

After lunch we were treated to the sight of a red-tailed boa constrictor. One of the guides allowed it to twine around his arm and we had a chance to examine it fully. Antony explained that you could see that it was about to shed because the skin over its eyes had already detached and turned milky, and that as a consequence it could barely see. It was an absolutely gorgeous snake, and we got to photograph it stretched out on the grass. They were removing it from the vicinity of the lodge for the comfort of the visitors, if I remember correctly. Here it is on the grass, about six feet long, I'd guess.

Later, I sketched the Pink River Dolphin skull in the yard at Otorongo. It is a humongous skull, more than two feet in length. I love drawing skulls, and this one was a real challenge and delight (see the sketch page above). Osmar sat nearby sketching a bromeliad in his sketchbook, and I occasionally offered advice on technique and observation skills.

After dinner, we donned our rubber boots and insect repellent, grabbed our flashlights, and went hunting in the dark around the lodge for tarantulas. Searching for and finding round 1½" holes in the ground, Osmar would poke in a grass blade and "tickle" the tarantula until it became irritated and would spring out to devour us.

Alas, we have been deceived about their ferocity. Once out on the ground, not seeing their usual food, they would stop dead and just stand there confused. We weren't ferociously attacked, chased, or even leg-run-up ~ NOTHING. Phhhht! I took picture after picture of tickled tarantulas, and never once felt threatened. So much for "deadly tarantulas!"

Switching over to "Reptiles & Amphibians," we next discovered a huge Cane Toad, Bufo marinus, along the path to the caiman pond. At about 4" in length, it was ponderously awesome. All of the guests were out frogging and spidering all over the grounds, and I kept hearing exclamations over in the caiman pond area, so we headed in that direction.

The caimans in the little fenced pond, secretive and hidden by day, were out and about. One of them, about six feet long, was completely out of the water and posed for its picture. But that isn't what everyone was excited about. They were looking at frogs.

Osmar had promised me a Christmas present, the chance to see a giant frog, and he was making good on his promise because there, in the trees above the caiman pool, was an incredible sight ~ an absolutely HUGE frog ~ as big or bigger than the Giant Cane Toad we had just seen. This was a Giant Monkey Frog, and it isn't a hopper ~ it walks. Reaching up, Osmar gently edged it off its branch onto his hand where it peered at us unafraid.

It walked up his arm and onto his shoulder where I took a photo. I would have loved to hold it, but there was a chance I had mosquito repellent on my hands, which could kill it, so I refrained. Osmar lifted it back up onto its branch, where it dismounted quite calmly. What a gorgeous frog. This morning I sketched Osmar and the frog from the photo I took that night.

I had thought that this ended our evening adventure, and it would have if Osmar hadn't spotted this Aquatic Coral Snake rustling through the leaves before we started back to the lodge. The bite of this gorgeous snake is quite venomous, but its poison fangs are in the back of its mouth instead of the front, so you'd only be in danger if you were barefoot (or stuck your finger in its mouth, duh). We watched it for a long time, then Antony picked it up and took it back down to the dock with the observation that it was probably hanging around hoping for a Giant Monkey Frog dinner.

This has to have been the most amazingly memorable Christmas Day I have ever experienced. Hope you enjoyed it, too!

Third Day at Otorongo Lodge ~ Dec. 24, 2010

2011-01-20T13:34:00.000-08:00

Christmas Eve
I was getting behind on my sketching and painting, so I was up at dawn on this Christmas Eve day to work (play, actually!) in my sketchbook. Quietly, quietly I tiptoed to the hammock room in the gathering morning light and settled down into a hammock. I needed to paint (with watercolor pencils) the drawing of the children in the boat which I'd penned the day before, and I also wanted to finish some other pages that had no color yet.

Later one of the other guests came in, and after looking over my journal she took a photo of me sketching in the hammock. Throughout my eight-day stay, everyone was so curious about my progress in the journal that I got into the habit of just passing it around every now and then (OMG, that sounds egotistic!)(oh well, that's what I did, anyway...)

You can see how peaceful the hammock room is. Behind me in the photo is someone's towel drying outside on the line strung all the way around the building. Most of the guests used it every day in an effort to keep fresh. After every hike, clothes were hung on the line outside our rooms to dry and air.

Right after breakfast Osmar and I and a boatman from Oran village took a motor boat across the Amazon to find a place where we could see hoatzins, amazing birds that live along the rivers and swampy areas of the Amazon.

We tied the boat up below the bank and walked through a forest that is usually underwater ~ you could see the waterline about 12 feet up on the trunks of the trees. I kept marveling at the thought. The earth was muddy but covered with leaves, sticks, and detritus, and there were gorgeous white, grey and red mushrooms all along the trail. I had to be careful not to brush against the spiny palms that flanked the trail.

Soon the forest opened out upon an emerald green swamp covered with water-lettuce. The boatman, now our machete-wielder, pointed out the tall fig trees at the far end that often serve as a gathering place for hoatzins. We skirted the swamp and followed the shoreline through the woods, gradually becoming aware of raucous shrieks and crackling twigs from the jostling of large bodies in the tops of the fig trees.

Osmar motioned for me to move quietly, and we crept up under the fig trees. The hoatzins overhead were difficult to see in the foliage, but I could see large shapes, an occasional accusing red eye in a blue face peering down at us, and the messy, "bad-hair-day" topknots of the suspicious birds. It was pointless to take a picture, but through the binoculars I got lots of good looks at parts of hoatzins, and I was delighted. I'd been curious about them ever since I'd had to research and illustrate one for a book many years ago.

The jostling increased, wings flapping, branches creaking and twigs breaking, then the chicken-sized birds crashed noisily out of the tops of the fig trees and were off to a nearby grove well out of sight. I burst out laughing at the great to-do and wished we could follow them, but we'd probably not get a better sight of them now that they'd gotten the wind up, so we started back. As we left their fig tree grove, I was ecstatic to find a pair of hoatzin feathers, one of the black tail feathers and a cinnamon-red wing feather. What sketching treasures!

Stopping to photograph a trail of leafcutter ants on a tree, my camera batteries pooped out on me ~ they were rechargeable, but I'd not thought to give them to Anthony for recharging. Since Otorongo doesn't use electricity, they must be sent to Oran Village overnight to plug into the village generator, which only runs for four hours each evening. You have to plan ahead. Fortunately, I had the extra batteries I'd bought in Iquitos as back-up, so after I returned to the lodge I could bring my camera back to life.

After lunch I explored around the lodge, sketching Penelope the Spix's Guan (see the journal page) and the tarantula in the top of the pineapple plant, then settling down in a hammock to color the guan, journal the morning's adventures and draw the hoatzins' fig tree.

Then, as the afternoon cooled, Osmar and I went down to the Otorongo dock and climbed into the dugout canoe to explore up the Oran River which runs past the lodge.

The Oran River at this time of year is slow and lazy, more like a deep creek than a river, and it was easy for us to paddle upstream to do some quiet birdwatching. Osmar has been up the Oran many times, and pointed out hawks, vultures, and smaller birds I had to look up in the bird guide we'd brought along (A Field Guide to the Birds of Peru). My best sighting was a Black-tailed Tityra, Tityra cayana, which is about the size of a robin, a pure white bird with black wings and tail, a black cap and bill tip, and a red eye-ring and base of bill. A VERY striking bird. We also watched an overnbird building its nest, although we thought it might be picking termites out of a termite nest as it poked and prodded at the edge of the muddy perimeter. I looked it up when we got back.

I really enjoyed the silence of the dugout, and paddling with the graceful, pointed paddle (see the picture). At one point we approached three submerged tree limbs poking up out of the water. Just as we passed, a cloud of bats emerged from the hollow ends and fluttered past our faces. It was extraordinary to feel the flutter of their wings past our cheeks (later I tried to draw my impression in the journal).

On our way back down the Oran, we spotted this ants' nest glued to the trunk of a tree, as a huge flock of canary-winged parakeets chittered overhead to land in a tree along the river. Amazingly, once they landed they were next to invisible.

On a whim, I asked Osmar if we could go down to the mouth of the Oran to see the sunset from our dugout, and we paddled past the dock and down to the Amazon to see the sun set (after all, I HAD seen Dawn on the Amazon, so Sunset on the Amazon was practically REQUIRED).

We had to hang onto the bank to keep from drifting out into the current, but it was a nice sunset, made even more dramatic by the passing of a boat in silhouette.

I forgot to mention that on our way down to the mouth of the Oran we had passed one of the women from the lodge doing my laundry on the bank of the Oran (accompanied by Penelope the guan). Some of the people from Oran Village work with Otorongo lodge to take the guides and guests to interesting spots in the jungle, to serve as boatmen and machete wielders, and to do, among other things, the cooking, landscaping, carpentry, laundry and keep the rooms made-up. It appears to be a good situation for all concerned.

I was impressed with the care the staff took with us ~ they were always on the lookout for interesting things to show us (birds, frogs, monkeys and sloths, etc.), and as boatmen, they would slow or stop the boat if a guest flung up binoculars or a camera to get a bead on something.

The Peruvians have more of a celebration on Christmas Eve than on Christmas Day. Since guests coming to the lodge may be of various religions, the holiday is very low key. But to celebrate the event the cooks brought in loaves of panatone (a light fruitcake) and after dinner we opened a bottle of rum from the sugar cane distillery and toasted one another and our Amazon adventure with high spirits. It had been another good day at Otorongo Lodge.

Second Day at Otorongo Lodge ~ Dec. 23, 2010

2011-01-19T13:44:00.000-08:00

12/23

[warning: there are two images of spiders in this blog,in case
you are one of those people who panic at the sight of eight hairy legs]

Dawn found me hanging over the bannister outside my door to drink in all the sights and sounds. The night before I'd been lullabied to sleep by all manner of frogs, crickets, and perhaps nightbirds. This morning I was awakened by a choir of birds, including the liquid "coo-bloop-wheeoo" of either an oropendula or yellow-rumped caciques (I never did sort that out). Birds were flitting through the trees across a narrow strip of garden as the sky quickly brightened.

Today we'd go in search of a giant Ceiba tree, across the Amazon and up a small tributary to the south. There were many birds to see along the way: egrets, hawks, yellow-rumped caciques (say Ka-SEEKs), long-toed jacanas, and many others. Fishermen plied the waters with nets ~ several nets were strung across the river and our boatman had to lift the motor to cross over them.

We passed one little boy diligently rowing a long boat with a younger girl aboard. They eyed us solemnly as we passed. I drew them later from my camera viewfinder. Here's the page they're on.

There were numerous little land holdings on the banks we passed. Here's an assortment of things we saw. from left to right: a tree full of the hanging nests of yellow-rumped caciques, the boat children, and a small farm with black pigs roaming free.

At length our boat swung into shore and we climbed a steep bank up into the dim forest. It was beautiful inside, and within a few yards we accidentally walked through the web of a golden-silk spider ~ if you live in the southern US, you will be familiar with this big orb-weaver. In the Everglades they make orbs that span the boardwalks. This one was even bigger, and Osmar twisted some of the web together and gave it to me (it's glued into my journal just above the boat children, on the right edge ~ see above).

After a short walk, following the boatman who was swinging a machete (plants grow so fast in the jungle that a machete-cleared trail will grow back together in a very short time) we came to the giant ceiba tree. It was unimaginably huge, with buttresses stretching out fifteen feet to the side. Osmar took a picture of me with the binoculars, standing at the base of the tree, but it doesn't really show the size. On the opposite side of the tree, in an open space, I could get far enough away to see it, so I took three vertical pictures which I have stitched together here. I used the image of me from the other picture to try to show you how very small I am compared to that tree. I couldn't get over the immensity of the tree and its wall-like buttresses.

Near the Ceiba tree, Osmar found a Crested Forest Toad (we thought it was a Sharp-nosed Toad, but the stripe down its back means it's the Crested Forest Toad). I sketched it on the sketch page above. On our way back to the boat we surprised a praying mantis building an egg case.

Rain started misting down as we descended the bank to the boat, but this is the rain forest, after all, and since the air was warm and the mist wasn't really cold, it turned out to not be a problem EXCEPT....

And here, dear followers of my packing blog, I have to confess to the failure of my lovely bandana/hat invention due to humidity. If you recall, I explained how to turn your bandana into a sun hat. But on the boat, when the sun appeared and I pulled my bandana out of my bag and folded it into a sun hat, I realized that the 100% humidity of the Amazon completely spoils the effect (and effectiveness) of the thing. It's a flop (literally) in a humid climate. Oh well, it'll still work for desert rats and people that live in "normal" humidity.

We got back in time for lunch and I had a chance to get acquainted with some of the denizens of Otorongo. Our host Antony was playing with Ara, the Scarlet Macaw. That bird shrieks "Lara, Lara, Lara" frequently, and I thought that was her name, but it seems that Antony named her Ara for her specific name, Ara macao. The Blue-and-Yellow Macaw (Ara ararauna) is named Azul, which is Spanish for blue. They have the run of the place during the daytime but are put in an enclosure at night so they won't be eaten.

The Spix's Guan also runs free. Her name is Penelope, and she pecks shiny things. You don't want to get your shiny eyes too close to her beak...

And here is Tio Juan (Uncle John). He is a Yellow-ridged Toucan, Rhamphastos culminatus and a real clown. He terrorizes anyone who shows the slightest fear of him, but it's mostly bluff. I managed to get up the nerve to make "friends" with him after a couple of days, always being aware that he could do damage with that bill and that I had to be really careful to keep my face out of range.

Early afternoon was generally reserved for siestas in the hammock room (a lovely, cool screened porch with six hammocks rayed out from a central pole to the sides of the room.) In one of the hammocks I would nap, or sketch seedpods and snails, sketch from my camera viewfinder, paint my drawings with watercolor pencils, and glue in things like the golden-silk spider web.

Discovering that Osmar was interested in trying his hand at sketching, I sat him down with an assignment (ever the teacher!) to see what he could do, and realized, looking at his first-ever drawing (done in ballpoint pen, at that) that he has a lot of potential.

So from that time on, whenever it worked for both of us, I provided him with a pad and pen, and gave him sketching lessons, first in drawing, then later in coloring with the watercolor pencils, and we worked quietly together through the hours. He was an apt student.

Earlier that day I had gone exploring in the kitchen garden and discovered a tarantula holed up in the top of a pineapple plant. Looking down into the top, I could only see its furry orange toes. Osmar said it would come out at night, so that night I went back and took a photo. Here it is, ready for intruders coming up from the ground.

Tomorrow we look for hoatzins ~ prehistoric-looking chicken-like birds that appear to be having a perpetual "bad hair day."

Down the Amazon ~ Dec. 22, 2010

2011-01-18T13:13:00.000-08:00

12/22
All during breakfast at Dawn on the Amazon Cafe I was peering over the Boulevard balustrade at the Amazon River along the horizon, eagerly anticipating the next step in my Big Adventure.

By nine thirty, Osmar had winkled me out of my hostel room and we were aboard the Otorongo launch and well out into the coffee-tan Amazon, beginning our 100 kilometer trip to Otorongo Lodge.

At first there was quite a bit of traffic like water taxis (that's one at left) taking people to different parts of town and to their jobs or homes along the river near Iquitos, plus smaller boats bringing in produce and fish to Belen Market.

Behind the water taxi you can see the big sand bar that is growing opposite Iquitos ~ it doesn't yet have trees on it, and the people plant crops on its rich soil.

The water appeared to be barely moving, but later I discovered that this was because we were moving so fast right along with it. Mostly it was clear of debris, smooth and with jungle along the edge. Many places had steep cutbanks as much as 30' high, sometimes showing raw edges where a big chunk of the bank had fallen off into the river.

Occasionally we had to maneuver and dodge through a morass of branches, water plants, logs, and debri. A few times our boat driver had to stop and back up in order to disengage from a collection of junk, but amazingly enough he avoided damage to the boat. I later decided that each debris-filled area was probably a pulse of water and debris swept down from the Andes into the river by a storm. It all stayed together because it was all traveling at the same speed.

At regular intervals along our way we saw little farms and thatched houses and an occasional "gas station" like the one in the image at right. There were also tugboats pushing or pulling loads of logs, and big petroleum barges, plus an occasional waterbus ~ a big double or triple-decker filled to overflowing with people and their possessions traveling from one point to another on the river. If you peer into the lowest level of this one, you can see hammocks strung side by side where people sleep during overnight passages. I'll show a waterbus in more detail in a later blog.

Also at intervals there were people fishing with nets from small boats or dugout canoes in the submerged reeds close to the shore. The small oar-powered boats tend to stay very close to shore where the water eddies upstream, to avoid getting swept away into the big current where they'd have a hard time getting back to shore.

I was entranced during the entire trip, unable to believe my good fortune in finally seeing this fabled river of my childhood (and adult!) dreams. I just couldn't get enough of it.

A couple of hours into our journey, the boatman pulled the boat to shore. Osmar explained that we were stopping to visit a sugarcane rum distillery. The eroded bank was very high where we stopped, but a plank crossed by small boards made what Osmar called an Inca Ladder, and we clambered up it to the top and walked across a grassy field to a low, thatch-covered shed. Inside were piles of sugarcane next to a grinder with crushing gears turned by horses pulling a long pole in a circle (the horses weren't working at that moment). Nearby, a huge copper basin was used for boiling the sugar juice down to molasses (by building a fire underneath), and further down the shed an assortment of pots and coils produced the rum from heated juice. It was like a scene one might have experienced in the 50s in Appalachia, and I found it really exciting to take this short step into a long-ago time. Osmar (standing in front of the molasses cauldron here) seemed surprised to learn that my dad used horses for such things on the farm when I was a little girl. I don't think it fit his idea of an American tourist. We had a lot to learn from each other!

After a short walk past the cane fields to the rum distillers house/store, we tasted several of his bottled products: straight rum, rum sweetened with molasses; rum sweetened with honey (from the log behive at left hanging from the roof ~ see the hive entrance hole at center?), and a Peruvian equivalent of Viagra, Seven Root Rum (or something like that) with various encouraging herb/root distillations in it. We also sampled the molasses and the honey, which is far more liquid than honey from American bees. In fact, it is so liquid they can extract it from the hive shown here with hypodermic needles.

After admiring a hanging oropendula nest on display in the store (it's in the image at right, with the sugarcane field behind it) I bought a bottle of the molasses for Otorongo, and we were on our way after admiring some gorgeous butterflies on the riverbank.

Soon the boatman was turning into a waterway coming in from the left bank ~ Oran River at last! After a short, winding way, we were docking at the Otorongo pier, right next to a long, narrow plank boat and a dugout canoe.

Waiting at the top of the long, sloping boardwalk were Antony and the staff of Otorongo, a warm, cheerful welcoming committee to greet us after our three-hour journey.

After a short walk through some open trees and along a landscaped path, the view opened out into an amazing scene: thatch-roofed Otorongo Lodge nestled among the palms and jungle trees, cozy and inviting. We had arrived!

In the common room Osmar introduced me to the staff, mentioned the serving times for meals, and pointed out the library for looking up bird and lizard sightings, etc., and an introduced me to Tio Juan, the toucan. Then he guided me down a long covered deck to Room 11, which would be my center of operations while at Otorongo.

My room was simply furnished, with a single bed beneath a mosquito netting, a table, and an open armoir with a place to hang clothes and lots of shelves which I would manage to fill during my stay with all of my belongings to keep them dry ~ the air was so humid that leaving anything in my bags would have encouraged mold. In fact, where one of my bags rested against the floor during my 8-day stay, a moldy white patch appeared and could have done some damage if left much longer. I really liked my cozy room. I took a little nap.

At around four, Osmar suggested that we take a walk in the jungle to try to find monkeys. Here we are next to a buttressed fig tree, shortly before we found the pygmy marmoset monkeys gnawing away on the bole of a tall tree then licking up the sap that dribbled from the wounds they had made. The waning light made it way too dark to take photographs, but they were neat to watch. We also saw, fleetingly, saddle-backed tamarin monkeys.

I sat for a few minutes to sketch a fleshy flower that would be too fragile to take back to sketch later, and as we went along I picked up seedpods and interesting things I wanted to draw.

Dinner in the kerosene-lit dining room was excellent, but I was so tired I was in something of a daze, and went straight to bed directly after.

Here's a page from the next day's journal with Tio Juan and one of the seedpods I collected the afternoon before.

Darkest Peru at Last ~ Dec. 20-21, 2010

2011-01-16T11:10:00.000-08:00

12/20
Everything was so busy with the Christmas rush at El Remanso that Adri and Dani had to work hard to carve out some time to talk with me about the map and trail guide art they want me to do for El Remanso, taken from my journal entries. I am really excited about the project, and have a bunch of ideas for it ~ after I finish blogging my trip.

December 20th was my last day at El Remanso, and it started out with more unseasonal rains ~ global warming has made the weather just about anywhere on earth unpredictable these days. In fact, it had rained so hard one day that week that vehicles couldn't ford one of the rivers between Puerto Jimenez and El Remanso, and guests had to wade across in water up to their thighs to catch a ride on the the lodge side (with a terrific vacation tale to tell when they got home).

I just hoped I would get out in time to catch my plane. As it happened, the rain tapered off and there was no problem. Alternate plans had been to leave early and have a taxi pick me up on the other side if there were a problem. I had dressed this last morning in my prettiest underwear in case I should have occasion to wade. I really didn't want to fly to Peru in wet pants!.

I caught my plane in San José that evening, and flew to Colombia where we were offloaded onto a bus, trotted through the airport, then onto another bus which took us to our next plane ~ a finely orchestrated minuet of people-moving. I had a long layover in Lima in the middle of the night, and I was DELIGHTED with my new hoodie rain jacket which pulled down over my eyes and my blankie-cum-throw which opened out into a nice warm cover so that I could sleep on three chairs in the brightly lit Lima airport (in the photo at left, taken at home, I have unfolded it to show how big it is. Perfect.).

12/21
Then, finally, over the Andes (in the dark) to Iquitos. Next time, I swear I will shedule my flights better so that I cross over land portions in daylight. What a waste of good sight-seeing to travel the red-eye flights in the dark, even if it is cheaper. I mean, I didn't even SEE the Andes! Here's my first sight of the Amazon, coming down into Iquitos shortly after dawn.

I was met by Ivy (pronounced "Evie") from Otorongo Lodge at the Iquitos airport, and after checking into my digs at Hospedaje "La Pascana" and pausing with Ivy for a cup of excellent coffee and a lovely long chat at Dawn on the Amazon Cafe overlooking the Amazon River, I was whirled into my Amazon adventure.

Ivy introduced me to Osmar, who would be my guide during my entire Amazon stay. We looked each other over. Osmar must have seen a middle-aged (or over) gringo woman with a big smile. I saw a Peruvian boy-man about my size with clear eyes and a shy smile. We shook hands with a "Mucho gusto" greeting, and Ivy sent us down to the bank so I could convert my cash to make the final payment for my tour with Otorongo Lodge.

While changing my American dollars to Peruvian nuevos soles, I discovered to my dismay that an American bill with even the slightest tear or wear is not considered legal tender ~ even at a state bank (take a look at this useless $100 bill). So, $100 poorer, since I couldn't use it, we stopped by the Otorongo office to take care of business, then we took off on foot to visit the famous Belén Market at the south end of town.

Iquitos is a fantastic place! The sights, the sounds, and the aromas of life swept around me in a rush of people and motokars, the major form of transportation in this river town without any roads to the outside world. Then we reached the market, which, when the water is high, is navigated by canoe. This wasn't high water season, so we didn't have that pleasure. But it was amazing anyway.

Osmar remarked that Belen Market was especially busy since people were buying Christmas presents, and it was indeed aswirl with people and an incredible variety of things, from dishes and fancy clothing to bananas and pig heads (I almost got sideswiped by a passing pig-half slung over a burly man's shoulder~ Osmar pulled me out of the way). You could buy anything here: food ~ either raw or prepared on plates, dried gourd halves (to hold anything from soup to, well, whatever you'd want to put into a gourd), to powdered bark in cellophane bags for headaches, to lively armored catfish for dinner. And a million things in between.

I really wanted to ride in one of those motokars, so Osmar suggested a trip to Pilpintuwasi, the Butterfly Farm & Amazon Animal Orphanage. The motokar trip was a wild ride, sometimes three-abreast on a two-way street, but with courtesy and skill on the part of the drivers. There were also motorcycles for hire, and the occasional car, truck or bus in the mix. I didn't see a single accident, but the diesel fumes were pretty potent.

In the marina at the north end of town we hired a peka-peka (a thatch-roofed boat with a motor that goes "peka-peka-peka" ~ at the dock in the image above) to take us up the Nanay River to the Butterfly Farm landing ~ a pleasant ten-minute ride ~ and at the landing we caught another motokar up to the farm. They raise butterflies there for release, and we were shown eggs, caterpillars, pupae and recently hatched butterflies.

Here are some scenes from there, and I hope you'll excuse my fuzzy photo of the pink uakari monkey ~ it was running free and grabbing things, like that mosquito repellent bottle in its hand, from the visitors, and we were not interested in sticking around to be vandalized! Osmar was responsible for seeing that I remained in one piece, a responsibility he took very seriously. BTW, that's a capybara in the center picture, a rodent the size of a spaniel. After an hour or two, we hailed a motokar to return to Iquitos.

Osmar and I started to get acquainted on our motokar rides, exchanging information and Osmar pointing out interesting things to me and sharing his knowledge of Iquitos. He showed me the street up which his family lives, and with his fair English and my poor Spanish I think we managed to understand most of what we tried to say. He said he was 22 and lives at home between guiding stints at Otorongo Lodge, where we'd head the next morning.

Now he delivered me to my room at La Pascana, and I went back out by myself onto the Boulevard above the Amazon to see the sights for the afternoon and evening. It was a great experience, and I met and talked with vendors and people I met on the street, bought a macrame bottle holder for 6 nuevos soles (the equivalent of $2), purchased some spare batteries and a snack in a corner store, admired the colonial architecture, and ate dinner at a restaurant overlooking the Amazon. The Iquitos people are the friendliest people I have ever met. Many speak a little English, and I speak a little Spanish, and it was fun to try to make myself understood.

For instance, I was examining a large beetle I had found on the sidewalk when an Iquitos man came over and explained in fairly good English that this was edible in its pupal form, and that its larvae could be found on a nearby tree. The discussion shifted to other Peruvian customs, and he showed me his portfolio which he was carrying. We must have chatted for half an hour. He took the photo of me holding the beetle, above.

Over dinner I got into conversations with an ex-pat at the next table and with an old lady vendor selling kekes (cakes) up and down the Boulevard. I had a wonderful time experimenting with the few Spanish words and phrases I know. Finally, exhausted and filled to overflowing with new sights, sounds and experiences, I walked back to my hostel and crawled into bed.

What a fine collection of experiences on my first Peruvian day!

Leaving Costa Rica ~ Dec. 19, 2010

2011-01-15T13:51:00.000-08:00

12/19
When I woke up it was raining a torrent. Hmmm...this did pose a problem for the adventurer who hates rain down her neck. However, there were lots of things on my little deck table to sketch.

So as soon as it was light enough (6:30ish) I was tackling the pile of treasures I'd collected on the beach the day before, including some odd little horned things that look like bullhorn acacia seedpods. Anybody know anything about these in Costa Rica? I've seen something similar in Kenya, but I didn't know they were here...(I just googled "bullhorn acacia," and that's what it is, for sure!)

As I sat sketching in the dim morning light, the flock of Great Curassows flitted by again. These big birds (turkey size) move very fast, and this was the best picture I could get ~ all the others were blurred. The males are solid black with a yellow beak decorations, but the females are this wonderful cinnamon red with barred tails and those tasselled black-and-white topknots! Stunning!

Later that morning, during a lull in the rain, I decided that I was going hiking anyway. The uppermost trail, Passiflora, beckoned, and I took off with my sketching bag encased in a plastic bag to protect my sketchbook and watercolor pencils from a possible shower. Here's the Passiflora Trail at right looking a bit mysterious.

There were lots of things to see, including lichen-striped trees, termite nests attached to monkey-ladder vines, and monkey-ladder vines in tangles. I stopped to watch squirrel monkeys in the trees overhead, and then, in a pattering rush, rain was coming down. I raced for the nearest tree with dense leaves and pressed up against the trunk (glad it wasn't a thorny one!).

A good, dense canopy like the one at left can provide fair shelter for a short rain, then water starts dripping through and you have to dodge around a bit to find a dry spot. I never did take out my sketchbook on that hike.

The wet earth and bark gave off a spicy, earthy scent, and as the rain shower trailed off to mist I resumed my hike, soon coming across these pretty woody flowers, which I sketched later under drier circumstances.

But I was starting to feel forlorn ~ this was my last full day at El Remanso, as I was scheduled to catch a plane the next day. Of course, WHERE that plane was going was really exciting, but still......

But to cheer me up, Mother Nature sent along another adventure. Adri saw me sketching heliconias along a path and asked if I'd seen the boa.

"No!" I exclaimed, and she grinned, saying "Then come see!" and led me to a tall shrub near the swimming pool where, right at eye level, a small boa constrictor was engulfing a Great Crested Flycatcher (Gera had identified the bird ~ it was way too far down the snake's gullet for me to tell).

The boa had apparently been waiting, hidden by leaves, when the bird landed on the branch next to it. The bird was no match for the small snake, which immediately wrapped itself around the bird and squeezed. So much for Tweety-bird! When I got there, the boa had been engulfing the flycatcher for more than an hour.

The snake had anchored its body to the branch with a couple of tail loops, and hung down below, coiled twice around the bird. With glacial speed, it was patiently inching its mouth upward around the bird's chest, which was probably three times the diameter of the snakes body. In the long photo at left, the widest part of the snake, right below the yellow feathers, is the snake's open mouth. The little pink blob at center is its lower front "lip."

Standing only inches away, I sketched and photographed the process. There was only time to get the outline in the fading light, so I took photos to help me finish it later. The whole process took several hours. Having gotten there late, it was dark by the time I finished sketching. By by the light of my flashlight I could see the yellow breast feathers and rufous wing feathers through the stretched-tight skin of the snake's belly. The whole adventure was, in a word, awesome.

By the way, the last picture of the boa's dinner, at right, was taken at dusk. On the disk, I could scarcely see the image. But in Photoshop I was able to improved the contrast considerably, since you can see it pretty well here. I still haven't added the boa's markings to my sketch yet. Maybe by the time I do the tutorial (next month) I will be able to show Before and After images of The Snake's Dinner.

Tomorrow I'll write about leaving Costa Rica and arriving in amazing Iquitos, Peru (not Quito, Ecuador ~ that's a different place).

'Til then!

To Costa Rica, -- Dec. 17&18, 2010

2011-01-14T10:40:00.000-08:00

12/17
Today was the first ever designated Audubon Christmas Bird Count Day for this part of the Osa Peninsula -- history in the making, and I was part of it. What an honor! Actually, anyone with binoculars who wanted to participate was invited, so off we went with Gerardo (pronounced Hair-ardo), the naturalist, up El Remanso's Ridge Trail to see what we could see.

Gera is the BEST naturalist ever, and I count him as a special friend, having first met him in 2007 on his first day at El Remanso. He can answer almost any question put to him, and if he doesn't know, he'll say so. He's an excellent guide to the mysteries of the tropical forest. Here he's holding an anole lizard, having just shown us how it flips out a colorful flag on its chin to warn off intruders or impress the ladies (lady anole lizards, that is).

We saw many wonders, from sloths to trogons (and numerous other birds) to squirrels and a coati nestled on a branch overhead. Gera cut open a tiny fig fruit and we were able to observe the tiny fig wasps which pollinate it (be sure to look at it close-up ~ there's one near the tip of my thumb).

Later that afternoon we took one of the Lodge trucks with seats along the sides of the bed and bounced off down the road to find more birds, including this toucan I photographed through Gera's spotting scope.

We kept getting distracted by monkeys, though, actually seeing all four species that live here along the road to our specified birding site, a large open meadow with a fringe of trees. Which monkeys? Well, there were howlers, spider monkeys, squirrel monkeys (with at least one baby in the troop) and capuchin monkeys. I never have much luck photographing monkeys in the dark trees, but at least this howler is recognizable as a monkey....

During this day ~ along Ridge Trail, the road to the Lodge and in the meadow ~ we spied about 79 species, including Smooth-billed Anis, White-necked Puffbird, Crested Caracara, Bare-throated Tiger Heron, Mangrove Cuckoo, Mangrove Black Hawk, and many others. We likely would have tallied more if we hadn't kept being distracted by other fascinating things, but I guess I'd be pretty stupid to complain about such a "dreadful" circumstance!

Dinner that night was so gorgeous I couldn't help taking a photo of it. All dinners in the restaurant are served by candlelight to keep electricity use to a minimum ~ in keeping with El Remanso's efforts to maintain a low footprint in the ecosystem. The presentation of all the meals is exquisite, and this braised fish was no exception.

I didn't get much sketching today. It was all images "in" and few images "out" although I managed a little drawing of a Slaty-tailed Trogon which I watched for several minutes from the railing of the restaurant. You can see the trogon in the image at right, in the center along the main trunk if you look at it close-up. Since the restaurant is high above the ground, you can look DOWN into the trees for lots of great sightings.

12/18 (my dad's birthday ~ he would have been 109 today!)
After yesterday's birding activity, I was all set for some solo adventuring and major sketching, so I took the trail down to the beach, pausing frequently to appreciate the flora along the way.

I'd been hoping to find an Ojo de Buey, which is the Ox-eye seed that grows on a vine along the trail. Imagine my delight to find the vine producing huge, fresh seedpods. I reached up to touch the fuzzy surface and immediatly got a handful of tiny spines! It took me ten minutes to pull them all out. Glad I had my binoculars ~ looking at the stickers through the wrong end magnified them enormously and I was able to get all those little buggers out. Ouch!

Looking around, I was able to find two seeds from last year along the trail. What beauties! One was to be for Daniel. Sure wish he had been able to come along ~ but I was having a blast nevertheless.

Continuing down the hill and out onto the sand, I was met in the very first minute by a scarlet macaw gleaning almonds in the beach almond tree at the foot of the trail. Beach almond trees almost always have some red and yellow leaves, so the macaw was amazingly difficult to see. I was able to get a quick outline sketch of another one I saw further down the beach, then I was delighted to find a bedraggled-but-beautiful macaw feather washed up by the waves.

I came across what for a brief moment I took to be a set of tractor tracks in the sand ~ but then remembering that there are no tractors around, I realized it was the trail of a sea turtle coming from the ocean to lay her eggs, then returning to sea. I sketched the tracks and the nest site, then continued on down the beach, picking up seedpods and fallen tree flowers to sketch as I went.

Snuggling into my favorite sketching spot in the shade of a huge black rock just yards from the surf, I sketched until my bum was numb (good thing I brought that little sitting pad, or I wouldn't have lasted as long!). Here's part of one sketch page ~ the end of the feather crossed over onto the facing page. I really like this drawing.

After a break I sketched other things I'd found on the sand, discovered some ocelot tracks (they look like big house-cat tracks), then headed back up the trail for lunch. But I almost missed lunch when I got seriously sidetracked by an amazing thing I hadn't seen on my trip down earlier...

At first glance, it was obviously a clump of mushrooms. But these "mushrooms" had evenly spaced bumps on them (no mushroom has those), and the oldest, wilted-looking one had actual flowers poking up out of each bump! Gera later identified it for me as Helosis cayennensis (it IS cayenne-colored) and not all that commonly seen. What a thrill!

During happy hour in the restaurant lounge, I decided to try drawing by the light of my battery-powered book-light (remember, it gets dark on the equator by 6pm), and I am happy to report that it works extraordinarily well. Here's a balsa pod I drew and painted with watercolor pencils solely by the light of the booklight (plus a candle, delivered by the waiter, Eljer, unasked, to light the pod). It worked perfectly!

That meant I'd have evenings to draw and sketch both here and later on the Amazon (I packed extra batteries, just in case). With this realization, I grinned, put up my feet, and relaxed with my Margarita. The perfect end to a great day.

To Costa Rica, Then The Amazon 12-15&16-2010

2011-01-13T16:21:00.000-08:00

My computer has been in the shop for the last week being exorcised of a whole slew of viruses, so I've had lots of time to think, but no chance to get my blog started. At last, here we go!

December 15 - Aloft! Finally, after months of planning, map examining, and googling such things as dugout canoes, the Amazon River and pink river dolphins, then spending hours weighing, packing and repacking my carry-on luggage, getting yellow fever shots and visiting travel sites.....I was at last on my way.

The first part of the trip felt familiar, the journey to El Remanso Wildlife Lodge in Costa Rica is, by now, a part of my beaten track since I've been there many times. But it never loses its allure, and I was so glad to be headed to the warm perfume of the tropics from 20°F., blustery, wintery, Oregon.

The first image above, taken from my plane window, is Mt. Hood (Oregon) from the southwest, shrouded with clouds but with its telltale lenticular (lens-shaped) cloud floating above like a halo.

The journey started at 1am in the Medford, Oregon airport, when Dan'l delivered me to the near-empty airport for the first leg of my trip: Medford-Portland-Dallas/Ft.Worth-San José, Costa Rica. The plane wouldn't leave Medford until 5am, but that meant I had to be there by 3am (for international flights you're supposed to appear 2 hours before the flight) and I didn't want Dan missing sleep because he had to work the next day. So I slept as best I could through the every-four-minutes-I-timed-them announcements to tell me to Watch My Bags, Ask My Airline What Should Be In Carry-on Luggage, Pack My Own Luggage, and other Embecilic Messages offered for midnight consideration while people are trying to sleep. Egad!

But enough complaining. The rest of the flight went just great, with time for sketching and lots of cloud-watching. One of the best things that happened was the $35 I splurged on a massage in a little concourse spa in Dallas/Ft.Worth. I recommend it highly.

I arrived in San José well after dark, but I had arranged for my hotel, Dunn Inn, to send a car for me, and the driver was waiting with a sign that said "Irene" on it, so I could relax and let the driver do all the work. That cost me $25, and was well worth it. Parlaying with taxi drivers in Espanol (mi Espanol es mal) is pretty tricky.

Dunn Inn a good little hotel, clean, with a pleasant staff, and not expensive. Here's my room from the hall, and my two carry-on pieces, sketchbook and camera, plus a suitcase full of goodies for Adriana and Daniel at El Remanso.

The next morning after a quick breakfast, I snapped a photo of the front of the hotel (it looks much like an ordinary house except for the hanging sign) as my hotel driver took me to the Sansa airport. That's my plane in distant center. I didn't count, but I'd estimate there are 16-20 seats in it. I love flying in small planes, and it was an unusually smooth trip. I was sketching a good part of the way.

Upon arriving at Puerto Jimenez, I noticed a pair of toucans gobbling up ripe papayas in a tree right next to the Lodge's airport office. I sketched and photographed them while waiting for my ride to El Remanso, about half an hour. Can you see the toucan? The orange oval in the clump of papayas is the stem of a papaya that was entirely consumed.

Adri had warned me that the rains had left the road to El Remanso a morass, but I had no IDEA! We were hub deep in mud a couple of times, and had to cross two rivers with water high enough to make the engine steam. It was exhilarating, and we arrived safely, having spotted lots of birds, this capuchin monkey in a palm tree, and great curassows in the treetops (more about them later).

After warm greetings, Adri showed me to my room, the spare bedroom in their house (we're distantly related ~ not everyone is so royally treated) which I was pleased to discover had an airy deck with table and chair that I could use while sketching and painting.

In the two years since I'd been there, they've been busy making the place look fabulous, with a new cabina perched out over a jungly ravine and lots of beautiful landscaping. I couldn't stop admiring the gorgeous flowers, hibiscuses, heliconias, palms, and hundreds of things I couldn't even come close to identifying.

And as always, the tree-top jungle view from the restaurant railing was absolutely stunning, with trogons, blue-throated golden-tail hummingbirds, toucans, squirrel cuckoos, scarlet-rumped caciques and many other birds, butterflies, and other creatures flying through or perching on branches just a few feet away.

Right away I started sketching: a lovely soft brown tiger moth they'd saved for me, and a huge paper wasp nest hanging over the Observation Point chairs (nice wasps, not stingers). And then, the turkey-sized Great Curassows wandered past (see the image at right)! My tropical journal sketching adventure was well and truly launched.

In past blogs I have included all the sketch pages I did on the journey. This time, though, I'll illustrate this blog mostly with my photos (plus a few journal pages to give it flavor), but I'll save the majority of the sketches for my upcoming e-journal Journey to the Osa and the Amazon, which I'll offer for download on my sketch journal site. Hmmmm...... I may give it a different name. Like, Daring Journey to Darkest Peru, or something dramatic like that.

I plan to make a tutorial for it, too, showing the scenes I was sketching, decisions I made to create the pages, design problems I ran into, the mistakes I managed to gloss over, and photos of the marvels I didn't get a chance to sketch ~ which were legion! And since the second part of the journal covers my trip to the Amazon (an amazing journey of discovery), there will be lots of new stuff.

I can hardly wait to get to it, but I have vowed to take things in the proper order, so we'll start with my delightful stay at El Remanso on the Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica. And I'll try to do a day or two of the two-week trek every day, so stay tuned! You can check the box in the right column if you want to be advised when a new blog entry goes up.

The Big Show/Sale, and Amazona Final Bits

2010-12-14T19:56:00.000-08:00

I'm leaving on my Amazon trip in just a few hours, but I'm all ready to go so I have a few minutes to sit down and tell you what I added over the last few weeks whilst also preparing for my Big Studio Art Show and Sale. click on images to enlarge them

I'll get as far as I can before I have to get moving. First of all, the Art Sale was reasonably successful. I'll put in some pictures without much comment, and you can make of it what you will. Cathy and I traded sides this year, so I was to the right as people entered, instead of to the left.

It looked pretty nice, in my opinion. The entire rear was lined with big noble fir trees Daniel and my hired hand Justin moved into the hall and placed judiciously. The guys helped me set up tables and assemble easels, and Cathy and her helper decorated them with white lights, which gave it a festive air. You can see glimpses of them in a couple of the photos.

I put my Christmas Tree ornaments on their manzanita "tree" at the entrance, where they welcomed people and proved a good conversation piece~ as I called my role of constructing them my "guilt-free TV watching entertainment," which seemed to amuse people.

I'm getting hazy on this, but somebody somewhere had wondered if the ornaments couldn't be made to open so that people could put little gifts inside. Cathy noticed that you could glue all but one flap, which I'm showing here, put in a little something, then just press it shut. Cool!

Anyway, it took six hours to set the show up, a total of ten hours on our feet over the two days while the show was open, then about 2 hours to take it down. We made expenses and a bit over, but we've decided not to do it again next year. However, I do have an alternative up my sleeve, which I will tell you about when I get back.

It was really nice to see old friends, new friends, students, and people who've heard of me and wanted to meet me (well, I HAVE lived here for 30+ years). An old friend, Mark, came by and stayed to help disassemble the show ~ a wonderful help! By the time I finally got home, I collapsed in the chair and didn't move for a L.O.N.G. time. My feet still hurt, three days later!

But now that the show was out of the way (and believe it or not, I have completely put everything back in its place in the storage areas), I had a couple of days to UNpack all the cool stuff for my Amazon trip that I packed, what, a month ago? Then I added a few new things suggested by friends and people who have been a-travel and wanted to share. I think the entire carry-on ensemble is now up to 25lbs.

I had planned to attribute ideas to those who offered them, but it is after 8pm and I haven't had dinner yet. So I'm going to just offer these up with heartfelt thanks to those of you who suggested them.
First of all, the Plastic Pee-er. That's not its name of course, and I'm not going to tout any one brand, but here's the one I finally got, for about $10.

I blushingly admit that I have tried it out, both in the bathroom and outside. It works beautifully, and doesn't get you wet, although it feels a bit scary the first time. If you're wearing levis or tightish pants, you have to pull them far enough down that the spout can point downish (doesn't have to be much more than half an inch of incline, though). But still, that means you'd probably moon somebody standing behind you. I haven't tried this, but I'll bet you could tie a shirt around your waist, knotting the sleeves in front so that the shirt-tail hangs down in back, and no one would realize what you were up to.

Okay, the next thing is a mosquito net. I made this from some dark tulle (stuff that tutus are made of, with a very fine mesh). It's just a piece about 18" long, gathered at the top, and sewed delicately down the side by hand. I can put it over my head and imagine mosquitoes vainly trying to get in. I can see through it almost perfectly, sort of a green mist between me and my subject, but it might mean the difference between being able to sketch or not. And it might be totally superfluous, but in any event it weighs virtually nothing and takes up about as much space as a cellphone in my bag.

And finally, I wasn't satisfied with my passport pouch. I found one that looks really nice and has two zippered pockets ~ one for the passport and vaccination booklet, the other for money or whatever. Here's the two of them together. I think the new one, on the left, won't be quite so tacky looking. Plus, it's easier to get at and won't need to be tucked in and out of my waistband.

Today I got a hat, too, but I didn't get a chance to take a picture of it. It has a brim, and a skirt around the back to shade ears and neck, because malaria pills can make you sensitive to sunlight and you wouldn't want to mess around with that on your vacation.

So I'm ready to go. I finished decking out my sketchbook with paper ruler, a paper Centigrade/Fahrenheit thermometer converter, my business card. I then covered the entire back and front with clear package tape to ward off moisture and humidity, then taped in a plastic pocket to slip flat things into. I don't have a picture of that, either, but it's similar to ones I've done in previous sketchbooks, so if you have downloaded one of those you know what it looks like.

My plane leaves at 5am, which means I have to be there at 3am, but you can't ask a friend to take you to the airport at that ungodly hour when they have to work the next day, so I've arranged for Dan'l to deliver me to the airport at midnight and I'll settle down in a chair and nap. No biggie.

Thanks for sticking with me this far! See you in January!

Here's big hugs to all my friends, family and followers. I will think of you as I float down the Amazon, sweating, sunburned, happy as a clam. I hope.

Window Dressing for the Studio Sale

2010-12-07T10:32:00.000-08:00

Okay! Got the window decorated! This year's Art Show & Studio Sale is now irrevocable.

Click on images to enlarge them.

The Shakespeare Festival Great Hall front window is all properly decked out with tasteful hanging posters, illustration/book-cover/book displays for three of my books, and several other things that look very nice. The bird mobile hangs in the middle this year, instead of at the end. Much better!

I plan to go see it after dark, because the lights in the window make things look really different (prettier, actually).

I've posted your invitation to the show above. That's me standing in front of the decorated window.

Last year it took about four hours of putzing around in the window to figure everything out and get the display set up. This year it took a bit over an hour ~ a tribute to experience and preparation.

As for the Studio Sale itself, last year I learned a little bit about what people are (and are not) interested in, which means I'm not taking some things I took last year, and have added the folded ornaments and better signage on the tables. For example, here's a sign to suggest what a nice gift a book/illustration combination would make.

Last year some of my best sellers were workbooks from my sketching, journaling and watercolor pencil classes. So this year I will have a whole table devoted to them. Below is the sign that will go on that table. There are all kinds of other signs encouraging people to leaf through the books to find where the original illustration in their hands appeared, informing them about copyright laws so they won't buy a picture and believe they have bought the copyright to it as well, and many other things.

I design those signs in InDesign, my desktop publishing program, then glue the paper printout to a piece of same-size Fomecore, which is a very light-weight sheet of foam layered between paper. I tape a triangular Fomecore piece to the back to prop the sign upright ON the table.

Then, after everything is tweaked and in its place, I TAPE the signs TO the tables. In fact, anything that can fall over gets taped to the tables because last year we had unruly kids (and one unruly dog) running into tables and knocking things over. This year there will be a sign at the entrance asking people to please leave their dogs outside. Wish we could ask people to leave all Unruly Beings outside.

Artists have a great advantage in selling their work, as we can make good signs, exactly the way we want them, instead of having to rely on others to do it for us. I feel really fortunate that I have Photoshop and InDesign programs (by now OLD, but still very functional) to help me produce the art and desktop publishing. However, one could also do quite a bit of this in other programs, as well. Word will let you do some fancy word processing ~ and some programs in The Cloud provide free access for tweaking images ~ Picasa, for example, lets you tweak your photos/artwork to some extent for free.

As soon as I finish here, I will be getting out my lists from last year to help me get everything for the show/sale ready to go and packed into boxes. Then the boxes will go out into the staging area (my living room, alas) so I can keep everything together until it goes out the door on Friday morning. I think I'm pretty much ready except for this final gathering-together.

You can probably tell I'm organizing my thoughts here, so this is as much for my benefit as for you to read. It always amazes me to discover which of my detailed blogs elicit interest!

This may be my last blog before the show on Friday and Saturday. After that, I'll come back online with a blog about last-minute additions to my 22lb carry-on luggage for my sketching trip to Costa Rica and the Amazon, which begins on the 15th of December (yeah, that's right, just 3 days after the Show & Studio Sale!).

I've gotten some wonderful tips from my readers about things I should take on my expedition, which I'll share with you. I've also created a little something to deal with mosquitoes. I may not need it, but it weighs less than an ounce or two, and if I DO need it, I'll be SO happy I brought it (I'll show it to you when I post).

Mo' laytah, dear friends!

New Ornament Tree

2010-12-04T11:40:00.001-08:00

After looking critically at the little Douglas fir tree I'd planned to use to display my ornaments (see at left), I went back out into the woods with my pruning shears and my saw, looking for a nice bushy manzanita branch. Click to enlarge images.

Here's what I returned with, and I must say, it looks a lot better than what it replaced (plus, I got a good dose of fresh air and sunshine)!

I had to lock JesseCat in the bathroom in order to decorate the little tree and take its picture, and only let him out when it was de-decorated. He is SO opinionated about where the ornaments should go (not on trees), and kept removing them with the wickedest of looks and skating them across the floor.... Here's what it looks like with the ornaments on it.

I think it will work okay. Maybe I'll put some flowerpot foil around the pot. I have the sand in it covered with lichens to improve its looks.

Just curious ... would YOU pay $1 for a little ornament and $1.50 for one of the bigger ones? How about 50¢ for an uncut sheet with one big one or two little ones on it? The ornament in the picture at right is the large size. Any suggestions?

I'm not even sure anyone will buy them. I may have to give them away with purchases. Well, at least they're colorful, and they're fun to make, so no big deal.

Window Dressing the ArtShow & Sale

2010-12-03T19:07:00.000-08:00

It's time to do the window dressing for my Art Show and Studio Sale on December 10-11 and you are invited! I bought some underwriting on our local NPR station. The ad goes like this (although we're supposed to say "underwriting" not "ad":

Broadcast of this program is made possible in part by artist and illustrator, Irene Brady, and fine artists Cathy Egelston Mahoney and Belle Mahoney, joining our listeners in supporting JPR. These artists are presenting an Art Show and Studio Sale featuring hundreds of original childrens' book and nature magazine illustrations, drawings, watercolors, acrylic paintings, and prints on Friday, December 10, 4 to 8 pm and Saturday, December 11, eleven to five pm at the Shakespeare Festival Great Hall, 70 East Main Street, Ashland. Pre-views available at www.natureworkspress.com.

The FCC rules make it awkward ~ we wanted to say "You are invited to our Art Show..." but that's not allowed. And there can be no 'calls to action' such as "Come buy some art!" Ah well.

*********************************

The actual window dressing will happen on Monday, in three days, so I spent a large part of today making sure I had everything I need to make it look good.

Here's what it looked like last year, and while I don't plan to change it a lot, I will improve a few things. The important thing, Monday morning, will be to have everything all together and ready to go: the art, the easel and other props, the drape to cover the step-stool (which will hold pictures), the printed signs mounted on Fome-Core, a step-ladder to help hang things, and all the little bits and pieces, like scissors, tape, etc. It's ten miles to Ashland from my house, and I don't want to have to come back for something!

So this afternoon I was pre-assembling everything from scratch to make sure I had all the stuff to put each section together. Jesse, my mischievous cat, helped immensely with advice on placement (some of which he generously tweaked into better positions for me). You can see him proudly showing off his arrangement in the photo of Living Treasure artwork, above.

Last year, I climbed up into the display window with my heap of artwork and gear ~ and my mind went blank. So this year I'll take a printout of the picture of the entire window. For changes I made, I assembled them and took photos. I'll take the photos with me as reference.

It's also important to remember how I assembled these arrangements, so I took "behind the scene's" photos to remind myself how I set them up (see above right).

The step-stool supports my Redrock Canyon Explorer cover art and some inside art as shown here. The drape is a big velour bathtowel (it actually looks pretty good).

Last year I didn't have anything for sale for less than $5. With the economy so lax I thought it might be nice to provide some little hand-constructed ornaments this year for $1.50 or $2.00 each. So I created a couple of folded octahedron ornaments, one with a chickadee, one with a scampering chipmunk, and had my brother print them up for me. The last many nights I have sat folding and gluing as I watched TV, actually having a nice time with it....'simple minded' perhaps.....

But I won't get them all glued up, so I thought I might just sell the printed sheets for 50¢ each and let folks make their own if they want (see the printed sheets at right).

I'm not quite sure what to do about displaying them, so I thought maybe a twiggy branch might work.

It was pretty outside today, with a light layer of snow on the leaves, which looks very strange ~ I don't know why the oaks still have green/yellow leaves on the branches the first of December, but there you see it! And since it was nice outside I decided I'd better get out there and try to find a "tree" to hang the hand-made ornaments from.

Here's what I ended up with. It's still drying out by my wood stove, with some bonsai-type tying and tweaking to make it stand straight and persuade the branches to go where I want. I tied the twigs to a chopstick to guide them. This a pretty poor picture, so I should tell you it's a Douglas fir seedling (dead) with lots of lichens on it. I stuck it in a flowerpot with some wet sand, and I hope it will be dry by tomorrow morning.

But Jesse is such a pill that I don't dare hang the ornaments to try it out. I could tell you tales of trashed Christmas trees in years past, but it is way too depressing to contemplate. So I will secretly hang some tomorrow, briefly, then make my decision. Outside temperatures are supposed to be in the 50s this weekend, to I'll have another chance if this doesn't light up the cockles of my heart.

It is so hard for me to concentrate on this Art Show! I am really excited about it, but I am even more excited about my trip to Costa Rica and The Amazon, which will begin just a few days after the show. Still, one thing at a time...

I have located a marvelous house sitter, Marco, who will stay here the entire time I'm gone. I've had trouble getting/keeping housesitters because Jesse launches surprise sorties at their legs, so this time I'm putting Jesse in a kennel (his kennel room features a window with a bird feeder outside, and a separate playroom he gets to visit for an hour a day). And it's just as well, because Marco has a dog ~ looks sort of like a pit bull/lab cross to me ~ which he PROMISES me will not chew the furniture. I'm so pleased to have someone here to keep the house warm and pipes unfrozen! And he even knows how to use a woodstove. I am WAY lucky!

Here's Jesse, asking nicely for a tidbit ~ my live-in clown.

And with that, I'm back to Art Show preparations. Now that I've cleared the decks of the window dressing mess (it's all stacked in the livingroom, ready to go) I can start packing for the show itself. More later.