Sketch/Journal in Progress

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!

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.