Sketching at the Black Sheep

I was supposed to have a workshop this last weekend, but only 3 signed up, so I reluctantly canceled. I'll be teaching the same workshop, Basic Nature Drawing, again in July, so perhaps they'll sign up again, with a lot more company.

Since I had this unexpected bonus of time, I used it to catch up on things -- like reassembling my kitchen from its construction orgy last week. I finally have most of the stuff into the new cupboards.

It still isn't done, as I have a huge cedar "plank," 6'x3'x3" sitting in my yard on sawhorses, wrapt in a tarp against rain and snow, awaiting my ministrations as sander. A huge task. It's still too wet and cold to deal with. Maybe next week! The plank is destined to be a counter/bar, and since my house is pretty rustic, it should fit right in.

And on Sunday, I went to The Black Sheep Pub again to sketch the Celtic Jam Irish musicians. I've been experimenting with design elements, and I really like how this major sketch came out (I did a couple of small ones I didn't scan in). The musician on the left, one of my favorites, turned his chair, left and came back then switched to playing the "bones" while I was trying to draw him, so he ended up just holding his guitar in the sketch. I love how he dresses the part, in the old-fashioned pin-striped shirt with its simple buttoned collar, the green vest, and that hat. I could only see the girl's head, with that wonderful hat and hair, and I THINK, in retrospect, that she was playing a different instrument. I only got a glimpse of it, and I think it was tear-shaped instead of a violin shape. Ah well...... There were ten of them playing yesterday, seven men and three women. This is just the ones that were closest (and somewhat visible).

When I visit one of my groups, EverydayMatters, I'm always entranced with the heavily designed pages/drawings people do in their journals. Up to this point I've been fairly simple in my renderings, mostly without backgrounds. So maybe I'll give this concept a ride in future entries. The box/line around it really does hold it together!

My Intermediate Nature Drawing workshop is weekend after next, the 21st, so I'll post that next time.

Robbie and the Haggis

This post is a bit of an aside, not being about a workshop, but since it happened because of a workshop it deserves its place in the sun. When my last student had gone, after my workshop last weekend, the weather was dim and rainy and I felt in need of a bit of gaiety, so I stopped by The Black Sheep Pub on the way home thinking to have a jar of ale and perhaps sketch the Irish Jam musicians playing their usual Sunday afternoon gig.

Imagine my surprise to find it packed with folk, the Irish music barely audible from the stairs, and three Scotsmen in plaid kilts standing by the bar! All the chairs were taken ~ I circled the room trying to cadge one from every table, but they were all being saved. So I crept behind the menu board at the top of the stairs and pulled out a folding chair and edged my way back with it to the only free spot remaining (and my favorite place, anyway) right next to the Irish musicians.

For awhile I just relaxed, for workshops are hard work and it felt good to sip my Guinness and just float with the music. Then I got out my sketchpad and sketched a piper and one of the Scotsmen with his bagpipe. And as things started to get really interesting, I began to write:

"The Black Sheep is dim with late afternoon light. The blue-black ceiling, covered with gold stars, hangs high over the rich tapestry of Irish tunes woven from the warp of fiddle and heavy thumping heels and a weft of flute, guitar, banjo and box. The air is redolent with Guinness and what must be baking haggis, neeps and tatties [I discerned this from a little menu I found on the table].

A fiddler rises, bow flying, from his chair in the group and crouches nearby, all solemn and gay at the same time, to fiddle the tune for a small child, entranced, held in the lap of a listening mother. Other mothers dance with their children in the very small open area, and a colleen with carroty hair jigs with her portly companion, his hand tucked neatly behind him at his waist in the Irish fashion. Both of them are improbably light on their flying middle-aged feet. All around me, toes tap, fingers jig on tabletops. My foot wags to the beat.

As I sit, the Scottish trio, with humming drone and a screeling of pipes, circles the pub behind a waiter bearing a silver platter of haggis, to deliver it, all brown and steaming, onto the next table.

Now our Jim Finnegan has declaimed Robbie Burns' famous ode to haggis with marvelous verve to great applause, and one of the pipers ceremoniously stabbed the great roll roundly with a big knife. Finally a kitchen drudge has marched off to the scullery with it to serve it up, with neeps and tatties, to the folk who would have some.

In case you wonder, haggis consists of a finely ground mash of suet, oats, liver, kidneys, heart, blood and possibly tripe of the sheep, heavily spiced and stuft into a sheep's stomach, then baked. On the menu 'tis offered as:
"Haggis wi' Bashit Neeps and' Champit Tatties, $12.50."

I shall have some.

The Irish Jam strikes up again, the Scotsmen having sat down to await their treat. My Guinness stands at half mast as I eagerly await my haggis and tatties. The very air vibrates with heel thumps, heavy strumming of guitar, voices shouting to be heard, and the swirling fiddle and pipes. Laughter rises and dances around the ceiling, weaving through the painted stars (my, that Guinness is good!), as the bagpipe drummer clicks his "spoons" idly, and waiters thread their way through dancers and laughing revelers.

AHH! My Haggis, Bashit Neeps (bashed turnips) and Champit Tatties (champed potatoes) has arrived, and I am savoring it. There is much ado about whether haggis is actually edible, and I am here to tell you that "aye, 'tis good!" How could this Scotch-Irish girl reach this advanced age before getting her first taste? 'Tis spicy and musky, hot and steaming, and truly, most excellent.

Jim Finnegan just sang 'My Heart's in the Highlands" in a voice fit to be heard the entire length o' th' green, followed by 'Auld Lang Syne' joined by the entire pubful of roistering folk. The bagpipes came in on the last verse, and it ended with hoots and hollers, shouts and whistles.

It's after five, now, and the bagpipers have begun winding a final path through the pub, screeling and tat-a-tatting as they play 'Scotland the Brave' on their way to the door.

It's time for me to go home. What a wonderful unexpected celebration for this tired lady on a rainy January Sunday evening!"


Later this week I hope to get up the pictures and entry about the last workshop. I tried several new things, and I think you'll enjoy seeing how they came out.

Promoting the Workshop & Drawing Irish Musicians

Stuffing Envelopes is kind of soothing. I am a great one for organizing movements (I was totally impressed by the efficiency scenes on how to take a bath in Cheaper By The Dozen, many decades ago) . The envelopes are placed with the flaps in THIS direction, the flyers are placed with the opening THIS way, the single-sheet 1/3 page inserts are placed here with THIS orientation, and the business cards face up and to the right HERE. Then I can pick up the envelope in my left hand and flip up the flap with one movement, then with my right hand I slide in the flyer, then the insert, then the business card. I let the flap flip down and push the filled envelope onto my lower legs as they extend directly past the end of the board toward the TV. Hey, it's smoooooth, fast, and I can watch Masterpiece Theater at the same time as I get all 90 envelopes stuffed, then stamped, then return-address-labeled, then licked. Talk about efficiency!

The insert is really pretty. I designed and printed them out on the color printer yesterday, 3 per sheet. Quite fetching, I think. Makes ME want to go to the workshop, anyway.

I was happy to have a soothing evening, because I had a raucus afternoon. My artist friend Cathy and I went to the Black Sheep in Ashland for a Sunday afternoon of sketching the Irish musicians. It was only a small group because that's all that showed up (it's totally off the cuff, and whoever comes, plays -- if enough people show up). So yesterday featured five musicians at its highest count (they came and went), plus a very talented clogger who only dances (he also carves quite marvelous walking sticks).

Cathy tried ink sketching for the first time. She's an excellent artist, but always sketches with a pencil and had never tried on-scene sketching with a pen. She decided today was the day. So we both drew with ballpoint pens, and she was unexpectedly pleased with the freedom it offered. She observed that with pencil drawing she is always fussing around with erasing and getting the lines just right. But with the ink drawing one has to just dive right in, and make the line, right or wrong. Knowing that some lines won't be right, you just have to shrug and think "okay, so now if I squiggle here, it'll look like a hand and be just fine!" A really nice epiphany.

Juiced up with a couple of "The One And Only" Newcastle Brown Ales (on draft) and using an ordinary black Bic ballpoint pen, I was experimenting with making quick original drawings, then fussing back in with a little more detail to give the drawings interest. Hair, seams on the jeans and shoes, details on a neck warmer, etc. As we sketched, the Irish music flowed and jigged around us. While The Black Sheep is a pub, there are generally little children running around, sometimes trying to dance to the music, and yesterday playing with balloons. I loved it when several times the pennywhistler's toddler climbed up into his lap and sat, rapt with pleasure, as the wild notes swirled above his head.

The baby's mother and grandmother had come for the afternoon, as well, and they loved the drawing of little Rowan on his daddy's lap. I told them to come to this blog, where they should be able to download the picture if they wanted a copy. [Hey pennywhistle folks, if you come for the picture, could you give the address of this blog to the other musicians so that they can come visit, too? I don't have their names, and if you'd pass this along they might be pleased.] I do know the baby's name is Rowan and the pennywhistler is Andrew, but that's the extent of my introduction.

It was, as always, a wonderful afternoon of music, companionship with Cathy, and pleasure in sharing the sketches with numerous passersby and the musicians. Rowan's mother tried to explain about the picture to Rowan, and he patted it appreciatively, but I don't think he quite got the concept of "this is a picture of daddy, and this lady drew it, and there you are on daddy's lap!"

My thanks to the musicians for a lovely afternoon. They are a wonderful sketching resource since they expect to be stared at, and don't mind being drawn.

And now, today, I have to get back to work on the editing of the Swamp book. I'm on page 41 now, and have begun to improve sub-par illustrations as I go along because I get bogged down in words after awhile. Stopping to correct or improve a drawing makes a nice break.

Later!

Irish Musicians and a Big-Time Computer Crash

WELL! I have had quite a month! My computer crashed with a resounding thump the third week of August as I was preparing the workbooks for my newest workshop, the one I've been chronicling here. It has taken me quite awhile and quite a jouncy ride to get a new computer up and running, the workbooks finished and off to the printer so they could arrive here in time for the class, and to finish gathering teaching materials and getting ready to teach that class. WHEW!

Below is the entry I managed to prepare the week after the crash (but never got a chance to post), and now I'm already in the middle of the Journaling workshop so it is slightly out of date -- but there's some really interesting news in it so I'm going to post this tonight and then post the info about the workshop (how it went, what I'll have to change, and other cool stuff, plus pictures) tomorrow or the next day. So start reading, and keep tooned.

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drafted about August 25 but never posted:

My Journaling Workshop is Official!

Hoo boy, it's for real now! My classified ad just appeared in the September issue of The Artist's Magazine (page 84, top left corner!), and I have two students signed up already plus the magazine has sent me "leads" from people who registered interest in it. Looks like it's a go! I need to send out info to those leads soon!

I spent some time putting my Journaling Workshop web page together, too, and I think it looks pretty exciting. El Remanso, the wildlife lodge in Costa Rica which is hosting the workshops, has also put up a web page about it.

I have my first go at the class in just a couple of weeks here in The Rogue Valley (that's what they call this area, since the mighty Rogue River, of Rooster Cogburn fame runs through it). The class is listed on page 33 of the Ashland Parks and Recreation Guide along with the new venture that fellow artist Cathy Egelston and I are going to try, which is leading sketching rambles in Lithia park on the 2nd and 4th Mondays in October and November.

I've heard of other artists going out and sketching with whoever shows up for the "crawl" and thought it sounded like fun -- so we'll give it a try. Since Cathy and I both teach in the area, we figured it might be a nice way to get acquainted with potential students -- they can come and get a free look at us before committing time and their hard-earned money to a class or workshop.

My workbooks aren't finished yet, though. I had finished the sketching workbook and was putting the finishing touches on the writing workbook when my barely-2-year-old computer crashed. Gone. Have you noticed how time seems to pass by so quickly as we get older? Well, I thought I'd backed up just a few days before, and it turned out it was three WEEKS before. I lost a lot of work I'd put beau coup time into, and I also lost all my email for the last many years, all my contacts, etc. And I lost EVERYTHING in the workbooks.

Actually, I'd printed out a fairly recent draft (with only (!) a couple of days of improvement lost), but I'm in Oregon and my InDesign program disk was accidentally left in Idaho last time I went, so there was no time to start over and no time to get it here with the Labor Day Weekend in the way. So I've been scanning all the printed draft pages into Photoshop, making the needed changes graphically, and I'll put those into pdfs to send to the printer. They'll work fine -- it's just not how I planned to spend my week!

And oh, if you've ever had your computer croak on you, you'll know the agony of sitting down to do something and discovering that something needs installing, or you're missing a beloved program that you only had on your computer and have no way to replace.

So it's been a tough week, but at least my new computer is up and running and my old scanner works again, so, soon I will scan in some of the things I've been sketching. It was SO much fun drawing the Irish musicians again last week! Thirteen of them at one point, with harp, bodhran (drum), mandolin, guitar, fiddle, pipes, bones, box, button accordian, and banjo (hope I didn't forget anything!).