Tucson Sketching Trip

(Sorry, couldn't resist)

Some people like their Christmas to be decorated with snowmen and conifer boughs weighed down with snow. I prefer to see lots of green, preferably steamy palms and junglish things.   

Christmas Cholla

This year I compromised and opted for a sketching trip with saguaro cactus and Christmas cholla. Contrary to my high hopes, I didn't escape the cold much, it being 25° several nights as I camped out in my rental Jeep SUV in the desert.

Saguaros in the Catalina Mts.

Actually, I had a lovely time during the days, when the temperatures ranged between 50° and 70,° but suffice it to say that spending from 5:30pm (when the sun goes down) till 9am the next morning (when it has finally gotten warm enough to bear getting up) inside an SUV is not ideal.

My "camper"

I had come prepared to camp out, with a little cat food can camp stove which I had made myself from an aluminum cat food can and a paper punch after finding instructions on YouTube given by this tattooed dude. 

The stove is sitting  in the skillet

BTW, you only need about half as many holes as he suggests. I also figured out that if you put the stove in a skillet and shape aluminum foil around it as I show in my photo, it makes a fine windbreak and confines the heat to where you want it. In the skillet, the flame is protected and the skillet and foil also protect your surroundings from wayward heat.

The stove here is out of sight UNDER the flattish pan, which is half full of my coffee water heating up, and the uppermost can is full of ravioli which I was warming up in the hot water.  It's a super stove in terms of being lightweight and taking up NO space, but you should experiment with it before you go camping to figure out how much fuel you'll need.  If you can't find Heet, denatured alcohol will work, but it's much more expensive. 

Ready to sketch

I sketched and journaled every day. While most of the time, I simply sat to sketch in the sand or perched on a rock, there were times when fallen cactus spines made this unwise. If my canvas chair was handy (I bought it on arrival for $6.95 at a sporting goods store) I'd set it up and draw in comfort. I sat in front of this cactus for a long time, sketching its demise, an astonishing sight.

Dead saguaro

For the first week, I stayed in Gilbert Ray County Park, a marvelous little campground west of Tucson in Tucson Mountain Park. I could step off my campsite into seemingly untouched saguaro/cholla/mesquite desert, and sketch to my heart's content.  

The people there were super nice ~ both the people who looked after it and the people in RVs and campers whom I met there: Jim, who offered me a heater to use during the cold nights, and made coffee for me in the chilly mornings; the folks who needed an aspirin for a hangover, then invited me for breakfast and admired my sketches...I met a lot of nice people on this trip.

Just across the road from the campground was a series of nature trails with lots more sketching opportunities.

Don't swing your arms whenwalking oast chollas!

This Barrel Cactus was one of many along the trail.  And walking along a trail through the Cholla was an other-worldly experience!

Daniel had lent me a cellphone for this trip, which meant that I could access my email and explain to people trying to order books that I would take care of it after my return in January..


Since I was spending as many as 14-15 hours in the "camper," I had brought along a tablet upon which I could read ebooks. That proved to be a real sanity saver as I could wrap up in my sleeping bag and fleece blankets to keep warm and read through the many long hours of darkness ~ after I finished sketching, of course.   

In the future, I'm determined to choose winter destinations SOUTH of the equator,  where it will be summer and there are more daylight hours than dark hours. Fifteen hours is WAY too long to spend cramped up in a car, and at 25°. there aren't a lot of other options when you're 20 miles from town.  Like I said, the days were lots better than the nights. Ah but the days!!!!

 

Great Horned Owl

Harris's Hawk

Gilbert Ray campground is fewer than ten miles from the famous Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. If you ever get a chance to go there, don't miss it.  One of their features is the raptor free-flight performances at 10 and 2 every day.  

I was able to photograph owls and hawks that you normally would spend months or years (or never) getting this close to.  

 These photos were taken during the birds' performance. They were all flying free in the desert, under no restraints. But if you'll notice, the Great Horned Owl and the Redtail perched on the same branch.

Barn Owl

Red-tailed Hawk

Great Horned Owl

     









There were other marvels at the Museum, as well.  I had a great time sketching the Desert Bighorn Sheep.  I suppose I MIGHT have seen Bighorns if I'd hiked to the top  of the mountains east of Tucson. But not likely.  

Their enclosure is about as real-looking as you're likely to find, and they're apparently contented, the ewe having produced offspring more than once while living there. She's the one with the smaller horns.   
There is other wildlife that chooses to live in the museum, as well, it being such a nice place.  This lovely cardinal apparently lives on the grounds.  
 
Unfortunately, campers are only allowed to stay at Gilbert Ray for seven days, then they shoo you out to make your way in the world.  There are more campgrounds east of Tucson, but before I went I visited Saguaro National Park (West) to see the famous Hohokam Petroglyphs, which perch on a nearby hilltop.

Hohokam petroglyphs

Here are the sketches I managed, peering around others as they came to respectfully examine them. 

I wonder what these petroglyphs were meant to convey.......... 

I ended up with twenty five pages of sketches ~ not bad for about twelve actual sketching days (that doesn't count flying-to-and-fro time or provisioning days spent at the grocery and sporting goods stores). 

In order to do as much sketching as possible, I didn't take the time to color ANY of the sketches. Evenings in the cold car didn't lend themselves to artwork because cold fingers don't easily grasp the ballpoint pen, which was my tool of choice here, or watercolor pencils, which I had intended to use for color.   I have my photographs from which I can add color here at home if I want.  But do I want to?  I may leave this sketchbook black-and-white. 
 
 Uh oh, I've run out of time.   More later!  Any comments about color or no color?  

Oregon High Desert Crossing Tutorial

Okay, here 'tis.
I have before me three versions of my Oregon High Desert Crossing Sketch Journal. The first one you may have seen and/or downloaded within the last three weeks or so, the straight sketch journal of my May sketching/journaling trip across Oregon (journal WITHOUT tutorial). Click on the sketchbook images to go see their descriptions and/or order.

Then, because several people expressed an interest, I've assembled a tutorial of how I did it (does that make it a "howdunnit"?) and inserted each howdunnit page across from its finished sketch page for a second version (journal WITH tutorial).

And THEN, since a) mebbe you downloaded the sketchbook hot off the press without the tutorial, or maybe b) you don't think you'll be wanting it but would like the option of changing your mind later, I'm offering JUST the tutorial (Tutorial ONLY), so you can add it to your journal if/when you decide you'd like both. You wouldn't want the tutorial alone, because it doesn't show the finished sketchbook page ~ that's in the Journal without Tutorial. aiieeeee!!!

So. If you'd like to see how it's done and you already downloaded the journal, now download the Tutorial and you'll find out how I approached each page, and the obstacles I overcame to do it, and even some of the booboos I had to fix (or just sob over quietly before turning the page).








For instance, you'll find out what happened when I made some ghastly color choices for the background of this quail, what I did about it, what I wish I'd done about it, and what an artist friend suggested as an alternative fix. There's even a photo of me drawing the quail, to prove that I didn't just trace an image off the internet [grin].

Since the straight journal is $5.95 and the combined version is $9.95, I've priced the tutorial at $4 so that it costs exactly the same to download them separately ~ or to buy the combined version.

Have I totally confused everyone? sorry!

It's been easy to stay indoors this last week and work on this. Thursday and Friday it was 104 and 105 degrees (gasp, gasp), then Saturday and Sunday it was in the 60s and overcast (kinda not what you expect for August, and a bit chilly for skin accustomed to dry heat) then today it went whole hog and delivered rain drizzle at 50 degrees! Geez Louize! That's 54 degrees colder than it was just five days ago, in the middle of the day, and quite a bit wetter. I'm not complaining about the rain, because we really need it, but.....wow! And now I can't go get my daily fix of nirvana as I weed/prune/stake down at the nursery because everything is sopping and I'd get drenched.

After toughing it out for several hours this morning and saying "aw, c'mon, it's August!" I finally started a fire in my woodstove and at last it's comfortable in the house again. Maybe all the climate change poo-pooers will start to see what the climatologists have been trying to tell us ~ that global warming will deliver us wild and crazy weather, not just heat.

The forecasters are saying we should expect lots of snow here in western Oregon this winter. Good for the snowpack, which will melt all next summer to provide water for the streams, but not so good on my steep-hairpin-curves driveway, which will probably be too slick to skate down. "Cook up the beans and rice, Jessie! We done been snowbound agin!"

Enough digression! Come see my wonderful new tutorial. It was a joy to create, and I'm going to seriously consider doing tutorials for some of my future journals. And hey, if I get snowbound, mebbe I kin draw a snowflake collection. Huh!

Enjoy!

My Hawaii Nature Journal -- Day 1 -- 12/18/2007

Aloha! Here I am, back in Oregon, with the results of my Nature Journaling trip to The Big Island of Hawaii. I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out, and since the object of the trip was to produce interesting journal pages, I'm going to include the actual pages instead of typing in the journal entries and adding the sketches (as I did for last spring's Costa Rica journal -- see the first entries on this blog, May 2007).

Here I am, all my traveling gear attached, and ready for my Hawaiian adventure.

Some things to keep in mind as you follow along: 1. I was traveling alone so I could do anything and go anywhere the urge struck me. 2. I was determined to be adventuresome, try new things, learn all I could, meet people and ask lots of questions, and I did. 3. The object of this trip was to create an interesting journal -- not necessarily "beautiful," but one that would keep readers turning the pages to see what happened next, plus be fun for myself to go back to later on. 4. Days in the tropics are about twelve hours long, so there's not enough time in the day to do/see/do everything -- but evenings are perfect for journaling. 5. I didn't go to Hawaii to swim

That being said, Here We GO! [The front cover of the journal is in the last blog.] In that last blog, I showed the inside of the front cover, but before I left home I added a clear-plastic pocket to hold flat things I might pick up during the day. The plastic is stiff (you could use a square cut from some bubble-packaging) and taped down on left and bottom edges, so things just slip inside and stay nicely in place. I was keeping an eye out for things to glue onto the pages, and used this pocket every day.

The first leg of my journey was from Oregon to Honolulu, where I stayed overnight in a hotel on Waikiki Beach. Click on the image to bring up a large enough image to read. Nearly all of the sketches in the journal are done in ballpoint pen, which keeps me from obsessing to get everything perfect, as I would with a pencil and eraser.

For the first page, I sketched all my gear the night before, laid out on the carpet ready to go. That's my entire outfit, and although it weighed only 19¼ lbs, I'm pretty sure things secretly multiplied in the dark pockets, because it seemed MUCH heavier by the end of the trip.

The next morning on the plane, I tried out my gold calligraphy pen to letter the initial cap for the journal entry, and outlined it with the ballpoint. I glued on my ticket stub as we flew.

Airports are great places to work on sketches. It beats the boredom and people stop to watch and chat. I met some really nice people, which normally I wouldn't have. The second page talks about the third page, and also gave me a place to draw my plane out the waitingroom window.

If you want to draw people, you have to be reasonably discreet and try not to stare too much. But if they catch you, you have to fess up. I was really taken with this beautiful child and tender parent.

The trip to Hawaii was over ocean, nothing to look at, so I read in my paperback novel -- the only time I even took it out during the trip. Upon landing (no baggage to claim!) I went out and caught a generic airport shuttle to my hotel, arriving about dark. With the whole evening ahead of me, I went down on the boulevard which fronts the beach and just soaked in the ambience; then after sushi dinner in a little hole-in-the-wall restaurant (for $8.50) I picked up some fallen flowers, leaves and seedpods from the trees along the beach, and some coral from the surf to sketch in my room later.

Remember, I'm not here for the night life!

And For My Next Workshop.......

4/29

We left Costa Rica today, flying out of Puerto Jimenez after an early morning hike on which I discovered a beautiful passiflora vine in flower, and sketching a red-capped manakin. Dan and I said goodbye to El Remanso with great regret. We have so enjoyed this tropical paradise, and being looked after so wonderfully. We want to come again soon, and I want to lead another workshop of eager students as they discover the wonders to be found here and become aware of their increasing ability to draw and add color to it. I can’t think of a more rewarding way to spend my time.

I’m developing another workshop right now on nature journaling for those people who enjoy keeping a journal and would like to add life and breath to it with drawings in pencil, pen, watercolor pencil, watercolors, whatever. It will be a chance for participants to develop their writing skills as well. I think this would make a particularly fascinating workshop here.

When I go on trips, I always take photos for my journals, and I usually sketch. I’ve found it’s the journals with sketches that I take the most pleasure in, by far. I visit them again and again, while the photo albums languish.

A journal is not only a record of what you see and do, but a narrative to return to again and again later. My journal of this workshop and all the sketches I did will provide pleasure frequently in the coming years – and it will be great fun to share with family and friends.

Colorful descriptive writing can make a simple journal a work of art. A walk in a wild Costa Rican jungle or beach, your local woods, the city park (or even a willful back yard) can provide lots of opportunities for a great journal page, but there are other sources for a wonderful sketch/journal, too.

For instance, a gardener is in contact with nature on a daily basis, and many gardeners keep journals of what they plant and when, the date the veggies ripen or the flowers bloom, etc. But how much richer their lives would be with an additional focus on journaling and sketching about these miracles. Here’s an example of a simple garden entry:

“5/27 planted 2 ponypacks of snap peas today.”

Now consider how much more enjoyment you could get from this entry – not only as you write it on 5/27 but as you read it on 11/30 when it’s cold outside and the peas are long-ago consumed – if you had journaled:

“5/8 10:30am Sunny with a slight breeze, and the blossoms on the madrone trees fill the air with a sweet honey scent. We’re having an unseasonably cool spring, but that makes it perfect for planting since I haven’t been able to turn on the irrigation drippers yet. I just planted two ponypacks of snap peas in a big pot on the deck, and looped the tiny tendrils through the chickenwire so they could begin their climb to the sun. The chickenwire keeps Jesse [the cat] out of the pot – he thinks those pots are there for his personal enjoyment.

The lettuce and bok choy I planted 2 weeks ago aren’t quite big enough to provide a full salad bowl every day, but by adding a few pea leaves (yum!) I can give a small, delicious taste of spring to my daily lunch menu. The peas are so robust and lively they’ll never notice.”

And along with that entry you sketch the pea plants and their spring-like tendrils, or the pot and chickenwire, or Jesse peering wistfully into the forbidden pot, or even the whole deck with its array of pots and salad greens. And just imagine drawing (and maybe painting) your roses or clematis blooms! As you gain experience and confidence, you can get really detailed about the drawing, and add color or shading as you wish. And no matter how skilled you are at drawing now, you will get better with practice – and your enjoyment in the journaling, the sketching, and even the gardening will grow exponentially. Reading back in your journal is like a time-machine visit. It fully evokes the day, the time, the scent and quality of air (if you write about it) and the very event you chronicle. What a lovely gift to make to your future self!

So THAT’s the workshop I’m putting together, to help people get started on a fascinating-to-read journal decorated with pleasing drawings. Having done it for decades myself, I’m really going to enjoy sharing the pleasures of it. I hope you can join me here at El Remanso for the adventure. Be sure to click on the link to get on my newsletter list so you won't miss it -- plus the art tips and techniques you'll also find in the newsletter. By subscribing to my free newsletter, you'll also let me know how much interest there is in such a workshop. Keep in touch!

On Beginning a Blog

Starting a blog is a lot like starting a drawing. It's really hard to overcome that blank page, so the best thing to do is make some kind of mark - anything, really - to get you out the gate and on your journey.
So here's the first mark.

I want to share my recent workshop in Costa Rica through the journal, photos and sketches I made there. But since I worked on the journal every day for ten days, there are quite a few words and pictures, which take time to transfer to type and graphics, so I'm going to do it one day at a time.

And since this is my first blog, I'm pretty green at this. It may take a while to puzzle out the ways to do it right so that I can share the immense fun and excitement with you properly.

So this begins my Costa Rica Journal. It's so beautiful there -- I've added a picture I drew of the ocean and jungle from the patio at El Remanso where the workshop was held. It's colored with watercolor pencils.