My Sketch/Journal is now a Slide Show!

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.

My new Oregon High Desert Crossing Journal is up!

I finally DID it! The new sketch journal is up! But only after going through two interminable months of journaler's block. I couldn't write or sketch or even think about finishing my new Oregon High Desert Crossing Journal, no matter how hard I tried. Whew!

Here's what happened:
In May I drove across the entire state of Oregon, from where I live in Talent (near Medford and Ashland on the west side) to Eagle, near Boise, Idaho, where my brother lives. It was a great trip, 500 miles, with four days on the road and another exploring the high desert Owyhee Mountains in Idaho with David & Marcia (Marcia's my sis-in-law). I sketched and journaled the whole time, with ballpoint pen (mostly) and watercolor pencils, but when I got home......

Well, it seems I got the blues. I loved being with family so much, and went into withdrawal symptoms, I guess. Finally, after weeks of avoiding the sketch journal, filling up the time with building a new work desk, cleaning my storage shed, getting out and refurbishing my old 4-harness loom, and any number of other subterfuges and dodges, I got sick and tired of my shenanigans.

I uncoiled the coil from my journal, freed all the pages, and tacked them up onto a big corkboard visible from my computer desk (where I'd been whiling away much of the time). Now it was In My Face, and inescapable. Looking at them many times a day, I began to see little details I might be able to add, things I wanted to improve, tiny things that m.a.y.b.e. I could manage to creep through.... and I managed to scrape and shovel my way through my "journaler's block," finally emerging victorious last week....

... whereupon I got to work and finished adding text to some pages, color to a bunch, and adding sketches from photos I had taken to a couple of others. The result is a sketch journal I am very happy with. And it's a great example of how to turn an ordinary road trip into an adventure you can relive again and again. I've made that trip across Oregon many times. THIS one I'll remember.

Most people think journal pages, and indeed, entire trip journals, emerge as finished works of art at the end of the trip. Some people's do, I suppose. And some of mine almost do, but often pages need a little finishing later on: color, notes, another bit of writing, a haiku, etc. (here's me, journaling on my brother's patio). Sometimes I want to add a sketch from photos I took at the time. Sometimes I originally only have time for a sketchy little note or picture which I can finish or add to later. And generally a fresh cover is in order. The cover for this journal is a composite of elements from several different sketches, plus color and a border, all constructed in Adobe InDesign, a desktop publishing program.

Last week I was talking with a friend (via email) who thought it might be a good idea if I made Oregon High Desert Crossing into a kind of "workbook" sketch journal, with each spread having a facing page showing what I did to create the actual sketch page. For instance, I could show the page as it appeared, unfinished, at the end of my journey on the left side, and what I did (and why and how) to create the final journal page which appears on the right page of the spread.
It might look something like this (remember, you can click on an image to enlarge it).









Does that sound interesting? If it does, I can make a second version available with that sort of addenda. I'd love to get opinions on this to see if anyone is interested. I'd hate to spend the time and effort on it if no one would find it useful. Please, comment and let me know?

I've left the insanely low price for the travel sketch journals intact (only $5.95) so they'll be affordable. And all my other sketching workbooks (basic and intermediate drawing, watercolor pencil, journaling, wildlife sketching, etc.) are still available, too.

And now, I need to get back to my desk. I'm working on the design and layout (and illustration) of a trail guide for the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center, and the deadline is getting pretty tight.

Taking a short break with a frog....

Little froglet in the water,
don’tcha think you really otter
save that croaking for tonight
when you’re safely outta sight?

Though I love your creaky chorus
pulsing through the springtime forest,
how I hope a hovering hawk
will not end your earnest grok!

Soon, I hope, a loving mate will
come to join you. I can’t wait till
all your fertile eggs are spread,
safely in their waterbed.

Okay, I just had to get that out of my system. I've just finished the 8th proof/edit of Nature & Travel Sketch Journaling and I just had to take a break and do something else for awhile.

The weather has been cold and wet except for a few bright days, just enough to get our hopes up here in southern Oregon, then dash them back down again. We've had 4½" of rain in the last couple of weeks, so that sort of shows you where the gloom gauge is set.

However, it is GREAT for frogs. Just outside my studio door is a pretty little pond I built many years ago, and about 40 feet away is a tub I sank into the forest floor and filled with water. The rain has kept them to the overflowing mark lately.

Each of them has a resident boyfrog, who has spent the last two weeks producing operatic extravaganzas, hoping to attract girlfrogs to their little ponds. Using binoculars, I can see them floating, chins pumped up like balloons, creating concentric, radiating rings on the still water with each croak (except when it's raining, then you can't see the vibes).

In the Nature & Travel Sketch Journaling workbook I've been crafting and endlessly (it seems) proofing and editing, there's a page on creating simple poetry in your journal, and I'd just finished polishing the rules for the umpteenth time (I can't chance ANY misunderstanding of the material in these workbooks because I'm not there to explain if the text isn't clear). So I thought I'd just try out the instructions. The froggy poem was the result.

There's a BUNCH of great stuff in this workbook. It's my best one yet, and longer than the others by a couple of pages. I've put some examples from my Costa Rica, Oregon beach, and Hawaii sketch journals, to clarify stuff I talk about. It has given me a major yen to travel.

I'll include one of my most unlikely sketches here. It's an Indian water buffalo, pulling a wooden oxcart filled with picnickers down the beach. As they passed in front of my amazed eyes, I had the minimal presence of mind to snap some photos, but there was no time to draw them, of course. That evening I sketched the picture into my sketchbook off the screen of my digital camera.

Hope you like it. And my froggy poem. You can copy the poem and use it for anything you like. I don't care. Have fun!

I'll be uploading the Nature & Travel Sketch Journaling workbook this week, so keep an eye out for it. You'll get a notice if you've signed up for one in the right-hand panel.

Oops! I accidentally uploaded this to the Sketching in Nature blog! Well, I'm sorry if you see it in two different places! Many apologies!

Cheers!