South Africa (after a wood-gathering glitch)

I had every intention of blogging about South Africa yesterday, but summer is almost over and I needed to start pulling in wood out of my forest to burn in my woodstove this winter.  Years ago a reforestation crew cut the hillside's dead trees and shrubs into 6' (2 meter) lengths and stacked them in piles out in the woods. I can handle the pieces smaller than about 7" in girth. 

Last year by now I was half done

 "Pulling in wood" consists of putting on gloves and looping one end of a sturdy nylon strap around one end of a piece (or several small pieces) of firewood. Then, laying the other end of the strap over my shoulder, I pull the log/s up, down or across my bumpy hillsides covered with poison oak, wild honeysuckle trip-vines and fallen logs, like a donkey in harness.  I stack them beside my road, where I can later heave them into Dan'l's truck to bring up to the house to cut into stove lengths.

I'm six weeks late getting started this year because of preparing to go ~ then going ~ to South Africa. So I started working yesterday morning before it could get hot. 

I sketched this nest last summer

Trouble is, I was far down the hill when I realized I had forgotten my gloves. It was a nuisance to go back for them, so I decided to work without them. That was a bad idea for two reasons. Poison oak grows tall and luxuriant in my woods, and there was another little problem I encountered when I lifted a log and uncovered the entrance of a yellowjacket nest.  

Wasps came roaring out quite angrily (I can't say I blame them) and one of them stung me on my little finger as I gallumphed speedily away through the trees. My finger was so swollen and sore I couldn't type yesterday. (Excuses, excuses! But it sounds pretty convincing to me....) 

At least I escaped a poison oak rash (so far). My good luck! So here goes, once again:

Beginning the tale of my South Africa Sojourn.  

The plane alit in Johannesburg after an epic transoceanic flight of some fourteen hours, and I was picked up at the airport by MoAfrika Lodge, southeast of Johannesburg (the inhabitants call it Joburg), to meet up with Sandy and Joe of Coyote Trails School of Nature, later that day.  

A Blacksmith Lapwing Plover

Eager to get started on my journal, I launched out the door to the edge of the lodge yard and managed a quick sketch of a Blacksmith Lapwing.  Then I made the mistake of patting the three Rottweiler dogs which live there.  

this is George

Immediately, I was adopted as a fellow romper, and everywhere I turned there was a super-friendly dog waiting to gnaw on me.  Using a good bit of stealth, I sneaked out again and again, sometimes getting a few minutes to sketch, and sometimes not.

Imagine my delight at spotting two ibises that first day!  The first was a Hadeda (pronounce as in LA-di-DAH) Ibis, found anywhere there is water of any sort, and a Sacred Ibis, a big white bird that reminds me of our Wood Stork in the US.  

Sitting down to sketch the Sacred Ibis, I was overtowered by three dogs licking my face and chewing on my hand, my sketchbook, my knee, whatever! 

I finally figured out that sketches would have to be roughed out quickly then finished from my digital camera screen in my room, so that's how this ibis sketch happened. BTW, the three dogs were named (I kid you NOT) George, Double-U, and Bush. 

Sandy and Joe arrived in time for dinner, and the next morning we started out in our rental car for Moholoholo Mountain View Camp, some 200 miles to the northeast.  

the landscape east of Joburg

Here is some of the landscape directly east of Joburg.  As you drive, the rolling hills gently give way to higher hills, then you come out on the lip of the Drakensburg Escarpment, which drops down into the Blyde (BLEE-deh) River Canyon.  And that's where I'm going to drop this blog today.  

Tomorrow, I'll get started on our ten day tracking/trailing/survival adventure at Moholoholo. Be sure to come back for the next installment of photos, sketches, and whatever strikes my fancy.  I'd love comments, if you have the time and will try to answer any questions you might have. 

Stay tuned!

Back from South Africa

A giraffe at Moholoholo

South AFRICA?  Okay, so you didn't even realize I was making a trip to South Africa?  Actually it was one of those things that had been in the planning stages for a year and a half. Since you can't think about something like that for a whole eighteen months, I put it completely out of my mind until, WHOA! Better get movin'!  And then, involved with preparations, I didn't leave time to blog about it before I left.  Duh. 

It was an absolutely terrific three week journey, separated into three distinct parts, with the expectation of recording the entire event in one of my travel sketch journals within the next few months, like the ones here.

Laying track for a leopard photo shoot

Part 1 ~ Ten days with Joe and Sandy, Coyote Trails School of Nature staff, plus student Johann and his mom, Alessandra at Moholoholo Mountain View Camp to scope out a course in tracking and bush survival Coyote Trails is scheduling for high school kids next year. I did lots of sketching and journaling during the ten days. We also took a drive through Kruger National Park in our rental car to check out the wildlife.  

At Marc's Treehouse Lodg

Part 2 ~ Then I took off on my own for five days at Marc's Treehouse, living in a tree house above the Klaserie River with sketching a high priority, but also making a couple of trips into Kruger National Park on game drives  undertaken in a vehicle with a top for shade but open on all sides, perfect for viewing wildlife in any direction.

Sketching frog behind the bar

Part 3 ~ Then I spent four days at Panzi Bush Camp, with time for more sketching and journaling, plus lots of laid-back enjoyment of the thorny African bushveld. Panzi Bush Camp has a waterhole and a viewing deck,  located right next to my cabin, so a lot of time was spent on the deck sketching and soaking up the atmosphere. Exploratory walks with the naturalist, Glynn, were an added enjoyment, and I was able to get many of my questions about wildlife, tracks, and the African environment and vegetation answered. And the great food ~ oh, my!

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

And now ~ I'm going to blog this over the course of the next several days, as I'm still sorting the dross from the 2500 photos I took.  The photos were in addition to sketch/journaling 43 pages in my sketchbook, with a number of additional pages partly begun and in line for finishing before I can put it up online. 

Drawing by flashlight

I was pretty focused, I guess.  Many nights found me coloring sketches by flashlight and booklight, using my photos for reference. That's what I'm doing in this photo at right (gotta find a better way!)

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Before I left, I spent a LOT of time tweaking my gear. If you recall, in December while in Belize I had a sticky problem with my vitamins getting moist and gumming up in the container.

Keeping the Vitamins Dry

I resolved that problem this time (although not technically necessary because the bushveld of South Africa isn't humid) by dropping one day's supply into a plastic bag, tying it off, then dropping in the next day's supply, etc. I got two week's worth in one plastic bread bag.  It worked perfectly, plus I later used the little strings for page markers in my field guides, a happy surprise use.

Baboons can glare like real hoodlums

Next blog I will tell about some of the fascinating things that happened during the first ten days at Moholoholo.  I helped bait a camera set-up for leopard (see the image above, under Part 1), tracked a wild white rhino and her calf through thornbush veld, and learned to identify tracks and sign of giraffe, wildebeest, leopard, rhino, kudu, impala, baboon and other African wildlife.

baboon tracks

I  also pursued my artistic investigations of acacia thorns, geckos, bushwillow fruits, bone-chewing giraffes, porcupine quills, and many other interesting subjects. 

And oh! the incredible birds!  I identified 101 species in my 21 days, a very satisfying number for this part-time birder.  

Lilac-breasted Roller

So! Stay tuned for the next installment!

Update On The Interpretive Sign

This illustration is progressing nicely, after quite a bit of research and tinkering, including some back and forth with the designer to get the placement and design to fit the subject, design, and panel dimensions.  At left is the first rough I did, which I think you can see in a larger size if you go back to the last post. Notice that the one I am working on now, below, has been changed a bit from the original concept, and is almost ready to move forward. Here's what has transpired.

Some things have changed. First the left edge of the Douglas fir has been curved to follow a swash element inserted by the designer to divide some text in a panel on the left from the tree.  The illustration follows that curve.  Secondly, the position of the owl and one of the "witches broom" clumps have been switched, so that the owl is sitting a bit lower, on the clump's branch, and a typical Douglas fir branch (which the owl originally sat on) is in the space below.  Thirdly, a nearer branch with foliage has been added at the bottom of the picture. And finally, a background of fog-dimmed Douglas firs has been added.  

What happens next?  Well, the original illustration was drawn on tracing paper. The background was rendered and added in my computer imaging program in a separate layer because that's the easiest way to do it. Then the two parts were combined in two layers so I can lighten, darken, or change either one without affecting the other.

The next step is to print this combined image out on heavy, smooth Bristol paper, and continue on with my ballpoint pen and watercolor pencils. The lines are fairly light, and can now be worked over with pen to good effect.  Then I will color the entire illustration with the watercolor pencils.  

Since the illustration's size is 8½" x 16", I had to create a "custom paper size" for the printer's menu list so it would print a piece of paper longer than legal size (14" long). So in the printer folder in the computer control panel I created a custom page that size.  When I print it now on my color deskjet, the background will already be there and I won't have to try to put it in behind later.  This is going to be a great time saver, and also will calm anxiety I might have about the possibility of having to redo something if I mess up the background... 

The designer already had an owl illustration she wanted to use, so with the permission of the other artist, when I am completely finished with my tree I will scan that into the computer, insert the owl art digitally in my computer imaging program, and blend it with my tree art.

I can only do this because the other artist gave permission and because the artwork on the owl matches my style closely enough that it won't look peculiar.  

The final blended result will be sent to the designer to combine with the rest of the sign.

In the meantime, while we were thrashing all these details out, I also did a spot illustration of a Starflower, Tridentalis borealis.  

One of the considerations on such a project is that all the art must fit together well, so I had to pay careful attention to the other artist's style while creating the starflower.  

As usual, when doing such an illustration, I had to use photo resources which, in this case, consisted of about five different photos. To avoid copyright infringement, you may not "copy" someone else's photo exactly without their permission, but if you use several sources and your end result doesn't look like ANY of them, there isn't a problem.  My goal, always, is to create an illustration which no photographer would ever even be suspicious of. To do that, and always being sure that my changes remain true to the subject's species requirements, I might change the number and size of leaves, their angles, their color and shading, the attitude of the flowers (in the case of a plant), or add or subtract something where possible. So far, no one has ever complained, and I plan to keep it that way.

More later. 

A Sit-spot Update

Just a quick note to tell you I've started my Every Day Outside sketching. I just thought of that name for it, which could be shortened to EDO to describe my daily wanderings on my wooded hillside to observe, listen, sketch, journal, and just be quiet.  I have sixteen drawings already which I haven't yet put into the slideshow/flipbook sketchbooks on my webpage ~ good grief ~ time to catch up on that, for sure!

Here's today's sketch outing, with notes about Shooting Star seed heads (the flowers, not celestial events) and Pussy Ears, which dot the hillside now with their furry cuteness.  The white Pussy Ears flower looked very blah on the white paper, so I put a dark background behind the flower-head.  Be sure to click on the image for a picture big enough to read and to see the details!

This kind of dark background is pretty simple to do with watercolor pencils, by the way, and I used to teach it in my workshops.  If you'd like to try it, you could download my watercolor pencil workbook here.  It has clear, step-by-step instructions on how to get this really striking effect. 

Update on the Kenya Sketch Journal: I plan a town trip to get my Kenya sketchbook scans punched and coiled tomorrow so I can start journaling on the pages. I'm trying to keep my carbon footprint small by rationing my trips to town. It's a twenty mile trip, minimum, and the gas expenditure  ~  more than $4.20/gal here ~ makes trotting off to town without a good reason a not-very-enticing prospect. But it takes planning and good lists to make sure I don't forget something and have to make another trip.

Oh yeah, I'm also working on a Douglas fir tree illustration for a watershed interpretive sign done by a colleague for the Bureau of Land Management (I think it's BLM, anyway).  It will be in color, and has witches brooms on it (naw, ya can't fly with them, but they do sorta look like broom heads... They're caused by a parasite which makes the tree put out beau coup bristly twigs).


It's just a rough at this point, with a place left for an owl she already has artwork for near the top.  The tree will fade off all along the length of the trunk, and there will be text and other spot illustrations to the right. The witches brooms are the two blobs near the center. Right now, it's gone to committee to make sure it fulfills everyone's expectations, so it might experience some changes.  That's it at right.

OK, I'll be back later with updates.

The Kenya Journal, First Steps

I've begun my Kenya Sketch Journal Remake. 

Materials I'm working from: here's my original sketchbook, at right, which was pretty unwieldy to use, being so large, but it was what I was used to at that time and I didn't even consider sketching smaller.  Now I use a sketchbook a little less than half this size, and I feel my results are quite nice ~ and a whole lot easier to carry!

My original journal, below, was a "Record" book I bought in a stationery store (do stationery stores still exist?).   I would have chosen an unlined book for my journal had they been available back in 1977.  

This one had blue lines which, while they kept my writing tidy, wreaked havoc with sketches, as you can see.  If I want to use one of these sketches I drew in the lined journal, it will be a major job to get rid of the horizontal lines without messing up the drawing.  In the end, I'd rather have tilty text than damaged drawings.

Additionally, the text and drawings are in two separate places, which doth not a sketch/journal make.

So here's the plan:  I scanned all of the drawings into my computer, then pulled up each image and cleaned it up. The drawings were mostly very lightly sketched in pencil. Some of them scanned poorly and needed to have the yellowed paper calmed down and the drawing amped up (the quail, at right, was properly contrasty, but most weren't). 

Originally, I'd planned to color my sketches with colored pencils, but I hadn't practiced beforehand and my on-location colored pencil skills produced pretty disappointing results, so I dropped that idea and penciled in color notes all over the place.  

 

Results: the drawings are mostly in faint pencil, in a vertical format, on yellowed paper, with many scribbly color notes and other written details.

Fixing things:  So I cleaned up all the drawings, removed all the written notes, and started moving things around to adjust them to a horizontal format.  This was a formidable job, as you can see from looking at the original Harlequin Quail and Tree Hyrax sketch pages above.  

Results: When I had finished, my twenty-four vertical sketch pages had turned into twenty-eight or more horizontal pages with things rearranged and the drawings sometimes split out onto two pages to fit the new format. 

You can see here how the Tree Hyrax pages were split up and rearranged to put all the foot and scent gland details on one sketch page and the two portraits together on a second page for a more effective grouping. All the stuff is there, exactly as it was drawn, but rearranged to look better.

 

Now I have printed out all the rearranged pages, two per 8½" x 11" page, onto the heavy paper I make my 8½" x 5½" journals out of.  You can see the pile of printed pages in the photo with the lined journal, above.

That's the point I am at right now.  Next time I go to town, I'm going to take the loose printed pages to a copy shop and get them coil bound into a little sketchbook which I can write in. 

The next step will be to start fishing in the original journal and sketchbook for good journaling information. In my new little sketchbook I'll rewrite the journal in ballpoint pen, re-label the sketches and add notes about the critters in the present tense as though it were happening at this very moment.  All the notes will be true to the original journal and sketchbook ~ I won't fake anything ~ so in the end it will be a reincarnation of the journal as I would do it if I were sketching today.

I MAY decide to use my watercolor pencils and add color to the drawings, as well. It would make the sketch journal much more attractive, I know, and that HAD been my original plan.  But I'd use watercolor pencils, not colored pencils, since that's what I'm most familiar with at this point.

An interesting note: My pleine air sketching skills half a lifetime ago were about the same as they are now, so the art accurately represents my current sketching style and level.  Huh.  I woulda thought I'd have improved a bit in thirty-four years!!!!!

As soon as I get a couple of pages done, I'll bring them to the blog and give you a preview. I'm finding this a fascinating process, and I'm really interested to find out if I can totally immerse myself into the project so that the journaling rings true.  Stay tuned!

Big Ideas Afoot!

I've been cleaning my studio!

For the last twenty years or so, I've been avoiding throwing stuff away, so walking into my studio was akin to entering an archaeological dig.  I'm not actually a hoarder, and I don't have anything dirty (well, dusty, mebbe) or smelly (I checked) hanging around in piles, but the piles were getting awfully high and it was becoming difficult to "swing the cat" as they say. I had been able to only s-q-u-e-e-z-e into some studio areas for years.

The view from my desk

So you haven't heard from me in quite awhile because I've been busy getting rid of stuff.  I've semi-donated about a hundred books to the Coyote Trails Jefferson Nature Center down by Bear Creek.  I say "semi-" because I actually sold them to the center for 50¢ each, but since some of them are worth $25-$30, that's pretty much giving them away. 

I found a home for my wildlife magazine clip files ~ seventy-six 3-ring binders, which took up a total of 140" of  library shelf space, to a wonderful wildlife artist in Eugene ~ Dan Chen ~ who says he will cherish and use them forever. I have been taking box after box of other items to the Goodwill store for redistribution.  And now, I can swing the cat in as big a circle as HE wants.  Wahoooooo!!!!!  It is incredibly FREEing!

And that leads me into my next topic, which showed up during the cleaning.

Tree Hyrax

Half a lifetime (my lifetime, at least) ago, I went to Kenya.  That was in 1977, and I took my sketchbook and journal and sketched and journaled for more than three weeks.  I rented a car and drove all over the place. I settled in Nairobi at the edge of Nairobi National Park, spending time there and visiting Mombasa, Lake Naivasha, Tsavo and Amboseli National Parks, and Aberdare Forest. It was my first trip out into the world all alone, and I had a scary, wonderful, enlightening time. 

When I got home, my life got busy, I divorced, built a house, supported myself giving school talks, remarried, became a nurserywoman, divorced, traveled and lived a lot of life ~ and the Kenya sketchbook and journal got shoved under a desk for decades.  Three decades.

Last week I pulled it out and scanned all the sketches into my computer, and yesterday I started typing up the journal.  Next, I plan to rearrange the journal and sketches into the format of one of my sketch/journal series with tutorial. 

Bateleur Eagle

My sketch/journaling was done differently then ~ the journaling was done in a separate ledger with lined paper, the drawings were made in a big 12x18" sketchpad on cheap paper (it's yellowing badly). But I will take information from the journal to enhance the sketches, change the shape, and do whatever is possible to create a new journal that is true to the old one.  So in a sense, it will be a fabrication, but in another sense it will simply be a distillation of my Kenyan journey.

As with my other sketch/journals, there will be a tutorial using the photographs I took during the trip. The photos I have are actually slides, and I will have to copy and import them into the computer to use them. To do that I've ordered a slide-to-digital converter  (which I expect to arrive this week).  

I plan to blog the copying process as well, because there are a lot of people with slides in their closets and no idea what to do with them.  I have more than 5000 slides, and almost all my 1980 decade images are on slides and thus missing from my photo archives.  My experience copying slides-to-photos is zero, and I've heard awful stories about machines that work poorly or not at all.....so this may get interesting. Maybe I'll get lucky.

Madrone flower page ~ this is #100!

I've also started spending an hour or so every day as I did last summer, sitting out in the woods sketching, trying to catch all the wildflowers in my sit-spot sketch journal before they fade (I only began sketching the woods in mid-July last year, so I missed them all then). It's been a chilly prospect, with temperatures in the 50s so far mostly, but to date I've captured Shooting Stars, Pacific Hounds Tongue, Madrone flowers, and several other little gems.  I just wish spring would come already!!!

I have several other things on my plate as well, including a safari to Crater Lake and another one to South Africa, which I will blog about soon.  

Big blog plans, huh?  I'll really try to keep up! Thanks for your patience with my spotty blogging!

Belize -- Beach & Jungle Adventures

At LAST! It took longer than I expected,
but here is my latest sketch journal, ready for downloading!

Creating a tutorial can take quite awhile, as I want to make each one as useful to you as possible. I try to be really specific about how each page came into being so you can benefit from my triumphs, experiments, mistakes and mistrials (of which, I assure you, there are many). There are some preview pages below so you can look inside the sketchbook.

For instance, while sketching some aricaris, toucan-like birds with huge bills, I was so entranced with that gigantic schnozz that I drew it FAR too large ~ and in ink, as I always do in the moist tropics (find out why in the tutorial). What to do?

After I got it home, I got out my dreadful-but-usable photos of the aricaris and redrew a correct-size beak on a scrap of drawing paper and glued it over the glaring mistake. Unfortunately, I forgot to photograph the way-too-big beak I had originally drawn before gluing on the replacement (or was my subconscious too embarrassed to let it be seen? I dunno!). But I tell you all about it in the tutorial so you'll know how to cover up your booboos, too. It really worked well ~ in fact, you don't notice the correction in the original sketchbook unless you run your finger over it and detect the glued-on piece. Take a look at the tutorial page here.

Using photographs from your digital camera is a useful technique to be comfortable with in case conditions don't allow you to sketch on the spot.

There was a delightful little coati mundi (a raccoon relative) at the Macaw Bank Jungle Lodge where I stayed in the jungle. I wanted to sketch her roaming through the jungle, but she moved so fast that quick digital snapshots were the best I could do ~ and many of them were blurred in the dim light. Adding to the problem, it began to rain and I had to take cover in my cabana. The tutorial shows how I overcame these conditions and got the sketch I wanted. I'm really jazzed about this sketch of the coati. Her name is Tallulah.

Sometimes I don't plan my page design well ~ it's one of my many flaws as an artist ~ and I have to improvise later to make a page look half-way decent. Here's a glimpse of a tutorial page where I show how I filled in a long, skinny blank area left at the bottom of a sketch page, and also how I used a sketch of surf grasses to divide two areas on the page.

You could use other interesting things to divide areas, too. For instance, if you were drawing sailboats in the harbor and wanted to set off an area for seagulls, or perhaps a detail of the dock, you could drape a drawing of a rope or hawser between the two as a nautical touch. The possibilities are endless, and you can see how I dealt with those two situations on the tutorial here. Actually, I did a whole section on such things in my workshop workbook Nature and Travel Sketch Journaling if you'd like more suggestions.

I've uploaded the Belize sketch journal now and everything is set to go on my Belize Sketch Journal webpage, so you can go see what I've been up to. If you'd like your own copy, I've kept the download price at $9.95, to keep it affordable.

One of the reasons it took so long to get this tutorial up was that I'm selling my immense collection of wildlife clipfiles which I've been cutting out of magazines, sorting, and gluing into binders my entire life. They're carefully identified ~ if I wasn't sure of an identification, I glued it to a "miscellaneous" page ~ and the entire collection fills 75 binders (some of them 2½" thick) and 140" of shelf space. But I'm done with book illustrating now and have moved on to travel sketching, and I don't use them anymore. I offered them to the Guild of Natural Science Illustrators, and so far the bidding has reached $600 (the buyer either pays shipping or picks them up in person. There are 20 boxes weighing 15-20lbs each.). I'll close the bidding later this week. If you are interested, you may still have time to get a bid in before it closes.

And FINALLY I can move on to doing my taxes (whoopee! Uh huh.) then start preparing for a family reunion where we'll be working on our big collection of family photos, trying to get them into an online scrapbook. What fun!!!

So, it'll be awhile before I blog again, but be forewarned that I'll start preparing for a trip to South Africa this summer, which is sure to produce yet another sketch journal. I can hardly wait!

Thanks for stopping by! See you next time!