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!

The Belize sketch/journal is ALMOST ready!

My latest sketch/journal tutorial
Belize ~ Beach & Jungle Adventures
is coming along quickly. I thought I'd let you know that it's really going to happen, in case you've been waiting anxiously for it. Here's the cover, and the rest is almost to this stage.

Last night I finished the first version of it ~ and since I put it together in a desktop publishing program, that means that it is written, all the pictures are in, and now I'm just tweaking any uninspired sentences, making sure all the edges line up properly, all the art is sparkling clean and bright, and everything else makes it an e-book you can enjoy and I can be proud of.

It will have more sketching adventures in it, which I hope will inform and amuse you ~ that's my plan, anyway.

Stay tuned ~ my brother still has to go through it and pick out the typos (if I can persuade him to wade through yet another manuscript!), and I have to build its webpage. Give it a couple of weeks ~ just wanted to give you a heads-up that it's more than just a gleam in my eye.

Big hugs to all of you have egged me on with this!

Cheers,
Irene

Nature Journaling in Belize 3

I tried out two cabanas while at Macaw Bank Jungle Lodge. This one is Butterfly, and it had a desk that would make a better drawing table than the one I was using in Macaw Cabana. Henri graciously helped me move, about halfway through my stay.

Mostly I only used the desk in the evenings, to add color to my drawings. If it rained during the daytime ~ and it did occasionally rain, 'cause this is the jungle and rain (and heat) are what MAKE it a jungle ~ I sometimes sat in my open doorway and drew from there. For the most part, though, the warm, mostly misty rain was nice to be out in and I just hooked an umbrella to my belt with a carabiner if rain looked eminent.

[BTW: I was using watercolor pencils to add color to my drawings, and discovered, on about the fifth day in the jungle with 100% humidity, that when I'd try to make a mark with the pencil the the pigment point would BEND! As a workaround, I dabbed color off the end of the pencil with the paintbrush ~ this works fine, by the way, but it's not how one expects to use watercolor pencils. As they absorbed moisture, the "leads" got limper daily, soon becoming about the consistency of lipstick. Then, to my dismay, the softening, swelling pigments actually split their wooden pencil casings!

Since my return to Oregon (and, roughly, 30-45% humidity), they've returned to their former hardness and the split pencils have regained their usual shape. So be forewarned ~ if you plan to use watercolor pencils in a humid place, either store them in a drybag or use regular watercolor pigments instead.]

Sketching en pleine air, a fancy way of saying "outdoors," isn't always feasible, and sometimes I took photos with the intent of drawing from the camera later. This is really easy with the newer digital cameras with large viewing screens.

For instance, Tallulah, the resident coati, moved like quicksilver as she zipped up and down trees searching for insects under loose bark or attached to the undersides of leaves and stems. Even the camera sometimes only caught a blur. So sketching would have been a losing prospect as I scrambled through tangled undergrowth trying to keep her in sight. But I did manage to get a couple of photos from which I could make this sketch.

Other subjects also posed difficulty. Butterflies, of course, would NEVER alight long enough for a good sketch, the cinnamon-red bracket fungus was on a steep hillside in a pile of branches and sticks, and the wasp nest attached to the underside of a thorny palm really didn't lend itself to a close inspection, much less a lengthy drawing session! Frequently, bullhorn acacias, inhabited by nasty, hot-headed ants which apparently craved an armed encounter with me, kept me from getting close to some other subjects. No, sometimes drawing conditions were not ideal, by any means.

Other times I got lucky. One day I discovered huge, 5" tall contribo flowers, with their 12" tails, hanging over a trail. I found this spent flower lying in the path, so I carried it along and sat on the riverbank for a couple of hours sketching and coloring it. Despite its lovely aspect, the contribo is a really smelly carnivorous plant, and uses a pitfall system similar to that of pitcher plants, trapping and disassembling insects in a pool of digestive fluid. But it was great fun to draw. Its specific name is Aristolochia trilobata.

Since I had a new camera, I spent some time playing with one of the really neat features, the panorama button.

On the bank overlooking the river was an ancient Ceiba tree which was estimated by a visiting botanist to have been a sapling when the Mayans were building their temples. It was fun trying to encompass its entire height in one picture, but even so I couldn't back up far enough to include the amazing width of the buttresses in their totality.

Buttresses (long, skinny above-ground root-like fins) prop up many species of really old jungle trees. Jungle soil gets so much rain that it washes away and never builds up a deep loam on the ground. Trees are consequently anchored in a thin layer of soil and could be easily blown down in a hurricane without their buttresses.

I sketched this magnificent 20' buttress that anchors one of the other old trees near the river.

Alas, my eleven days at Macaw River Jungle Lodge were nearly ended. One warm, humid day I carried a big black innertube upriver, passing through a wide savannah to put in upstream of the lodge. Then I spent a couple of dreamy hours slip-sliding down the Macal River past huge trees draped with hanging lianas and decorated with hanging ant nests.

A couple of rapids added excitement ~ but not too much, since I was on my own and not really seeking high adventure ~ and several huge orange iguanas sneered down at me from their high roosts above the water as I passed beneath.

On my last afternoon, walking in a melancholy Eeorish manner along a river path, ("Oh dear, my last day. I'll probably never see this tree again. I'll never walk this path again. Oh dear!!") I was rewarded with the appearance of this delicate lacy-skirted mushroom called a Veiled Lady. Definitely cheered up, I drew it on the last page of my journal.

So. We have traveled together, dear friend, through the seventeen days of my sojourn on Belizean beach and in Belizean jungle.

There are 24 pages in my sketch journal, and I invite you ~ in a couple of months ~ to visit my website to download a copy if you are still interested.

Thanks for coming by! Leave a message if you have enjoyed this, so I'll know whether I should bother to blog the next journey I make. I'm considering one to South Africa........

Nature Journaling in Belize 2

The jungle is a fascinating place if you keep your eyes open and don't jump at every crackle or strange noise. This lovely passionflower was glowing right beside the trail on one of my forays.

But there were lots of crackles and strange noises, most of which could be attributed to birds, squirrels or just the breeze rustling the fronds of a papery palm leaf. There were probably eyes watching me at all times, ones I had no idea of, but hey, that's part of what makes people watch horror movies ~ that desire to be living on the edge of excitement. So I welcomed in all of the strange things (well, not the ticks!) and had a great time.

Ron warned me about ticks. Only one other guest, he said, had ever gotten ticks, and that was because they were crawling about in the greenery looking for insects. Hmmm..... "But," he said, "while they do itch, they don't carry Lyme Disease."

So since I planned to be poking around in the shrubbery, I decided to take my chances. I got a few, but they were teensy things and easily plucked off. I get ticks all the time around my house in Oregon, anyway, so it was no big deal, and worth the adventures.

I mean, look at that curious mantis staring (guiltily?) back over its shoulder at me. It looks like someone "caught in the act," doesn't it? I met that little fellow off-trail.

And I was totally entranced with this amazing Clearwing Butterfly. You can see right through its wings. Butterflies are normally not my forte, but Belizean butterflies seemed to be tamer and less likely to fly than most butterflies I've tried to photograph before, and this picture was taken from about two inches away.

I fell in love with the Macal River, which flows past the end of the trail from the lodge. Cattle egrets swooped in every night to roost in these trees, spangling the darkening riverbank with sparkles of white. Kingfishers clacked up and down its length, diving for the small silvery fish that flashed in its shallows.

I spent a lot of time down there sketching, and actually spotted a crocodile species which hadn't been known to spend any time in the immediate vicinity. That was a Morelet's Crocodile, a small, docile creature which has, on occasion, dined on a cat or other small creature, but wouldn't THINK of bothering big folk like me. Or you.

And look at this colorful king vulture that landed in a big tree just across the river from me. Imagine a vulture being so winsome as that.

Well, as you can see, I was having the time of my life.

Every night, Ron and Al cooked delicious dinners, and we chatted afterward by the light of kerosene lamps. I really enjoyed those evenings. The lodge has electricity, but only kerosene lamps are used for lighting in the thatch-roofed open-air restaurant, which gives meals a charming intimate air.

There was always hot coffee and toast ready for me at breakfast time (I eat a small breakfast ~ I think Ron was distressed at my deficient appetite because he delights in creating delicious breakfast fare and toast doesn't quite cut the mustard). When other guests were there Ron spent this time helping them figure out how to spend their day, how to get to interesting places, and connecting them up with their tour guides if they were off to see the sights.

I was having such fun (and I was on a limited budget, too) so I only did one outside tour during my stay, a visit to Caracol, an ancient Mayan ruin, for about $85. This ruin complex measures 12 miles across and once had a population of more than 140,000 people. We just visited a tiny part of it, but it was amazing.

There are still a lot of undiscovered or unexcavated ruins in Central America, and many of them just look like hills. You can see from this partially excavated ruin at Caracol how you might mistake the tree-covered hump of a ruin for a hill! Henri took me to see some ruins near the Jungle Lodge, which are totally unexcavated, and if I hadn't been told they were ruins, I'd never have guessed.

Once they're excavated and restored, however, they can be MOST imposing. Here's the main (so far) ruin uncovered at Caracol. It is much bigger than it looks here (there are people in that photo).

The Mayan people still live all around this area. Both of the young men on the Macaw Bank Jungle Lodge staff, Henri and Angel, have Mayan roots.

I'm still learning how to do scenery, so sketching the ruin was a real challenge for me. I wanted to show some of the glyphs, too, so I did a detail to show them up close, then an arrow points to where they were on the ruin. You may have to squint at it to get the full effect of the glyph!

Some people go out every day on a new sight-seeing tour, but I was glad I had set my sights on Seeing One Little Part Of The Jungle Well.

I had daily adventures just a few feet from my door ~ watching a "hand" of bananas mature over the deck of my cabana, for instance. Discovering several colonies of brilliant red mushrooms. Finding trees covered with huge thorns.
EVERY time I went out, I discovered wonders that left me saying "Wow! and "OMG!" ("Omg" is really hard to say, y'know! Try it! )

Anyway, more wonders tomorrow!
See you then!