The Hundreds for November

Alrighty, then! Whew... I made it to a hundred little sketches for the month of November. This doesn't seem like such a big deal when one does the math: 100 sketches in a month is 3-4 per day. The trick is that if one somehow misses two days, then suddenly there are 10 sketches to do!

The hardest part for me is deciding what to draw. I want these sketches to be fast... responsive... interpretive... not careful pre-linocut drawings or long value studies. To that end I tried to stick to pen; if I used a pencil my inclination to go all crazy with subtle values would lead me down time-consuming paths.

I also want to work from life as much as possible, but it's November (now December). Daylight hours are short (especially up here in the north country) and there's rain and cold (and soon snow) to contend with and I am a wimp. So at the moment this means a lot of drawing indoors... interiors of coffee shops, my house, the laundromat. I did find one nice day to go to the Maine Wildlife Park before they closed for the season, and a couple of nice days for sketching landscapes near home.

To break things up I also worked from movies and a YouTube video described as Cat TV. (Footage of birds coming in and out of a feeder station.) I'd watch for an interesting frame, hit the pause button, and draw as fast as possible. The temptation to slow down and try to get a likeness on movie frames was huge, but I kept reminding myself my goal was to get the idea down quickly and move on.

It was a satisfying adventure, but rut ro! Now it's December. Here we go again!

In the meantime, here's a little flip through the sketchbook... I think I missed turning a couple of pages, but you get the idea. This month I'd like to be more deliberate about overall page composition, so we'll see how that goes. Onward!

The Return of The Hundreds

Five down, 95 more to go for November.

After a summer of almost zero studio time, my work groove has felt... well... not groovy. Both my hands and my thought processes are rusty, and I have been frustrated with my lack of creative grace.

But then I remembered The Hundreds.

Unbelievably, more than a decade has passed since my friend Tim Deibler and I challenged each other to make 100 thumbnail sketches every month for a year. Even though our success with the challenge waxed and waned, I managed to fill two sketchbooks with compositions and ideas... mostly from life, but sometimes from the television and videos.

It seemed a fine idea to take up the Hundreds challenge again, not only for tuning up my skills, but also for helping me get to understand Maine better. Believe it or not, today is the two-year anniversary of my move here from Colorado, and in a lot of ways I still feel very much a stranger.

So I relaunched my Hundreds effort in mid-October and managed to get 50 sketches done by yesterday, so now I'm off and running on the start of a new month. It's been blowing a literal gale here (more power outages, but so far not in my area!), so today's sketches are a mix of life drawings from inside my house and compositions derived from photographs I took this morning outside. I gave myself no more than ten minutes to find each composition and sketch it in ink before moving on to the next one.

Carrying a sketchbook with me is a long habit, but giving myself an assignment and a deadline ensures that I'll take it out and use it regularly. It feels good to flex both mental and physical muscles... so, hey! Why not grab a sketchbook of your own and join me?

Field Sketching 101 with the Central Colorado Conservancy

Pretty much anything can happen with the weather in a Rocky Mountain spring. Twice last week I found myself making long drives in bad weather: wet, sloppy snow that thankfully didn't pile up much on the roads but which compromised visibility and gave me splitting headaches.

But I remain convinced that sparkling days are just around the corner, and what better way to celebrate outdoor adventures than with a field sketching workshop?

I've teamed up with the Central Colorado Conservancy to offer a half-day Field Sketching 101 class at the Boxcar Ranch in Chaffee County on Saturday, May 13. If you're in the area and interested in learning new skills or dusting off some old ones, I encourage you to grab a sketchbook and join us.

Registration can be made through the Conservancy, more information is available at the Central Colorado Conservancy website.

The Sunday Hacker

No, I'm not suggesting that I've taken up a life of techno-crime. Although there is a virus involved.

Mine is the sort of hacking that accompanies a horrible, deep, junky cough that I never saw coming, but which now has me locked in its nefarious grip. To say I'm unhappy about it would be an understatement. Who gets this sort of thing when it's almost April? And where did it come from? I would sincerely like to send it back.

Whilst I'm plotting revenge against all things germ-related, there are a few things that I continue to work on. Doing so distracts my viral overlords from the efforts of my personal rebel forces. (Yep, I'm watching more movies than usual right now.)

Secret unnamed commission project:

Which of course is not so secret now, except that I don't think anyone involved regularly reads Brush and Baren. There could be blog stalkers, I know. It's a risk I'm willing to take. I've become reckless under the influence of germs.

The commission is for either a watercolor or a linocut of black swifts, and honestly I'm still on the fence about how I want to approach it. They're cool little birds that nest behind waterfalls, but their shapes are unfamiliar and challenging to sort out because they're small. And black. And they hang out in shadowy places. Thankfully, preliminary sketches are doable whilst dressed in my battle uniform of bathrobe and slippers:

But wait, there's more!

Arts & Birding Camp, Hog Island Audubon Camp, Maine:

June is coming up faster than you think, and our instructional team has been busy working on the schedule for our great week of sketching, painting, and photography on the island. We have a few spaces left, so please pass the word to anyone you know who might like to join us. (Yes, of COURSE you can come, too!)

Audubon Artist Residency at Hog Island: 

I am indeed thinking a lot about Maine right now, and not just for camp. You may or may not know that I am the Coordinator for the island's Artist in Residence program, and the last few weeks have been filled with selecting, notifying, and then sending an avalanche of forms to our four Residents for 2017. General program information is on the Audubon Residency website, but info about our upcoming season is on the Residency's Facebook page.

2-Day Reduction Linocut workshop, Salida, Colorado:

I can make room for one more person to squeeze into the April 8-9 weekend of printastic fun. To my great surprise and delight I have participants coming from across Colorado and also Nevada and Michigan! I've also had a couple of recent queries for east coast workshops, so I'll be working on that for some future date. 

Sorting, sorting, sorting. Applying, applying, applying. 

To be followed by framing, framing, framing.

It's that time of year! I've been busy submitting work for exhibition juries, and getting organized for upcoming shows. First up is the Colorado Governor's Show at the Loveland Museum. Opening Gala is April 28, show runs through May 28.

Clearly this is no time to be functioning at half speed, so I'm off to send reinforcements and supplies to my valiant white blood cell troopers. I'll let you know when the victory celebration is scheduled. Dare I say it? It's gonna be yuge. 

Spring Fever Hits the Studio

Yep. I've got it BAD.

73 F. Today's temperature was 73 (count 'em) lovely degrees. Even better? No wind. I threw open a few windows and tried to focus on tasks at home this morning, but I. Just. Couldn't.

So I gave up trying to be virtuous, grabbed my journal, and headed down to the river. I did walk there, a round trip of about 2.5 miles, so I told myself I scored at least a few points in the getting-some-exercise column.

There were a LOT of people down by the river this morning (clearly suffering from the same malady), so I tucked myself into a more-or-less hidden spot behind the bandshell and made a little drawing of the F Street bridge over the Arkansas River.

F Street bridge, downtown Salida

My semi-hidden spot behind the bandshell.

It felt quite nice to get out with my journal for a bit, especially since my practice has been sadly neglected through the winter months.

After my little field trip it was easier to work on projects in the studio, most importantly on a long-overdue birthday gift. It was great fun to carve some single-color linocuts, and then to play with the arrangement of the two separate blocks on different kinds of paper. (Full disclosure: the seated toad was carved a while back for another project. The leaping toad is a new block.)

Lino-toads

I also pushed around a few ideas for new color linos, although I haven't committed to anything yet.

Tomorrow, however, I'll be back to indulging my restlessness with a trip to the Monte Vista National Wildlife Refuge. The trip to MVNWR, stopover site for several thousand sandhill cranes, is a spring ritual, but this year it's gotten a bit out of control. Tomorrow will be my third trip there in 10 days. Is it any wonder I'm not getting much work done?

How can I resist THIS, though?

Yes! All cranes!

See? Not my fault. Wildlife spectacle is not to be missed, and with (ahem) spectacular spectacle weather, it would be pretty much criminal not to take advantage of the opportunity. That's my story, anyway, and I'm sticking with it. Monday will be a perfectly good day to tackle the to-do list.

Maybe.

Preliminaries

Merganser exploration under way

Slowly but surely I approach the big (18 x 24-inch) merganser linocut. Lino is trimmed and sanded. Composition is more or less determined. I'm thinking about color passes and their order. The first one or two will be straightforward... and then I suspect all heck will break loose.

I love mergansers, although I don't see them very often here in my patch outside of migration season. This time of year my glimpses of mergansers are usually confined to the river (as they will be in this lino), or flying overhead.

I've been familiarizing myself with common merganser head shapes, particularly those of the female, because she will be the main subject. I've been digging through what reference photos I have and also making some sketches from interesting-looking images I find on the web, just to see what my options are. For the record: merganser head shapes are ridiculous.

Female common mergansers have amazing rust-colored feathers on their heads, which can be raised or lowered and create all sorts of bizarre-looking shapes. Try a Google image search and you'll see what I mean.

I think the birds in my print will have fairly smooth heads, although I am toying with the idea of giving one of them a punk rock 'do. I like the one in the top center of this page for starters, but the lower left could be fun. The overall mood of the piece is going to be relatively quiet, though. (At least I hope it will.) Punk rock might not fit the theme.

This afternoon I'll start prepping the paper and hopefully make some final decisions about the composition so I can get it drawn up and on the block. It would be great to be rolling some ink by Monday.

Back Where I Started

Maine said goodbye in the same way it greeted me in May: With rain and mist and a sigh.

But before that, things were a blur of activity. Some teaching, some drawing, some socializing.

Rockweed, leaf, and crab carapace

What's Maine without lobsters?

Blueberry, beard lichen, plant life

View from the Queen Mary deck

I've been back in Colorado for a couple of days now, but am finding the transition a little bumpy. I've had to hit the ground running-- shipping sold work, framing and ordering frames for upcoming shows, plowing through three months of mail and bookkeeping. My internet service was reinstalled this morning... and slowly but surely I'm finding my feet again.

Evening comes to Hog Island

I'm anxious to get back to work on linos... in fact it's imperative that I do so soon. I'm scheduled to give a demo at the Woodson Art Museum's "Birds in Art" exhibition in less than two weeks and I have nothing started. Eek. Tomorrow will be one more day of "other stuff," but Monday it's back to the studio! Hooray!

Still, it's hard to listen to the sounds of town and remember that for the last three months I've had seabirds, loons, waves, and boats as my background soundtrack. But as Dr. Seuss said, "Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened." And I've got a lot to smile about.

One more sunset from the island

Fieldwork...umm... Wednesday?

It's Tuesday evening here in Muscongus Bay. I'm still on Hog Island, where Family Camp began this evening in a deluge. We have big rain forecast all night, so I battened down the hatches at the Cottage and came in to camp. Everything is quite snug out there, but I'm on deck to teach a workshop in camp tomorrow and depending on the weather it might happen first thing in the morning. It seemed prudent to spend the night here rather than start my day hoofing it in through rain and mud.

I've been finding a rhythm out in my little cabin in the woods. Sketches are being made, albeit slowly and without much focus. It's been a long time since I let myself draw any old thing that appealed to me, so here's a peek at what's been catching my eye.

Beach pea and driftwood on the rocks below the Cottages

A chicken skeleton in the bio lab

Crab leg twelve ways. (Embiggenable with a click)

View across Porthole Cove to the Helm cabin.

Mayflower, starflower, and something I don't know. Also embiggenable.

Red spruce

Suddenly my entire summer away from Colorado is almost over. Hard to believe I've been away since May, and harder yet to think of leaving the island in just two weeks. It's been a great adventure and I am not at all ready for it to end.

P*-minus 48 hours and counting! (*Press)

An older field drawing to keep you company.

By the time this posts on Monday morning, my friend G and I will be on our way to the airport and our rendezvous with Presston.

It's a complicated journey: drive to Colorado Springs to leave a vehicle (2 hrs), catch a ride to DIA (2 hrs), fly to Vegas (2 hrs), catch a ride to pick up the rental truck (1  hr), drive another hour to Presston's current location to load up. Hopefully we will sleep like logs and then begin the 1,000-mile drive back to Salida Tuesday morning. We'll unload here, then continue back to Colorado Springs to drop off additional equipment and return the truck. And THEN back to the car and home to settle back in to my space and try to figure out how to work a whole new way!

In theory we'll be back in Salida just about 48 hours after we leave, but it's hard to say. This sort of epic road trip seemed a lot easier 20 years ago. I already want more sleep. But...ooooooh! I'm getting a PRESS!

Tying up loose ends and being AT loose ends

A better scan of the Paintbrush
linocut. Click to embiggen.

The recently-completed "Paintbrush" linocut is dry enough to scan but not yet dry enough to store, so it remains suspended on my drying rack for a few more days. I've drawn up (mostly) a new piece, but not yet trimmed paper for it. I'm shuffling work around my studio in anticipation of a show change at my local gallery.

You're right. I'm procrastinating.

I'm dragging my feet for a couple of reasons. The first is that I have to be away a couple of days this week and don't want to start something and walk away from it. The second, more troubling, reason is that I'm not completely enamored of my idea.

I'm not completely enamored of ANY of my ideas.

In fact I pretty much hate every idea that enters my head right now.

Yep. I've got the post-success, I'll-never-do-anything-better, who-am-I-trying-to-kid, fraud-syndrome blues. It happens. Maybe not to all artists, but to a lot of us. Accolades and sales can be as mentally stressful as shows that fall flat (and I had one of those this summer, too). Self-doubt always lies in wait, eager to trip me up.

So how do I deal with it? The usual ways, of course: tantrums, moping, chocolate. And this week? Drawing.

Feeding my crankiness has been the inability to get outside to draw from life, but I finally quit whining about it and settled for sifting through my photos. Instead of looking for a great idea I allowed myself to just explore images that offered an opportunity to learn something: challenging postures, interesting textures, unusual points of view. Bad photography becomes good learning tool.

I still don't have a great idea, but I feel better about taking the time to practice my drawing skills and consider my next piece. Moving a pencil around moves my mind around and it reminds me why I do "this art thing" in the first place: to explore, learn, and grow.

So, HUSH, you Nagging Voices and be still, you Monkey Mind. Artist at work.

Sketchbook...umm... Tuesday?

The paintbrush linocut remained too tacky to print over the weekend (hopefully today, after I take down a show here in town), so here's a little tidbit from my sketchbook to celebrate heading back to work post-holiday-weekend. (For those of us in places that just HAD a holiday weekend.)

It's called a crested screamer. (Although at the moment it looks rather placid.) Appropriate for back to work? Your call.

Fieldwork Friday: Of pigs and endangered species

A trip to Colorado Springs was in order yesterday, and while there I popped in at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo to spend a little quality time with my sketchbook. Hadn't anticipated also spending quality time with 400 middle school students participating in Endangered Species Day.

Near as I could tell, this meant a sort of "science-fair-meets-field-trip" scenario in which students and their science-fair posters of information were stationed in front of animal exhibits throughout the zoo.

A nice idea... kids teaching kids... with their classmates receiving a stamp or sticker or some such indication that they had visited the various stations. But during what was probably the last (or second-to-last) week of school? Yeah. Mayhem. So I hid in what semi-quiet corners I could find until they all magically vanished back to school after lunch. Phew!

I don't find mayhem particularly conducive to drawing, but at least I did alright when I could commune with Aloiscious, "Call me Al," the King of Calm Within the Storm. You probably think you know what species he is, but I assure you that he was most emphatically identified by an adult woman as a Vietnamese Portabello Pig. Al certainly exhibits the enthusiasm of a mushroom, although I have it on good authority that he despises wet earth.

Some time later I got to dust off my tried-and-true cake-baking retort. This time the culprit was a somewhat senior-aged man who stood behind me and watched me drag pencil across paper for a while before asking, "What are you doing? Sketching?"

To which I naturally replied, "No. I am baking a cake."

To which he responded, "Oh," and then, "What?" while his wife chuckled quietly next to him. 

I relented. (sigh)

"Yes, I am sketching."

"What, THAT?" queried Mr. Confused and Incredulous, as he pointed at the one and only collared lizard perched directly in front of me, striking the very pose Mr. C had just watched me put down on paper.

(Again sigh.) I refrained from saying, "No, I am drawing the elephant near the zoo entrance. I just thought I would sit in front of a lizard while I did so," but oooohhh... it was tempting.

Endangered Species Day? One can only hope.

Fieldwork Friday: Some museum sketches

I grew up in the Denver area, so there are long lists of people to see and errands to run and venues to visit whenever I make the long trip out of our little valley to The Big City, as I did this past week.  But I'm a small town girl these days, and find my energy sapped pretty quickly by the need to drive everywhere and contend with crowds and traffic and oblivious SUV-wielding Whole Foods princesses with cell phones permanently attached to their craniums.

Hm. Judging by the previous snark it appears I'm not fully recovered from this week's experience.

But no fear. I ALWAYS find a way to go either to the zoo or the natural history museum (in Denver these are conveniently located next to each other) to draw... even if it's just for an hour or two. Although I haven't lived in the Denver metro area for 14 years I still maintain memberships to both institutions so popping in and out is no big deal.

This trip I managed two visits to the museum. The first resulted in many pages of lousy drawings, the second fared a little better.

A page of bones: Stegosaurus leg, unspecified "duckbilled" dino limb,
and a fossil turtle skull because it was 10 minutes to closing time and I
wanted to squeeze in "just one more".

Herons. Black-crowned night-heron and great blue.

Geez. I can't believe I had the entire museum to choose from and
I drew seabirds. Brown noddy and Heerman's gull.

I had a birthday while I was in the city, and I have to say that the thing I least like about advancing middle-age is the compromises it has placed on my eyesight. Museum halls and displays are softly lit to protect collections, but DANGIT it's hard to see both my subject and my drawings. The drawings are sometimes a surprise when I finally get them in daylight.

But I'm home again in my little town and back to printing this weekend... Whew! Gotta finish the last of those seabirds!

Fieldwork Friday: From the archives

Thirty-six hours. Maybe less. In just a day and a half I expect to be settling down finally into one location and happily living with my work again. I have big plans for Sunday morning that involve ink and pajamas. Which, now that I think of it, probably sounds a wee bit strange. But hopefully long-time readers will be able to explain it to newcomers in a way that doesn't make me sound too eccentric.

ANYWAY. Since I don't have new lino work to share (although I do have a block all drawn up and ready to go!) I thought I'd get Mr. Peabody to fire up the Wayback Machine and see what we could see.

So here's an old sketchbook scan dated 2003. This is a fabulous ponderosa pine living and growing in Chubb Park, a lovely area at the eastern edge of our small county. At least I presume it's still living and growing there ten-plus years later. I need to go look for it again.

I dubbed this "the donut tree," for obvious reasons. Its mysterious growth pattern seems a fitting metaphor for my own journey of the past several months. Got a little twisted around, but now it's onward and upward again!

Fieldwork Friday: Giant Hump-headed Lizard

I mean, really. Why WOULDN'T you want to draw a beast with a name like Giant Hump-headed Lizard? (Although sources other than the zoo call this "angle head lizard," which is equally amusing.) This one was a willing zoo model. I love how it rests with its hind legs straight out behind it. And those ridiculous toes! I do wish I'd had color with me this day because they're really very lovely in blues and greens.

Moving madness continues. Household is more or less settled... just trying to wrangle a team to schlep the studio now. Hopefully next week!

Fieldwork Friday: Mesohippus. Because it's the Year of the Horse and this is as close as I'll get.

Enough with the seabirds, already. Let's look at something different for a bit. I know! How about ancient horse skeletons from somewhere in my sketchbooks? The Chinese new year, the Year of the Horse, begins at the end of January, after all.

Mesohippus barbouri, or "middle horse" turned up in North America around 32 mya, and boy, was it cute! At least I imagine it was cute. Larger than Eohippus, smaller than many dogs I know. (About 60cm tall, according to Wikipedia, which seems about right for the specimen I looked at.) According to my (almost legible) notes, this particular fossil came out of the White River formation in Nebraska. Cool.

I confess I've never tried to draw contemporary horses. I find them a wee bit intimidating. Something about trying to cram something so large onto a small sheet of paper that just doesn't work for me. But I could draw this horse nearly life size and at least get his head on the page. Or I could have done had I planned my page layout a little better. Cute, Sherrie. Real cute. Just like Mesohippus.

Happy End of the Old Year!

Oh, beloved readers of Brush and Baren, my apologies for long silence this month. I've been down with The Crud for a couple of weeks, during which time I was also technically homeless. I'm still coughing but finally upright and returned to my temporary housing situation, so almost ready to return to adventures in printmaking.

Today I felt well enough for a little walk around my patch... which probably did more for my recovery than the assortment of meds I've been chugging.

While I was out I picked up a couple of little willow twigs to bring back and draw. It's been too, too long since I have drawn anything just for me, which seems clear when I regard my impatience with the process and my less-than-stellar results. But I did it, and that was good.

My plans for the remainder of this week include continued recovery (oh please oh please), some year-end administrative tasks, and some print time. It's safe to say that 2013 has been one of my least favorite years ever,* so I'm looking forward to putting this one on a shelf and getting a fresh start in the new year.

(As a friend said recently, "It's enough to make one triskaidekaphobic!" So one good thing that came out of this year: a legitimate excuse to use that word in a sentence!)

Fieldwork Friday: prehistoric wonders (why not?)

Because sometimes you have to put aside the things you "should" be working on and draw something else entirely.

Edmontosaurus skull and Protostega gigas. Denver Museum of Nature and Science.

**So I just got back to town and checked this post on my computer... Gack! Apparently the Blogger app doesn't do a very good job of resizing photos. The previous image was supposed to be "medium-sized." But here's a replacement.. 

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Fieldwork Friday: Warthog (Why not?)

One of the few things that I regret about living several hours from any big city is the infrequency of my zoo-drawing expeditions. When I lived in Denver I filled a large sketchbook with zoo sketches every few months. Now it takes a year, sometimes two.

I enjoy drawing at the zoo, but some days I despair at the things I overhear. The "Disneyfication" of animals makes me crazy. Every clown fish is Nemo. Every warthog is Pumba. (sigh) I suppose I should be pleased that observers can recognize the origins of animated characters, at least...

But there's often something to chuckle about, too. (Remember the story of the kid and the brain-sucking giraffes?) Not long ago, as I sat drawing a camel, a family consulted their zoo map: "I think these are dromedaries. Where do they keep the bacterial camels?"

I dunno. In a petri dish, I hope.

Fieldwork Fishday

Fish sketch on Friday? Why not? Parrot cichlid and flag-tailed prochilodus, in case you're wondering. Guess which one's the flag-tail.

I was in Denver yesterday to shift some work around at Abend Gallery and to have lunch with my wee nephew, Alex. As you can see, he's not such a wee lad anymore. In fact, he turned 23 this week. Time flies. Fish flies? Flying fish? Sorry, I can't seem to tie these two together. Although when Alex was little he could do a very passable imitation of fish lips. ;-)

Back to el lino grande this weekend, although the fact that we're getting a warm reprieve after several weeks of sub-zero weather will probably keep me more out of the studio than in. I'm in serious need of some outdoor time.