Hipstamatic and Recent Sketchbook Pages

On Sunday afternoon, wanting to go somewhere to do some sketching, we drove to Nixon Park Nature Center to sketch inside air conditioned comfort. Nixon Park Nature Center features a nice collection of taxidermied animal mounts from around the world. There’s a polar bear that you can see up close, a caribou, blue and black wildebeests and others. After arriving there, it wasn’t as cool inside as we had hoped. We also didn’t feel as much like sketching the animals as we thought we would. Brenda read over the many display cards with animal facts while I was taking photos with my rediscovered Hipstamatic app on my iPhone. I used the pinhole lens in Hipstamatic which produces wildly exaggerated pinhole type photos. A few of them are shown here.

Pinhole photo of caribou in nature museum
Pinhole photo of lion chasing animal nature display at nature museum
Pinhole photo closeup of animal with antlers
Pinhole photo of tree with leaves

Other than that, I still am feeling a bit uninspired with creating new artwork or sketching in my sketchbook. The progress of the illustration work on my current children’s book project is going very slow. Most of my sketchbook pages have been meditative types of doodles. Here are some of my recent sketchbook pages.

Sketchbook page with curly doodles
Sketchbook page with imaginative teapots
Sketchbook page with repeating radiating curved doodles
Sketchbook pages with doodles drawn in blue pencil on blue background

Weekend Sketching

This past Saturday, I caught up with my sketching group at Italian Lake Park in Harrisburg, PA. I hadn’t been sketching with the group for a few months due to a nagging medical condition which I won’t share here. I was the first to arrive and chose a bench beside the lake with a view of the historic water fountain, titled Dance of the Eternal Spring. A Google search found that the fountain was sculpted by Guiseppe Donato in 1909 for Milton S. Hershey’s estate lawn. Hershey refused the artwork and after going through several locations, it was ultimately installed at Italian Lake Park in 1971.

I chose not to sketch the fountain at first, settling on a home with a large tree on the other side of the lake. I had decided to keep my sketching kit small and easy for the day. I brought along my small crossbody bag with assorted pens with two small sketchbooks inside. One of the sketchbooks was an Uglybooks pocket sketchbook with bright yellow paper, which I chose to sketch with that day. I used two of my favorite sketching pens, a Uniball Vision Micro and a Pentel Pocket Brush pen. I was able to create the four small sketches shown below. Nothing fancy, just putting in the old pencil miles as they say.

drawings of trees on bright yellow paper
drawing of house and tree and drawing of water fountain sculpture

On Sunday, my wife and I decided to get out of the house for an early afternoon treat at a local coffee shop that was new to us. I really just wanted to do some cafe sketching while sipping some coffee and eating a sweet snack. Brenda had a chocolate banana peanut butter smoothie. I had half of an enormous chocolate chocolate chip muffin and a hot coffee with half and half. I didn’t bring anything extra to sketch with, I just used the field notes signature sketchbook that I’ve been carrying around in my bag for months. I also pulled out my Blackwing red pencil to sketch with. The sketches are below, again nothing fancy, just putting in the old pencil miles.

sketchbook page spread with sketches of beetles in red pencil

Feeling Blocked

Lately I’m finding it hard to work in my sketchbooks or other art projects. I’ve been slowly pecking away at the finished illustrations for the now titled, Catnip Coco Cats. My 100 Studio Days project of working in my studio for one hour a day for 100 days has tapered off to NONE. I think I made it to 67 or somewhere about there.

I will finish the 100 days project but I haven’t much to show for it so far, except a finished sketchbook. I also spent some of that time getting ready for the Rainbow Artists and Makers Fair at the East Shore Area Library last weekend. I was busy printing, trimming, folding, and packaging art prints, zines, stickers, my children’s books and nature journal art kits. It was my first time having a table at any kind of event and I sold more art prints than I thought I would. It was a good experience, so much so, that Brenda and I have decided to apply to have a table at the Harrisburg Zine Fest in September.

The one small thing that I’ve been able to keep up with is my illustrated Traveler’s Company monthly journal. I’ve managed to complete every month so far with a small daily drawing of whatever’s happened that day (mostly what I’ve eaten that day). I find looking at the finished months very satisfying. I’ve been using pen and ink and color pencils. Some of my monthly pages are shown here.

So, here I am, ready to start creating again. I’m going to finish that 100 days in the studio project and see what I end up with. I’ve started dabbling with making a couple more zines. And I’ve borrowed a few drawing books from the library just to get more pencil miles in the old sketchbook. Some of things I want to explore are the new Himi Gouache set that’s been sitting on my art table, unopened. Tempera and mixed media art sticks, and a set of Caran d’Ache Neocolor II Aquarelle wax pastels. What are you experimenting with?

Illustrating My Next Book

While hanging out in the living room with my wife and two cats, I finished writing and illustrating my third children's book, Buffy & Roxy Decorate a Cake. Buffy is our original character in the first and second books, and Roxy is a new character inspired by my son and daughter-in-law’s Golden Doodle, Roxy. This book won't break any sales records or win the Caldecott medal, but it's my work and I really enjoyed the process of illustrating and publishing it on Amazon KDP.

Two dogs wearing aprons are decorating a large yellow cake with pink frosting.

I discovered while illustrating this book that the method I was using to illustrate the characters didn’t reproduce very well on the proofs that I received from Amazon KDP. I had to change the settings a few times to get the colors to pop. I’m still not entirely happy with the final colors but I had to let it go. I found that I should be using the CMYK color space for the illustrations in Procreate on my iPad.

While I was working on Buffy & Roxy Decorate A Cake, I kept thinking about a possible story line for one of my illustrations from a couple of years ago. The character is a winter wizard and he sorta resembles Santa Claus. Different story ideas kept running through my mind but I was firm about taking a break after the third book before starting another book. Finally I set a rough timeline for myself and got started on The Santa Wizard of Mrakovich Mountain by sitting down with my laptop and ironing out a story. Rough sketches started in June 2025 and now I’m at the stage of inking the pages in digital ink in Procreate. My plan is to have the book finished and uploaded to Amazon KDP by October, just in time for the holidays. I’m still not sure how I will illustrate the pages or if they will have the look of my other work of black outlines and watercolor fills.

Winter Wizard that looks like Santa Claus is on a dark sky background

Here are a few preliminary pages of the book, I plan to ink all the pages before starting in with the full color illustrations.

The sleepy wzard wakes up in the morning with his cat on his lap
The Santa Wizard is riding his electric scooter across the mountain through the pine forest.

The Wizard drives the same brand of electric scooter as Buffy The Happy Laughing Dog. And he has a cat. I’m not sure who would be cat-sitting for the Wizard while he goes on his trip.