First sketch in a while

December 1, 2023

Drawing of breakfast consisting of coffee in a cup that says "Best Bonus Mom" along with lactose free milk and a flask of water. On a blue and white plate there is a half of asiago cheese bagel with butter and a half of a banana. — Morning sketch in daily carry notebook

I slept in this morning and decided to start the work day a little later. My emotional support cat came into the bedroom this morning and stayed with me until I had showered and made myself presentable. I decided to put on my vintage pocket protector since I was wearing a comfy flannel shirt on this chilly late autumn day. My emotional support cat hung out on the kitchen table keeping me company while I sketched and then ate my breakfast. I feel better today than I did a week ago.

Vintage YTI (York Technical Institute) Pocket Protector - York, Pennsylvania — Vintage YTI (York Technical Institute) pocket protector

Old Bad Art - High School and College Art Projects

February 1, 2017

Over the past summer, Brenda and I climbed the stairs to the attic to look through my old art portfolios for a book that I remembered having in college. After seeing some of my old high school and art projects as I was going through the portfolios, I thought maybe the attic wasn't the best place to store them. I wanted to look at them again after 35 years of being stored away so we brought everything downstairs. I purchased under bed storage containers and started to sort through the projects, remembering my time in art school and the artist I was in high school.

My college commercial art education stressed highly the importance of good craftsmanship in producing all of our art projects. I spent many late nights and a few all nighters painstakingly drawing and painting typographic designs, making alcohol marker renderings, and creating gouache illustrations. Each of our finished projects then had to be wrapped cleanly and neatly with acetate to protect them.

My college art experience did not include computer graphic training (this was before the introduction of the Macintosh computer), I learned all of what I know now on the job and with a couple of training classes. I have continued to increase my knowledge of computer graphic design programs with online training using services like Lynda.com and YouTube.

I have in the past three or so years, been re-acquainting myself with my analog art roots by experimenting with various art materials and daily sketching. I had not created much artwork up until then, being busy raising my children with their extracurricular activities, and a full-time job with a long commute. Now that they're grown and out of the house, I am on a quest to fill sketchbooks with ideas, and find ways to express my artistic vision, whenever I figure out what that might be.

Projects waiting to be completed and art supplies to be tried.

"Create-A-Thon" 2017 - A Year Long Creative Experiment

January 1, 2017

I've just completed my yearlong 2016 Film Camera project but I've been thinking about what I want to accomplish for 2017 for a couple of months now.

After years of being out of art school and with our children all grown, I've been sketching and creating projects with renewed artistic energy the past 2-3 years. The local newspaper took notice of my instagram postings and included me in a story early last year about artists carving out creative time while working full time jobs. I've been trying to squeeze in time to sketch and experiment with new art supplies or processes all year long while working on the the film camera project which brings me to my project idea for 2017 - a year long Create-A-Thon!

I will be trying out a new art material or process roughly on a weekly basis, depending on how much time I want to spend on each one, while blogging about my experiments and posting photos. My bipolar mind wants to try so many things and my studio is filled with no end of creative supplies that I've been buying like crazy with A.C. Moore and Hobby Lobby coupons. I have mounds of sketchbooks as I can't pass up a good looking sketchbook when we go to a new place to visit or I take my son shopping for art supplies for school (he's in the fine art painting program at MICA).

I still love film photography and will continue practicing it in the new year, but I would like to narrow it down to just a few of my favorite cameras, which currently happen to be ones using Fuji Instax Mini and Wide films. At some point during the year I will also try to get into my darkroom that I set up over a year ago.

Here is a list of materials and processes I will be using for Create-A-Thon 2017:

1. Derwent Graphitint pencils

2. Derwent Inktense pencils

3. Derwent Aquatone pencils

4. Peerless watercolors

5. Prang Professional Pan watercolors

6. Prima Decadent Pies watercolor pans

7. Prima Classics watercolor pans

8. Prima Tropicals watercolor pans

9. Coptic Stitch Sketchbook

10. Gelli Printing

11. Museum sketching

12. Urban sketching

13. One Sketchbook, one pen, one week

14. Watercolor Painting

15. Oil painting

16. Acrylic painting

17. Oil pastel

18. Mixed media

19. Doodles

20. Live model drawing

21. Take a class

22. iPad drawing in Procreate

23. iPad drawing in Paper by 53

24. iPad drawing in Autodesk Sketchbook

25. iPad drawing in Concepts

26. iPad drawing in MediBang Paint Pro

27. Week of portrait drawing

28. Self portraits

29. Winsor and Newton Pigment markers

30. Faber Castell Pitt artist pens

31. Nicole dual tip markers

32. Grayscale Value studies

33. Line art with brush pens

34. Duct tape sketchbook

35. Dip pen and ink drawing

36. Hand lettering

37. Sketching people at the mall

38. Mono printing with 3D objects

39. Sun prints

40. Cyanotype printing

41. Darkroom printing with caffenol

42. Fuji Instax peel aparts

43. Print photo or painting on watercolor printer paper

44. Use Bristol board

45. Use mineral paper

46. Use canvas paper

47. Watercolor painting of cats

48. Loose watercolors

49. Fill one sketchbook per month

50. Toned gray sketchbook drawings

51. Toned tan sketchbook drawings

52. Christmas card art

53. Collage

54. Winsor and Newton Watercolor markers

55. Variety of Watercolor pencils

56. Tim Holtz Distress crayons

57. Tim Holtz Distress markers

58. Koi Waterbrush markers

59. Sketching with Carpenter pencils and lumber crayons

60. Make watercolor blocks

61. Drawing on the Iskn Slate

62. Drawing on Wacom Intuos tablet

63. Assemble Skilcraft Visible Head model

64. Assemble Skilcraft Visible Cow model

65. Assemble Lindberg transparent alien

66. Assemble Lindberg transparent woman

67. Draw the same subject in 5 different mediums

68. Copic marker drawing

And anything else that catches my fancy in the new year.

Nature Journal Sketchbook

June 6, 2016

Sketching entries in my Global Art Handbook Panorama.

Mixed Media Doodling

April 14, 2016

The latest entries in my sketch journal - doodles made starting with watercolor wash, swatches of Derwent Aquatone pencils activated with a waterbrush, then Uniball Signo White Gel pen and Pentel Pocket Brush ink pen in a Strathmore Watercolor Visual Journal.

Pocket Watercolor Sketchbook - May 2015 - March 2016

March 27, 2016

I've completed two sketchbooks on my vacation - this is the Moleskine pocket watercolor sketchbook that I've been carrying around for the past year. I used a Sakura Koi pocket watercolor field kit for the sketches in the beginning of the journal, then switched over to a Winsor & Newton Watercolour Pocket Sketcher's Box. There are bits of other media thrown in here or there - Pigmamicron Pen, Uniball Vision Fine Pen, Platinum Carbon Fountain Pen, Watercolor Pencils, Uniball Signo White Pen, and Gelly Roll Pen.

InkTober 2015

October 4, 2015

I'm a little late with this post, but I'll be participating in InkTober for the second time this year. Last year I was completely unprepared, not knowing what it was until scrolling through my instagram feed at 11:30 pm on the first day. I quickly sketched out something and posted it before midnight. Inktober is a month long daily drawing challenge using pen and ink in its various forms, with your daily drawings then being posted on social media. This year, I've prepared my folder of ideas and decided on a weekly theme of subjects for the month. This week's theme is "Cameras from my collection." Check in with me daily on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter to see the daily pen and ink drawing.

Weekend Sketches

August 2, 2015

A few weekend sketches here, two pen and ink line doodles with the new Pentel Pocket Brush Pen that I picked up last week at Plaza Art in Baltimore. The third sketch is an entry in my Moleskine Watercolor Journal, made with Windsor & Newton Cotman Pocket Watercolor Sketcher's Box and Pigmamicron pen. I've been on a quest of sorts to find the perfect pen and ink brush pen, I've tried several. I've tried the Pilot Pocket Brush Pen, both hard and soft versions, both producing very nice thick and thin strokes, with the soft one producing thicker and heavier lines than the hard one. I also ordered the Tombow Hard and Soft Fude Brush Pens, these are ok, but I like them the least of the brush pens that I've tried. I have used the Pentel Fude Brush Pen for a number of sketches and find I can control the thin and thick lines I get with this brush pen very well. It is a a little larger in the hand than the other brush pens, feeling a bit more the size of a brush than pen as the other ones do. The line art sketches above were made with the smaller Pentel Pocket Brush Pen with available cartridge refills. This pen is more expensive than the Pentel Fude Brush Pen but has the capability to be refilled with ink cartridges as the Pentel Fude Brush Pen does not.

The third watercolor sketch continues my fascination with drawing skulls, but we all know that I love skulls, skeletons and anatomy and have a small collection of anatomy models, some of which I've assembled and painted myself. This skull was a yard sale find and features green glowing light-up eyes in a skull head made of a foam like material.

Argus C3

July 27, 2015

The Argus C3, the camera I'm currently carrying in my bag and shooting with. I bought this camera from ebay and it seems to be in working order. I've loaded it with Kentmere 100 that I'll develop in Kodak D-76. Watercolor painting created with Sakura Koi Watercolor Pocket Field Kit using Niji waterbrush in my Moleskine watercolor journal.