It’s been a while since I last posted, here’s what I’ve been up to lately. After going through a bit of a creative slump and artistic block during our move last year, I got back to the business of filling up sketchbooks and digital sketching. I tried a variety of drawing and painting activities and sketchbook filling ideas to get back on track. I took a summer landscape in-person drawing class this summer that got me into sketching and drawing nature with pen and ink. Specifically trees.

I find I’ve been spending more time working on a drawing than I did previously. I would like to get outside more to draw from life, but I’m still having a block in that area about where to go to sketch. Not to mention the terrible habit I’ve gotten into since the pandemic of not wanting to leave the house. But I do go out on occasion and snap reference photos for my drawings. My wife and I went to an antique steam engine show a couple of weeks ago but had to leave early, I had forgotten how hard it is to breath around the smoking coal-fired steam engines. I did manage to grab photos for reference for future drawings.

I’ve been out a few times over the summer with the local urban sketching group and my wife and I are planning a day trip out to the National Apple Harvest Festival coming up soon. I’ll be posting some of my sketchbook drawings in the coming weeks.

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.