3 waterbrush pens filled with Payne's Gray, sepia, and cerulean ink

1 Pigma brush pen in burnt sienna

My blue Portuguese laundry pencil

2 Cretacolor oil pencils in sepia and soft black

a  lightweight plastic travel palette with manganese blue, burnt sienna, transparent pyrole orange

1 travel watercolor brush

A big Pitt Artist pen in warm gray

Then I bought a box of cheap colored pencils for children at Poggi's. I used the orange one a lot!

I left my Stillman and Birn sketchbook at home (!) in my packing haste and had to buy a Daler and Rowny Ebony one, also at Poggi's. 

Here are more of what I did with these:

Here's my stepson Lee, at lunch with my daughter Cecelia and me. I put that orange pencil to work!

As a reminder, here's an earlier scene of that same cafe

In the same period,  Enrico Casarosa started his Worldwide Sketchcrawls, where participants spend a designated day sketching and afterwards, share their work with each other, again online. Danny's and Enrico's stunningly successful groups showed us what 'going viral' meant, back when that phrase was still in its toddlerhood.

In 2007, Gabi Campanario had his own brilliant idea, creating an online group called Urban Sketchers, with correspondents he'd selected from all over the world. The goal?  "To show the world, one drawing at a time."  Talk about going global. Gabi and his website have done it.

If Danny and Enrico were the founding giants of the sketch movement, and Gabi their successor in the Big Ideas category, Cathy Johnson, with her books on sketching and illustrated journaling and her various websites, has been the movement's wise woman, teacher, and generous mentor. Her encouragement, both private and published, has drawn many, many into the sketching fold.

Several books have come out of the movement already, in addition to those by Danny and Cathy, but I want to talk about two very recent ones that are as inspiring as can be: 'The Art of Urban Sketching' by, who else, Gabi Campanario and 'Here & There,' by Miguel Herranz.

Gabi's book features the work of dozens of Urban Sketchers, including, I'm proud to say, my own. It's handsomely designed and laid out and, with the variety of styles and approaches it includes, it has a near-encyclopedic reach. It's such fun to see the kind of things sketchers can get up to! AND it's the Number One seller in books on painting at Amazon as of this writing! I won't go into great detail about it, because it's already much touted, but just in case you've been distracted lately, I wanted to bring it to your attention. You need this book.

Miguel Herranz's 'Here and There' is at the other end of the encyclopedic spectrum. It is Miguel's work we see here, and only his. Like Gabi's book, Miguel's is artfully composed. Production quality is very high, which, it must be said, is not all that typical of independently published sketchbooks. And then there are the drawings themselves. You'll want to see these not only for their vitality and charm and luscious technique, but because you can trace Miguel's evolution as a sketcher on these pages. Mind you, he IS a professional illustrator, but you can still see a significant evolution in his drawing tecnhnique as he, having taken up drawing as a daily practice, gets better and better and even better. All of the drawings in 'Here & There' are lovely, fun, and full of personality. There are some drawings that will simply take your breath away.

We like sketches better, sometimes, than paintings because they are so direct, so here and now. They're personal, they're handmade, and really, anyone can produce them. You may not be another Miguel Herranz or Cathy Johnson, but you CAN sketch, you know. (Read Danny's book, if you don't believe me.)

Or you can just look at and enjoy the work you'll find in these two books.

Oh, go ahead. Either way. And let me know what you think.

I did brave the cold with my daughter Cecelia the first day (pre-snow) and the last day (after snow) to make some outdoor sketches. I'll post them in a couple of days.

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I met dear Concetta Flore early on the day it snowed. We got some sketching done and here is one of mine from that day. More to come.

Here are two very different first steps in lithography. One is a face roughly derived from my sketch of the adoring angel below. It sort of just appeared on the plate as I drew.

The second image comes from a recent sketch done in my studio here and is a way of seeing how my normal gestures and lines behave under lithograph conditions. The plates were small, 7"x9", so it was hard to get real momentum going.

Here is the mixed media sketch of the protea mentioned above:

And finally, a little loosening-up sketch from this morning: This loosening up is necessary because I'm going to Rome next Tuesday to see my daughter Cecelia (she who never stands still) and hope to get some sketches of Rome (think fountains) done while I'm there. She, as you may remember, is an avid sketcher now, so we can enjoy this together. I'm also meeting up with Concetta Flore, lovely artist and very nice person. She lives in Rome and wants to sketch with me...I'm really looking forward to it. I'm going to prepare some loose sheets for sketching by applying acrylic washes like the one I used for the Greek/Roman head below. Then I'll use ink and crayon on site. Playing with mixed media outside of the painting studio keeps me open to new ways of doing things inside it.  I'm taking a travel sketchbook, too. Ciao, Roma!

I had time on my last visit to make two brief sketches. Color added later, as per the museum's rules.. no wet media allowed, of course.

This is a heartbreakingly beautiful angel, Bavarian, 18th century, in polychrome and gilt.

And here is an antique head, Greek or Roman... I didn't note at the time, unfortunately. It looks very pristine, I'll say that.

Off to Austin, Texas tomorrow for a lithography workshop, cold-addled head and all.

Achoo!

In this process, I move back and forth between more and less abstracted images. When I get stuck or feel too loosey-goosey, I put something down in front of me (here, the amaryllis) and paint it. This direct painting from life, from objects, is a way to ground myself, a means and not an end. Last year, I did this for an extended period, just to get back to wielding a brush. I spent only three hours on each of those paintings and set them aside, unfinished, before moving on to the next one. It was a great exercise for me.

These are unfinished, too,  but I will work most of them to completion. And then put them aside. After a couple of months, I'll see where I am.  

These paintings are speaking to me, though I don't know yet what they are saying. For now, it doesn't matter. The imagery here comes from emotion and intuition.

I'm supported in this slow, intuitive working method by the ideas I found in the book Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind by Guy Claxton.

Here are some excerpts: 

The mind, too, works at different speeds. Some of its functions are performed at lightening speed; others take... days or even years to complete their course.

...there is another mental register that proceeds more slowly still. It is often less purposeful and clear-cut, more playful, leisurely, or dreamy. In this mode we are ruminating... .being contemplative or meditative. These leisurely, apparently aimless ways of knowing  and experiencing are just as 'intelligent' as the other, faster ones.

We need the tortoise mind as much as we need the hare brain.

Yes, indeed.

I'm going to Austin, Texas next week for a lithography workshop and a few days later to Rome, to visit one of my daughters. I'll share here the work, sketches and prints, from those two experiences; they'll be much more hare-brained than my studio work.