I love to sketch, but I also love to share my passion with other people. Recently I led two activities to help promote art in the local community.

For Google's Take Your Children to Work Day, I facilitated a sketching scavenger hunt. The kids had to solve riddles and then find and draw objects around the campus. I encouraged them to create a visual journal of their visit to Google.

As the kids sketched, I drew the activity around me on a flip chart using the same Scholastic washable markers that everyone was given -- an early morning volleyball game and some people taking a break from work outdoors. The weather was perfect -- bright and sunny. I hope the children had as much fun as I did!

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Last weekend, I led an outdoor sketching workshop for Art in Action, a Menlo Park-based nonprofit that provides schools with art education programs. I had donated this "art experience" to their fundraising auction earlier in the spring, and the winning bidders were the participants.

We chose the Mountain View farmers market as our meeting point and muse. I talked a little about the basics of sketching outdoors and then sent the participants off to do several studies describing the story of the market. Our humble materials were:

• a Bee Paper Pen Sketcher's sketchbook
• a Sharpie fine point pen
• Yarka pan watercolors
• a Pentel Aquash waterbrush

Not the best of tools for watercolor (we were trying to keep costs down), but we still captured some great moments.

Here's what I sketched while everyone was off drawing.

A collage of perspectives on the market:


A sketcher drawing a vegetable stand:


The parrot guy:


A quickly drawn tableau of a mom and her kid:


Hope everyone (kids and adults alike) fills up the remaining pages in their sketchbooks over the summer!

I said last fall that I would post pics of my studio soon ... aaaand now it's May of the following year. (Oops.) Well, better late than never!

The studio is 8'x10' and is right next to the house. It was built by The Shed Shop in Fremont, California. They were great to work with from beginning to end. We opted to have it built unfinished, so we did the interior walls, flooring and exterior painting.



Come on in!



I've reused much of the shelving and organizing solutions I had in our Connecticut house.



Two windows let in a lot of light, and I can even see the hills in the distance when I'm sitting at the desk.