Woke up early to watch the sun rise from the summit of Cadillac Mountain in Acadia National Park.















Sat on the rocks near Bass Harbor Head Lighthouse to paint this one:




















This is a lobster boat as seen from an overlook on the Ocean Path in the park:

















A quick sketch of Main Street in the town of Southwest Harbor:















Here's Jordan Pond, as seen from the Jordan Pond House Restaurant in the park. (I thought their famous popovers with jam were good but not amazing.)















A super-fast sketch of some boats in Bar Harbor:















And a gazebo, sketched from the same vantage point but on the other side of the park bench I was sitting on:















The flat rocks in the park made it easy to sit and sketch for long periods of time. Here's a look at some park tourists gazing at the ocean at Thunder Hole:















And again, from the same vantage point but looking right instead of left:















I took a lot of different materials with me, so several of these were experiments. I used my usual Lamy Safari with Noodler's ink but also Pitt Artists pens, watercolors and other ink; I used my Moleskine watercolor sketchbooks, Arches hot-pressed watercolor paper, and Strathmore cold-pressed watercolor paper.

I'm always the type who takes a bunch of activities to a weekend away. This time, I brought along my sketching stuff, some books to read, and my knitting. I didn't knit a stitch, and read about two lines, but I did manage to get some drawing in. I sketched the dock at twilight, even though the colored pencil shading makes it look earlier in the day. Then I sat on the deck sketching family members who had gathered around the table for a card game.

Visiting D.C. feels like coming home -- a home that has changed a great deal since I left, of course, but somehow is still comfortingly familiar.





























Saturday night, we had dinner at Oyamel, in Penn Quarter, where the made-to-order guac and tiny tacos are heaven...















Dinner on Sunday night -- just as delicious -- was at Agraria Farmers & Fishers on the Georgetown waterfront, which is all about seasonal, sustainable ingredients. Yes, it was originally conceived by the North Dakota Farmers' Union, a provenance that seems a bit odd for Georgetown (but not so odd for D.C.)















(Lamy Safari/Noodler's ink & watercolors; Faber-Castell Pitt Artist's pen & Staedtler Aquarell watercolor pencils.)

Went out to Caramoor yesterday afternoon -- it's a lovely Mediterranean-style villa surrounded by beautiful gardens in Katonah, N.Y. We strolled around the gardens and listened to the music of pianist Vladimir Feltsman.


















(Lamy Safari w/ Noodler's ink in Lexington Gray, Winsor & Newton artists' watercolors, and Staedtler Karat Aquarell watercolor pencils in Holbein Multi-Drawing sketchbook.)

Yes, I know I haven't posted in some time, but I have been sketching!
Here are a few sketches done over the Fourth of July weekend in Mystic, CT. There was a man attempting to put up a sail, and as he kept circling around the same area while doing so, it gave me an opportunity to get the major shapes down.

I also liked the way an abandoned boat looked, aground on the shore, so I added a sketch of that as well.















Some swans decided to sun themselves on the little beach near my in-laws' house:

















And this is a super-fast sketch done this past Saturday while sitting on the Lambertville, NJ, side of the bridge that takes pedestrians and cars across to New Hope, PA:

















(Lamy Safari/Noodler's ink in Lexington Grey; colored later with Staedtler Aquarell watercolor pencils.)

At long last, the Perpetual Rain Machine let up and we were able to go see this year's Shakespeare on the Sound performance of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in Rowayton's Pinkney Park. It was a very entertaining performance -- the actors seemed well cast and the music by Stew was very cool. Looks like the new artistic director is already making her mark! The raked stage definitely brought the actors closer to the audience, though our vantage point wasn't the best for scenes that took place under the trees. I sketched the stage and audience while we waited for the play to begin, and then quickly drew impressions of the various characters as they danced, crawled and shimmied through their parts.

There are several vacant buildings in Stamford's South End -- long abandoned former factories and such. I've been wanting to sketch them before they're all razed for the new Fairway-and-condo complex, and I finally went out this morning to do it. Instead of my usual Moleskine, I tried out a sample pad of Bristol board. Surprisingly it takes watercolor quite well.























(Lamy Safari w/ Noodler's Lexington Gray ink and waterclors on Strathmore 300 Series smooth Bristol.)

It's been raining pretty much every day here for the past several weeks, so we were a little apprehensive about going to the Clearwater Festival in Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y., yesterday. It's an annual extravaganza to preserve the Hudson River, headlined this year by Pete Seeger, Jay Ungar, Arlo Guthrie, and Taj Mahal, among others. But we went anyway, and the sun did come out, at least for short periods of time, so it wasn't a complete washout. The sudden showers did prove to be a challenge, however, for sketching -- it was a race against time to complete a drawing before the large, splashy drops began, announcing the next downpour.
I took along my large Moleskine watercolor sketchbook, which I haven't used a lot lately, and I wasn't too pleased with the way watercolors handled on it -- odd, I know, because presumably it's exactly the same paper as in the smaller version, which I use all the time.











































































(Lamy Safari w/ Noodler's Lexington Gray ink and watercolor in large Moleskine watercolor sketchbook; last one done with Pentel brush pen and colored with Faber-Castell Pitt artists' pens.)

I'd always wanted to visit Green-Wood Cemetery, in Brooklyn, and got an excuse to do so on Saturday. We had a quick, surreptitious picnic on the grounds with friends and then walked about for a bit afterward since it wasn't raining just yet. Green-Wood is the resting place of such notables as Leonard Bernstein, Boss Tweed, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Louis Comfort Tiffany. It's vast (478 acres) -- would love to go back there sometime to explore it more thoroughly.


















(Lamy Safari with Noodler's ink in Lexington Grey; watercolor added later.)

Just got back from a long weekend visiting friends in St. Thomas (U.S. Virgin Islands). Did a lot of snorkeling, but had time to do a few quick sketches. Here's one of Hull Bay (yes, the water really is as turquoise as it looks in brochures):


















And one that I drew while waiting for lunch to be served at a waterfront restaurant in Charlotte Amalie:

















Here are some people relaxing at a picnic table at Magens Bay -- often thought to be one of the most beautiful beaches in the world.















(Lamy Safari with Noodler's ink in Lexington Grey and watercolors in Holbein Multi-Drawing sketchbook.)

Went camping this past Sunday at Housatonic Meadows State Park in Sharon, CT. According to our fellow campers, we just happened to miss a massive rain/hail/cats/dogs storm that deluged and swamped the campsite for a half-hour -- we had pitched our tent and gone up to the next town to check out a kayaking outfitter store. Luckily our tent was fine -- just a bit damp inside. On Monday, we drove up to West Cornwall to kayak a little on the river. We were there before 7 a.m., but the trout fishers had beaten us to it, as you can see.

Decided to pop into the brand-new Ritz Asia in Ridgefield, CT (on Rte. 7) on our way back from visiting family and checking out the flea market in Rhinebeck, NY, on Sunday. Typical Asian fusion fare - selection of sauces for sauteed veggies/meat/tofu, pad thai, sushi, etc. -- nothing too amazing. But the huge statue of Buddha in the middle of the restaurant just BEGGED to be sketched.

On our last day in London, we breakfasted at Smith's of Smithfield, in the area of Smithfield Market. The blackberry-mint smoothie was divine.






















Then we took the Eurostar train to Paris. Here are a few impressions of the landscape outside the train. There were fields and fields' worth of acid yellow rapeseed flowers, too, which were gorgeous.











The weather in Paris was gorgeous, too. Here's a quick sketch of a cafe on Rue St Antoine:














When we went up the "butte" of Montmartre, we found lots of sketch artists making conte pencil drawings of tourists for a fee -- and so they themselves became the subject of my sketch:















Dinner one night was at a traditional French bistro, the General La Fayette:

















We returned to London on the Eurostar on Sunday -- here's a passenger asleep on the train:

Yes, that's where we are, and we couldn't have asked for better weather -- it's been hovering around 70 degrees here. So -- no excuse not to get the sketchbooks out! Yesterday I walked practically the length and breadth of the city, looking in at various shops like Green & Stone and L. Cornelissen for art supplies; Finnesse Lifestyle for the Aarika 'Foxi' earrings that I'd bought in Helsinki and promptly lost; Foyle's for some of the travel sketchbooking art books I wanted, etc. So the only two sketches I did were these, at the beginning of the day, both at Duke of York Square on King's Road. (I don't have a scanner with me, so obviously these are only as good as I can make them with a digital camera and Photoshop.)































Today, I decided to do the opposite -- I went to fewer places and got more sketching in. Here's the scene at a cafe on Earl's Court Road where we had breakfast:
















Went out to Smithfield Market after that, and did a quick sketch while I was waiting for an appointment that never actually happened:























After a picnic lunch in the hotel room from M&S Simply Food, took the tube out to Kew Gardens:
























































I brought along this Muji notebook to experiment with -- I don't know that it's meant for drawing at all, but it has lovely brown kraft paper and so far I really like the way it works with a gray Pitt Artist pen and a gel-ink white pen. I sketched the above while in the gardens, and decided to add a little color with my Stabilo color pens later on:























Finally, I did a quick impression of people at a small cafe in Kew, near the railway station.