I know this is a week late, but as the weather gets colder I find myself getting busier!

We started our crawl in Chelsea Market near the Chelsea Wine Vault, with a good-sized crowd for once:





For this next one, I used a dip pen that I'd bought in New Orleans, along with Higgins India ink. It was the first time I used a dip pen "out in the field," so to speak. Surprisingly it wasn't too hard to handle the bottle, ink, paper towels, etc.



Then a bunch of us moved on to the High Line:



After that I left the group to meet up with M. and have lunch. All in all, it was a good crawl!

Get out your sketchbooks, paints, and pens ... it's time once again for Sketchcrawl. This one marks five years of Sketchcrawling around the world!

Sometimes when the weather is beautiful and you're in a new city, it's really hard to stop and sketch ... you just want to keep walking all over and seeing all you can!

Here's a quick sketch looking down Chartres St from near Jackson Square in the French Quarter. The balconies and buildings cast a ton of shadows everywhere.



Here's a look down the opposite side, still from a bench near Jackson Square.



And here's a super quick sketch dashed off while waiting for the Magazine Street bus, colored with Faber Castell Pitt Artists pens later:

'Tis the season for apple-picking ... or at least, it was. After reading the recent feature on apple orchards in Connecticut magazine, I wanted to go sample the harvest for myself. So we set out for Easton a few weekends ago, to a place called Silverman's Farm. When we got there, we found out that apple picking had ended for the season, though families were still mobbing the place for pumpkins and tractor rides. (Tractor rides are like hayrides without the hay, as we came to find out -- at least we got to ride up the hill through the apple orchard and see the view from above.)

It was a typical autumn "country" scene -- kids and parents quaffing cider in little single-serve sippy cups, toddlers trudging around with gourds bigger than their heads, strategically piled bales of hay, the whole works.  But somehow the whole thing reminded me of what Ada Louise Huxtable wrote about in The Unreal America -- nothing was quite, well, genuine. The pumpkins weren't attached to anything -- selecting them from where they sat on the ground was really no different than selecting them from a bin in front of the supermarket. Most of the edibles, jams and jellies in the small market weren't made on the premises; they were made "for" the farm, as the labels indicated, by some wholesaler who made them for lots of similar farm stores. And I believe they even had stuff from that standby specialty brand of all "country" stores, Maine's Stonewall Kitchen (usually found next to their Ohio-based gourmet-foods cousins from Robert Rothschild Farm). I certainly understand why they sell all this stuff, but part of me wishes that these places still actually produced everything (or most of their wares) and didn't have to rely on all the wholesale private-labeled stock. There's no point in shopping at a destination if all I find there is the same stuff I've seen elsewhere with a different label slapped on.

Still, it was a lovely fall day, and I ended up dashing off some super-quick sketches of the animals in the farm's petting zoo.

Took a drawing class this weekend called "Anatomy of the Boat" at Mystic Seaport, taught by J. Susan Cole Stone of the Mystic Art Center. It was meant to be mostly plein air, but Saturday's relentless rain drove us all indoors. We started off with sketches of catboats in a small building:



During a very brief break in the weather, we sat by the water and drew the little wooden rowboats (dories, I believe):



But sure enough, the rain started up again; I chose to go with some of the class to the youth education building, from which we could see the sailing class getting ready for a race. Sketched the sailboats quickly with pencil and Pitt markers:



Sunday proved to be much sunnier. Started off with a pencil sketch of the Liberty:



Then it was back to the little dory boats -- this time I tried out a very rough watercolor paper and added watercolor (yes, I know, the boat in the foreground shouldn't be quite so pointy):



Finally, I used a small box of watercolor pencils for this sketch of the Breck Marshall; probably not the best medium, but I made do:

Spent much of last week in Portland, Oregon, attending the AASFE (American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors) annual conference. Spent the weekend taking in the sights in and around the city. Here's a quick one done while waiting for dessert at the restaurant clarklewis, colored later with watercolors.




This one looks up Oak Street in Hood River, where we stopped for lunch during our driving tour of the Columbia River Gorge and Mt. Hood. The weather could not have been more perfect the entire time we were in the state!

This time, the NYC group chose Governors Island as the SketchCrawl venue. The weather could not have been more perfect!!
Before heading down there for the SketchCrawl meet-up near Castle Williams, stopped at Republic on Union Square for some pad thai. Sketched the view looking north toward 18th Street while waiting:



Since M had brought along his folding bike, we rode with the bicyclists on the ferry going over to Governors Island. The boat was packed with people and their two-wheelers:



There was a festival on the island. These sculptures loomed over the tents and people:



I set up my folding stool in a patch of shade near Castle Williams and sketched the view of the Manhattan skyline beyond:



As I took the ferry back to Manhattan, I sketched the bright red structure above the ferry dock:



It was a very fun SketchCrawl day indeed!

Join your local group or go sketching on your own. Check out the forum and get your sketching gear out!

Biked the 10 miles on the Harlem Valley Rail Trail from the Metro-North station in Wassaic, NY, to Millerton, NY, yesterday, and sat on the bench in front of the Harney & Sons tea shop to sketch this view. Unfortunately the area was a bee magnet, so I had to get up several times to fend them off! Drawn with Koh-I-Noor Nexus Studio pen (which I'm not crazy about) in Fabriano Quadrato Artist's Journal and colored with Faber-Castell Pitt Artist brush pens.

Took advantage of a half-day at work to visit the High Line, the new park that's been created from old rail lines above Manhattan's West side. It's truly a magical place. While I was there sketching, I saw another artist doing a plein-air painting and dozens of amateur photographers capturing every vista.
I used my usual Lamy Safari/Noodler's Lexington Gray ink to draw, and then experimented with my latest acquisition -- a host of Caran d'Ache Neocolor II water-soluble crayons. I'm still getting the hang of them, but I like the intense color they produce.

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.