Spent an hour sketching at the Brooklyn Library's cafe last weekend with the NYC Urban Sketchers.





A curious young man (I think he was 10, but for some reason my sketch makes him look older) stopped to see what we were doing; he ended up taking out his notebook and sketching with us, as he chatted about Picasso and the Guggenheim -- and then he posed for a portrait.

It all started with a casual leaf (well, digital swipe) through the current issue of Country Living. Intrigued by a feature excerpted from Sibella Court's new book, I researched her and found that she'd earlier written The Stylist's Guide to NYC. A curated pick of shops in the city? Sounded like my kind of book -- and as the Union Square Barnes & Noble had it in stock, off to Manhattan we went yesterday.

After procuring the book, I stopped in for an hour and a half at Old Town Bar, where the NYC Urban Sketchers were holding court. We were blessed with a steady stream of models (I mean, bar patrons) to draw.



Afterward, I met M. at Strand Books, where I snagged the now out-of-print Robert Wade's Watercolor Workshop Handbook.

Two places that Sibella Court favored were next on our list: Olde Good Things and the Antiques Garage in Chelsea. Fun stuff in both places, but definitely priced well above what we'd get them for outside NYC.

We ended our day at Jones Wood Foundry, a cozy British-style pub on the Upper East Side, because I was craving sticky toffee pudding. And it was good.

Bodega's takeout menu, with its fab truck logo, just *begs* to be sketched on. I love the challenge of incorporating existing graphics into the sketch. Drew the goings-on in the kitchen a few weeks ago during breaks between dinner courses. Used colored pencil instead of watercolor with the ink drawing because of the thin paper. Just looking at the menu is making me dream of their brussels sprouts, the cazuela with quinoa, the kale salad -- yum!

In bleakest February, the hardy people of Canada's capital turn the Rideau Canal into the world's longest skating rink, get international artists to sculpt fantastical things out of ice blocks and throw a big party in their city called Winterlude. So how could we not go?

Ottawa turned out to be our getaway, our escape from the blizzard Nemo, which left great boulders of snow in places that were already Sandy-scarred. It snowed up there too, of course -- this was a storm that made headlines even in the north country -- but they are used to it there. There were people pedaling bicycles even as the snow kept falling that Friday, blithely commuting through the accumulating drifts to their homes, to stores, to dinner.

So I wasn't about to let the bone-chilling cold stop me from sketching. I was well-prepared for the weather -- I had an ankle-length down coat, a fleece balaclava to protect my head and neck, lined boots and wool gloves.

The problem, of course, is maintaining dexterity when your hands are mummy-wrapped. Nina Johansson inspired me with her recent gloved sketches of Stockholm done with thick markers, so I brought along some Caran d'Ache Neocolor II water-soluble crayons and other supplies to try. When I was browsing through Wallack's, the local art supply store a few blocks from our hotel, I picked up a Sakura SumoGrip mechanical pencil as well -- figured the fat barrel would be perfect for grasping through gloves.

It's a good thing I bought it, because it turned out to be the perfect tool for sketching in the extreme cold. On Saturday morning I skated out to a bench in the middle of the Rideau Canal to draw. The pencil worked like a dream, but the Neocolor IIs didn't cooperate, and trying to dissolve the hesitant marks with a waterbrush just made them turn to flakes of waxy colored ice that skittered right off the page. You can see my attempt in the sketch below (before I sort of salvaged it much later with watercolors).



I did the pencil drawing of Parliament Hill while sitting on my folding stool next to Major's Hill Park, just before the Alexandra Bridge, and colored it later with watercolors. I marveled at the number of runners who flew past me in the snow on their way across the bridge to Gatineau (which is in Quebec).





On the drive back home, I took out the Strathmore Toned Gray sketchbook and drew the landscape -- it looked this way for hours on I-81.



How about you? What are your tips for sketching in extreme cold?

On Saturday I participated in the 38th Worldwide SketchCrawl. I wasn't able to meet up with the NYC group in the morning but ended up doing a daylong dual-state crawl.

I started off with a quick sketch over breakfast at Le Pain Quotidien in Stamford before going to a few local garage sales.



At one of them I scored a set of unused watercolor pencils, among other art supplies, so I brought them along with me to my next stop -- Brooklyn, New York, where I met my friend Alison. We had lunch and sketched each other. Then I sketched the expansive view from her window, with the Verrazano Narrows Bridge in the distance:



We went up a few flights of stairs to the roof, where we enjoyed breathtaking views of the sunset over Brooklyn and Manhattan. I quickly sketched two views before my fingers began to freeze:





When we went back down to warm up, I drew her daughter practicing piano (finally broke out those watercolor pencils):



Around 6:15 I headed back to Connecticut so I could catch The Sig Brothers playing at Coalhouse Pizza in Stamford -- got a prime seat right in front of the band so I could draw them as M. and I enjoyed the music:



The next Worldwide SketchCrawl will be on Saturday, April 13. Mark your calendar and join in the fun!

To cap off 2012, M. and I drove down to Washington, D.C., on Dec. 30. After the requisite stops in the 'burbs for yummy unfamiliar food and the Tyson's Corner Levenger store, we sat down for an Ethiopian dinner at Etete and browsed at Kramerbooks before calling it a night.

New Year's Eve was a whirlwhind of art supply, bike and pen stores within Metro-ing distance of the Dupont Circle Hotel (scored the Utrecht travel brush set I'd been looking for and three inexpensive new fountain pens from Farhney's). Then it was off to Redwood in Bethedsa, Maryland, for dinner -- their NYE fete was titled "Last Dance in Old Havana," but the Hawaiian shirts and leis strewn about seemed to imply Polynesian tiki bar. Glad we were only there for food and left before their dubiously themed party kicked off!

While we were eating, I noticed this fabulous silver-haired woman perched at the bar with her feet up on a stool -- she seemed to embody a certain old-school style, with her cashmere sweater, silk scarf and jeans, so I just had to draw her.



After a few bites of rather cheesecakey flan, we were ready for our next stop: the New Year's Eve swing lesson and dance at Glen Echo Park's Spanish Ballroom. Last time we'd been was in the summer -- and it was broiling. This time, it appeared to be unheated -- we couldn't wait for the dance to get started so we could contemplate shedding the warmth of our coats.



We went over the basics in the lesson but also learned some Charleston-esque moves, so that kept things interesting even for the more experienced dancers.

Tuesday morning we decided to stop in Annapolis on the way back home. The last time I'd been there was in the fourth or fifth grade, when our elementary school unit on state history culminated with the obligatory trek to the state house. All I remember of the trip is that as we waited for the school bus to pick us up, some of the girls in our group were chatting up the (much older!) Naval Academy students.

Anyhow, turns out it's quite a cute and sketchable capital city. And oddly enough, it was *bustling* on New Year's Day. Shops and restaurants were open, and people were out and about. M. took a bike ride while I parked my folding stool and drew the view up Main Street (and yes, that's the state house dome in the back).



Will have to go back in warmer weather to explore it (and the Eastern Shore) some more.

Hope everyone has a happy and art-filled new year!

Nothing says holiday like a blast of salty spray from the Sound! As usual, we packed up our presents and drove off to Mystic, Connecticut, on the Eve of Christmas Eve, to spend the holiday at M.'s family's waterfront cottage.

This year, we went to the 57th annual Mystic Seaport Community Carol Sing, benefiting the Pawcatuck Neighborhood Center. Everyone gathered at the Seaport's Anchor Circle to sing popular Christmas carols (with the aid of helpful booklets to remind us of the more obscure verses).

 



On Christmas Eve, we went bowling at Spare Time in Groton, with my sister-in-law and her family. We started that tradition a few years ago. She and I often take our knitting projects, but this time I took the sketchbook along, determined to capture something of the action.



I find it's really hard to draw people bowling. The experienced bowlers contort themselves into an odd stance when they release the ball -- right arm just so in front; right leg curving behind the left, toe grazing the ground -- and in a second it's over. Yes, they do it over and over again, which should be helpful, but I still haven't quite mastered the pose.





In the evening, we went to the Christmas Eve service at St. Mark's Episcopal Church. It's a smallish, intimate church, and the service included lots of singing, which I enjoyed. The musicians were in the back behind the pews, so I had to crane my neck around to draw them.



We were all given paper stars (gifts for the child in the manger) so I promptly used mine as a stencil to add some interest to the page. I was also fascinated by the people lighting the glass hurricane lamps next to the pews -- but I couldn't sketch them properly as they moved so quickly.



Speaking of things that move fast -- M.'s parents recently got a King Charles spaniel. She's a bundle of puppy energy, so I was only able to get a few quick sketches of her in during the holiday. Perhaps she'll nap more when she's older. :) Hope everyone had a good holiday!

In the wake of Friday's tragedy -- less than an hour away from here -- there are a lot of unanswered questions. There will never be an adequate answer as to why the families of 20 children will be facing a new year without them. But there is one question to which there are a lot of answers -- urgent answers: "What can we do?"

We should of course be redoubling efforts to make it harder for people to get a gun, make them harder to load and use, and get those assault weapons and semiautomatics out of the public's hands altogether. These things are very, very important.

But we can do other things, too.

Let's fund and encourage and celebrate other ways of expressing our emotions, of coping with life. Everyone knows about our lack of competitiveness in math and science, and there's a nationwide conversation about fitness, but we don't do nearly enough to promote the other stuff: Art. Theater. Music. Dance. Cooking. Writing.

Let's give our children safe environments for self-expression and dispel the notion that art is the rarefied realm of a special, talented bunch. Let's press pause on the electronics for a minute and arm our kids with pencils and violins and tap shoes and pottery wheels and whisks and knitting needles.

These are not nice-to-have programs that can be cut when budgets get tight. They are necessary. They are crucial.

This season, I know what I'll be doing. I'll be watching to see if our local and national legislators translate the gun control outrage into actions. But I'll also be giving to arts programs in classrooms. I'll be volunteering at our local school so that someone else's holiday will be a little bit better. And I'll be drawing my heart out, in public.—You come too.

Let's look forward to a time when mass shooting is replaced by mass drawing. Mass dancing. Mass music-making. We can never have enough of that.

Yes, I lived in New York for several years, but this was a first for me! Couldn't have chosen a better day. We had a fairly prime vantage point, near 72nd Street and Central Park West. Couldn't really see what was happening at the street level, but the balloons looked fabulous.

Spent a chilly week in Cleveland since I had to be there for a work meeting (and, conveniently, there was a holiday bazaar being held at the office, so I got to sell some of my paintings and cards). Still managed to do a little sketching on the weekend.

The James A. Garfield Monument at Lake View Cemetery is an interesting place. Makes me want to read Candice Millard's Destiny of the Republic to find out more about the president's assassination.



As the wind whipped the trees, I sat in the car to do this quick sketch of the West Side Market:



Next time, I think, we'll drive there when it's a bit warmer!

The weekend before the superstorm, I was in Atlanta visiting my college roommate. We went to the Country Living Fair at Stone Mountain, lunched at Bocado, had a lovely dinner at Watershed, and saw the scarecrows at the Atlanta Botanical Garden.

A jacket that my friend bought at the fair led us to Roswell, a city just north of Atlanta with a cute downtown full of restaurants and shops. We wandered the length of Canton Street, peeked into the little boutiques, and paused at Roswell Provisions for tea and a cookie. I was smitten with their kraft-paper shopping bags (they're stamped with a bicycle image!), so I picked one up to draw on as we sat in the window seat with our snack.



After completing the sketch on location, I added some color using my new Holbein gouache paints. I'm reasonably satisfied with it, but it will definitely take some time to get used to working with such pigmented, opaque paint.

Amazingly I was able to fly back Sunday night as planned (all the New York City flights were being cancelled, but thankfully I'd booked my trip to White Plains). Monday was a day of waiting. The winds kicked up; a dry pillar of a tree in our backyard fell gracefully, damaging nothing but the ancient deck.

The power blinked off just after 6 pm. We ate spicy turnip soup by candlelight, put the leftovers on ice in the cooler, and sat in bed with the blue glow of our phones for company. The police drove in blaring a sudden evacuation order at 10 o'clock, but we chose to stay -- we felt we were on high enough ground and trusted (blindly?) that the surge wouldn't overtop Stamford's hurricane barrier. (It didn't.)

Tuesday we emerged and looked at the smashed poles and twisted wires and flooded roads. Through Twitter we learned that Barcelona was open and operating downtown. (Light, heat, tapas!) They were encouraging people to come in, recharge, drink wine, savor a meal, swap stories. And so we, and many others, flocked in.



In our area, the power was back on Wednesday evening. But as we look at the devastation in places like Breezy Point, Hoboken, Staten Island and the Rockaways, we feel very lucky indeed to have escaped with a just a brief outage and a downed dead tree.

Longtime blog followers know that I don't have a great track record of sketching sporting events (at least ones where the participants are predominantly human and not, say, equine). Certainly I've made some attempts (curling, the Olympics) but only sporadically, with varying success.

When M. and I found out that my alma mater was playing his in sprint football during Franklin Pierce University's 50th anniversary celebration in September, I jumped at the chance. At first I was disappointed that the game was being played at a high school in Ashburnham, Mass. (Pierce doesn't have a football field). But when we got there, school spirit seemed just as high, and we quickly got swept up in the action.





(Please ignore the fact that the huddle isn't quite parallel to the gridlines and that the players appear to be striking poses more suited to a music video than a football game. Artistic license, I say.)



Oh, and Penn won. :) Sorry, FP -- better luck next time!

Met up yesterday with the NYC Urban Sketchers for the 37th Worldwide Sketchcrawl, at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn.



The day started off chilly, but it soon warmed up. Began with sketches of the streets near the arena, and then moved on to Atlantic Center where we sketched some of the food trucks.







Then I met M. for lunch at Ganso, which serves Japanese comfort food. It was fun to draw the chefs bustling around the glassed-in kitchen.

My ink and watercolor sketch of Inakaya (now titled "Master Chefs") was rejected from Westport Arts Center's "Foodies" show but instead selected for their salon des refuses -- to grace the walls at The Blu Parrot, a fab new food-and-live-music joint across from the Westport train station. Owners Adam Lubarsky, Perry Cantor and Steve Alward have created a space where food, art and music all play well together. M. and I went on Sunday night for dinner. The food was eclectic and enjoyable -- especially liked the fresh-popped popcorn flavors (try the jalapeno-cheddar).

The moment I sat down and saw the musicians on stage, I regretted not toting along my sketchbook. However, Blu Parrot obliged with a four-pack of Crayola crayons, a beer menu, and a butcher-paper tablecloth.

I remembered the task Nina Johansson had set for us in the Challenge Through Limitations workshop at the Urban Sketching Symposium in Santo Domingo -- and I was determined to do a better job this time capturing values and shapes with less-than-optimal tools! Crayons only stay decently sharp for a few minutes -- they're soon just blunt wax sticks that you hope make a mark in the right place.



The highlight of the evening was definitely the music. The theme was gumbo - the performers played a little New Orleans, a little R&B, some Etta James -- you get the picture. And diners actually got up and danced! It's an infectious mood-lifter to clap and sway with your fellow patrons to sultry jazz beats.

But back to the visual arts -- the restaurant's walls are tastefully covered with paintings, mostly from local artists. My piece hangs right by the entrance, next to the host's station. If you're in town, please go! and eat! and dance! (and buy art!)