When you wake up every day you have two choices. You can either be positive or negative, an optimist or a pessimist. I choose to be an optimist.
It’s all a matter of perspective.
Harvey Mackay
Meditation – 14 October 2019
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Author Archives: Dana Burrell
Inktober 2019 – Days 1 – 7
If it’s October then it must be Inktober, a celebration of daily ink drawing.
Jake Parker, an artist and illustrator, started Inktober in 2009 as his way of making a personal commitment to draw every day and improve his inking. The “rules” are minimal and although there’s an official Inktober 2019 daily prompt list, there’s no requirement to follow it slavishly. In fact a number of “unofficial” prompt lists have sprung up. Just google it and you’ll see.
I’m going to use one of the rogue prompt lists myself. I found one distributed by the Guild of Natural Science Illustrators on their Facebook site which has very broad categories for the prompts. As someone who finds narrow prompts irritating this was just what I wanted.
As I have other projects going on I don’t have either the time or the energy to commit to hours creating a daily masterpiece. Instead I’m taking the quick and dirty approach. Two pens (one permanent, one watersoluble), one waterbrush , and small cells drawn onto a spread in my sketchbook journal.
A5 portrait Hahnemühle Watercolour Book
#inktober2019 #inktober #sciart
Meditation – 07 October 2019
Happy are the painters, for they shall not be lonely. Light and colour, peace and hope, will keep them company to the end of the day.
Winston Churchill
Saint-Gaudens and the Mountain
I’m incredibly fortunate to live within a thirty minute drive of two National Park Service sites. Saint-Gaudens National Historical Park is the closer, just down the road in Cornish, New Hampshire.
I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve visited, with family, friends, on my own and most recently, with my plein air group.
I’m boring… I paint the same building each time, the Little Studio, getting better with every rendition even though I continue to struggle with perspective. This day I sat in the field ignoring the yellow-jacket buzzing around me and focused on grape vines twining on the pergola as the tours came and went.
Once I was finished I looked for my artist friends but they had spread out across the property. Eventually I joined one who was painting from a lovely bench with a view of Ascutney across the river in Vermont.
Yes, that’s the other scene I consistently paint but no regrets here… it’s just fun!
OK… I’ve had enough with the Little Studio! I hereby declare I will paint something else when I next visit. But sorry no promises about the mountain. As Cyndi Lauper sang, girls just want to have fun.
A5 landscape Arteza Watercolor Book
Meditation – 30 September 2019
Do your little bit of good where you are; it is those little bits of good put all together that overwhelm the world.
Desmond Tutu
Plum Island Reverie
Every year my birthday gift is the same…drive to the ocean and walk the beach.
As background, I have a summer birthday, and walking the beach among all the vacationers, children and sun worshippers is not my idea of bliss.
Now I’m no fool, all I have to do is delay a few days until it’s September, preferably a sunny, not too hot – not too cool, weekday. The summer crush is over, the children are back in school, and the beach is nearly deserted. That’s just the day for me!
The last few years we’ve driven to Newburyport, Massachusetts, specifically Plum Island and the Parker River National Wildlife Refuge. This year Hurricane Dorian had blown through a few days earlier and kicked up loads of shells. There were the classic New England trinity – clams, oysters and mussels – along with lots of “exotics” not often seen on our beaches, especially Sand Dollars.
Sand Dollars everywhere!
I have never seen that many whole Sand Dollars in one day. It brought back memories of a fellow on Marco Island Florida who would walk the beach looking for ones that were still alive. He’d wind up and pitch them back into the surf to be carried out with the tide to live another day. He showed me how they’re really flattened out sea urchins and when alive are a lovely fuzzy purplish maroon. I silently thanked him for the knowledge as we threw one after another into the sea.
Sunlight and fresh sea air… now that’s a gift!
A5 landscape Arteza Watercolor Book
Meditation – 23 September 2019
Gratitude unlocks the fullness of Life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos into order, confusion to clarity.
Melody Beattie
2019 Hopkinton State Fair – Part 6
Auuuugh! No Tunbridge World’s Fair for me today. Instead I’m home dealing with a leaking kitchen faucet and sink! Looking on the bright side, I’ll have more time to write this wrap up and I figure I can always sketch my kitchen instead.
I love going to the fair and over the years I realized my sketching success is inversely proportional to how much stuff I lug. Carry less – sketch more is my motto. I pack two inexpensive permanent ink pens, a small watercolor set, one short real watercolor brush, a small nalgene jar of water, paper towel and my sketchbook into my extra small Timbuk2 messenger bag (I have an older version) and tuck my wallet and phone into the zipper pockets on my lightweight vest.
I brought my current sketchbook, the A5 landscape version of the Arteza Watercolor Book. Now this book has quite a few issues which may prevent you from liking it but its price may just be the best thing it has going for it. Currently Amazon has a pack of two books for approximately $20 USD. At that price I’m willing to overlook a lot of its faults precisely because it’s inexpensive and not precious… perfect for doing studies. Roz Stendahl published a series of blog posts reviewing the A4 portrait version of this book. If you think you might like to try the Arteza for yourself, I urge you to read the entire series. I think there are 9 or 10 posts and they’re well worth your time.
My own issues with this Arteza book revolves mostly around its construction. First off, I prefer portrait orientation to landscape but they don’t make the A5 in portrait. A few of the spreads don’t have matching surfaces across the gutter, although most do match. The book is not bound with the stitching parallel to the paper grain and the binding seems to separate where the signatures are sewn together. There doesn’t seem to be any glue on the book’s spine for stability either. And finally, watercolor takes a long time to dry. This must be due to its sizing and it’s not inherently bad… it’s just something to consider if you like to work fast.
But the good thing about the Arteza’s slow drying time is the watercolor has time to move, blend, and basically do its magic thing. You can see this effect in yesterday’s Nubian goat images and the images of the Porcelain Bantam Pullet from Tuesday’s post. Those effects are what allows me to overlook the faults and keep using this book.
But will I buy more of these books? Probably not. There are other watercolor papers that allow those wonderful effects and I’m fortunate to be able to bind my own books. I guess I’ll be binding more watercolor books as one of my winter projects.
Finally, next time I must make time to sketch the other mammals at the fair… you know, the two-legged ones. There are humans, big and small, short and tall, young and old, all over the place but you wouldn’t know it if you looked at my fair pages over the years.
Next year’s fair. You heard it here first!
Arteza A5 landscape watercolor book
2019 Hopkinton State Fair – Part 5
Yeah… no wrap up.
Life got in the way and my poor planning left me with no more hours yesterday. Believe me, I have a hard enough time writing something coherent when I’m fresh much less late at night after a busy day.
So, I’ve saved my last images… and the elusive wrap-up… for tomorrow.
Gotta go… Tunbridge (VT) World’s Fair is calling… gates open at 0700 and it’s Youth Showmanship in the Poultry Barn!
Arteza A5 landscape watercolor book
2019 Hopkinton State Fair – Part 4
Arteza A5 landscape watercolor book
