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Category

Sketchbook

• 06.29.08
  ladybugzes
  Daily, Nature, Painting, Sketchbook (3)

  

  The other night, on our way down the bike trail, a ladybug landed on my arm and it hitched the whole 9 miles to the brewery. I made sure it stayed safe because there’s no insect cuter and I’m all for public transit.

  With it in mind, I got to work last night at my desk. It’s a great group; I love this nature journal exchange we’ve got going on at Moly_x_9.

  I’m mailing Scoach’s Moleskine journal tomorrow an it’s headed for Hawaii.

  
  
• 05.31.08
  
  Please Bear with Me, Sketchbook (0)

  

  We’ve been having too much fun!

  I promised my mother I’d blog tomorrow.

  
  
• 05.05.08
  Catching up & flying off
  Daily, Sketchbook (2)

  
  

  I finally sit down to write, and the clock tells me it’s midnight. The nerve!

  Above are my latest pages for the Moleskine exchange group. We each are sketching wildlife outside in our backyards: Hawaii, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Montana, California. Everyone in the group is a nature nerd and has spent a little time this past month capturing his or her native flora and fauna in the pages of an accordion-fold Moleskine notebook. I’m loving all the entries so far! It’s a great group.

  My notebook’s going in tomorrow’s mail on a jet plane to Hawaii! Bon voyage, little thrasher!

  
  
• 04.27.08
  california thrashers
  Daily, Sketchbook (1)

  

  
  
• 04.11.08
  evening run
  Daily, Running, Seeing, Sketchbook (4)

  

  evening run, originally uploaded by young@art.

  I’ve switched to running in the evenings, now that they’re longer. 4.1 miles of solitude. This is my favorite part of the year, when I can run at evening twilight. The frogs are concentrated in huge creekside communities. To approach them is like coming to a college football game at fourth quarter; they are loud, gregarious and totally in the moment, ringing a million musical cheers at the moonrise.

  I love the dark silhouettes hugging the landscape, alive with busy little yellow kitchen windows and spiked with crow-topped tv antennaes and the sound of children playing on dewy grass.

  sumi ink on watercolor, Moleskine sketchbook.

  
  
• 04.07.08
  sous chef at chez alis
  Chas, Daily, Friends, Sketchbook (0)

  

  sous chef at chez alis, originally uploaded by young@art.

  I took Chas up to Skyline so we could bother my friend Alis on a workday.

  Under the hazy sun I sat in the lounge chair while Chas made lunch and Alis took a work call. He wasn’t just making lunch, he was his own Iron chef competition. More complicated than that, even, because it involved acrobatics and small Tonka trucks. After about 45 minutes, he was done, and only after he had told me so, not a minute before.

  Nevermind the fact he was playing right beside an actual plot of bolting kale, cabbages and beet greens.

  When I brazenly picked up the plant saucer full of broken sticks, he furiously demanded I take the saucer with the crumpled up dandelion greens that had been yanked out of the ground and plunged into the water trough with the drowned bees and rusting scrap metal. I mean, salad.

  “NO!” He demanded, “That’s not yours! That’s Alis’.”

  There are two particularly delicious sounds that make me happy.  One is the low-pitch quiet sound of the barn in the afternoon, when the horses are chomping on grain and hay. I love this lulling sound. The other sound I adore is the high-pitched, little-mouth delicious sound of Chas, pretending he is eating sticks and twigs. So there we had pretend lunch ad afterwards, as he played, I sketched.

   

  

  

   

  
  
• 04.05.08
  our backyard friend’s silhouettes
  Daily, Nature, SillyValley, Sketchbook (3)

  

  our backyard friend’s silhouettes, originally uploaded by young@art.

  A warmup set, and part of my new silhouette obsession: Winsor & Newton Black Indian Ink atop delta ceramcoat atop gesso atop the pages of a Moleskine (heavy stock) sketchbook.

  We have no more critters in our backyard than anyone else, but I wage that ours are the cutest, because of the quail. There’s a family, about 20 of them, that run the perimeter at dusk. The California Thrasher couple have a nest somewhere in the hedge; when we lay in the sun by the bird bath, one of them will watch us from the grapefruit tree, sometimes with a red worm in his mouth, for a half-hour or more. Hummingbirds are always fighting, and the woodpeckers have assaulted the old olive tree on their continual hunt for boring insects.

  
  
• 03.14.08
  faces
  Daily, Sketchbook, Uncategorized (4)

  more faces, originally uploaded by young@art.

  so, actually, this is part of that Moleskine sketchbook that’s going to the London Book Fair in a few weeks (thank you, Moleskine!). I’m extremely motivated to do a lot of sketching, consequently. And I could always use help with faces. I was discovering that I tend to draw the same features, more or less the same face, as I sketch along. Now that I’m studying faces, I’m hooked on discovering all those wonderful details that make people’s faces unique. It’s really addictive! So that’s why I’m up past midnight on a Friday, drawing at my desk (besides that fact that I’m a dork).

  
  
• 02.26.08
  harbor seals
  Sketchbook (2)

  

  
  
• 01.26.08
  battle
  Sketchbook (1)

  

  
  

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recent posts

• ladybugzes
• mapping my runs
• date nite
• It’s not just a marathon.
• indoor track & field
• Reliving fossils