Sketching Your Life

White Chicken Chili and Egg Salad

the Tea Cup from Niagara Falls

Bloom's Cafe in Leesburg, FL

Two friends doing Urban Sketching with me

Taking an online class is a wonderful inspiration to get out your materials and "get going".  Liz Steel's class is lots of fun…many inspirational videos and lots of great hand outs.  (I am putting them in a 3-ring binder!!! )  Taking a class that way is so convenient as you can work at your own speed.  Mary Gayle and I both love these kinds of classes.  She's been taking Sketching Skool.  

With Liz you are reminded of all the different styles and techniques of sketching and she urges you not to get "stuck" in any one format.  My soup and sandwich sketch was lightly penciled in to get the "measurements" sort of right and then loosely  washed in wc and then inked afterwards.  Bloom's Cafe was penciled in wc pencil lightly, inked and then washed.  In Bloom's cafe I tried heavier in markings in the foreground.  The brush pen is water soluble so I had to do that AFTER the wash.  Unless I wanted a totally different look.  

Seems like whenever I try to get a group of drawers/painters together outside, weather is not good.

So that happened again yesterday.  The Farmer's Market fell through due to poor conditions including high winds.  But we went to Bloom's and had a nice lunch and sketched for awhile inside.  As long as a restaurant is not busy…they usually do not mind if we "hang out" awhile.  

Weather now this week looks fantastic…sunny and in the mid-80s.  Of course now I am pretty booked with lots of places I have to be!  But I'll drag my sketching bag along with me.  Opportunity sometimes knocks anyway.  

The history on the tea cup is funny…I like tea but rarely use a real "tea cup" as I prefer sturdy mugs that keep things hot longer. But way back (maybe 12 years ago?) I was invited to a tea party where we all had to bring our own tea cup and it was suggested it be a pretty one.  Pretty?  I did not own a pretty one!  So off to the thrift shop I went and I came upon this one which a souvenir cup from Niagara Falls (a place I have never been actually).  The china was all swirly in different colors and it was fun.  So I've been hanging on to this cup (that I never really use) for years.  Liz (from Australia) is a BIG tea drinker and apparently there are a lot tea opportunities in Australia (she's from Sydney).  She takes what she calls "tea breaks" in her teaching all the time and demonstrates various techniques with her own collection or at cafes around Sydney.