While I was on vacation in Eastern Oregon last week, I brought along the latest issue of Cloth, Paper, Scissors. This is a yummy issue and in particular I was drawn to Robin Olsen’s article, “Being Here, Sketching the Moment”. You can see her sketches with watercolor washes on pages 70-73 in the Sept/Oct issue. I liked her list of “essential sketch bag items” and realized that I had brought along all of them.
The scary part for me was to draw with an ink pen. Yikes! What if I made a mistake, you can’t erase it. What if I hated what I drew? What if it looked dorky? Well, I brought along my gesso and could always cover it up and start over. Everyone has to start somewhere, so here are my very first drawings.
This was a Liquitex Gel Matte Medium jar and my foam brush on a table. The torn ephemera was a after thought, and really didn’t need to be added except that I hated the bare white space.
This is my second drawing of my Prismacolor pencils. I had already laid down the torn ephemera pages and used those for some texture to the drawing.
Here is my heat gun, again I added the torn ephemera pages first and then drew over it.
This is my first “Plein Air” drawing of spawning salmon in the Wallowa River. This particular fish had perched itself on a bed of rocks and died before it could swim to its birth place at the mouth of the river. I took this drawing down to the Joseph (Oregon) post office and had it post marked.
These four drawings were done over a two day period. I used a thin Sharpie marker for the drawing and Rembrandt pan watercolors. The background ephemera were torn pages from dictionaries and novels applied using gel matte medium underneath and on top. These drawings are done on 5″ x 7″ cold press watercolor paper.
I plan to continue with these types of drawings and have purchased a Moleskine watercolor journal to carry along with my watercolors, brush, pen and water. I even have a small shoulder bag just big enough to carry all of these “essential” supplies.
If you are looking for some inspiration, take a look at the Everyday Matters blog by Danny Gregory, or consider joining the Yahoo Group .
Cheers!!!
Simply Artistic Pleasures 
These pages are beautiful! Absolutely amazing. What a great treasure to bring back with you from your journey.
thewse turned out awesome gaal!!!
LOve your ephemera pages! I’m stealing this idea and running with it. It looks like such great fun.
Your journal pages are wonderful! Drawing with ink scares me too. I really like your drawings of colored pencils and the imaginary buildings. Glad you liked my watercolor charts. I’m new at that also and the charts have made it much easier to choose colors. I look forward to seeing more of your art!
What a great start on your sketching! I’m not brave enough to do pen first yet either. I really love the look of your drawings over the ephemera – cool layered texture.
I find it interesting how many people love the Cloth Paper Scissors magazines. For some reason, I really haven’t gotten into them. I love Quilting Arts, by the same publisher. I’ll have to look at the current issue of CPS and see if it interests me – QA didn’t always, so maybe I’ll like CPS now.