I haven't been adding much to my website lately because I've been working on another large project. I do continue to work in my sketchbook, however, and the images below are some that I made over the last month between the middle of May and the middle of June. I apologize for the crummy quality of the photographs. I snapped them quickly to put them up.

You can tell that I like to play with text in my sketchbook. I use these drawings as a means of journaling, but I don't really want them to be entirely legible. There's enough there so if I look back on the image in a couple of years, I'll be able to glean what I was thinking.

The landscapes are from a brief trip we took to Boothbay Harbor, Maine. We stayed in a lovely apartment above a marina. It rained for much of the three days we were there, but when the sun came out, it was glorious. These sketches were made from the window looking out onto the marina.

Boatscape near London

Octopus

Carol

Rick asleep

These sketches were all done with my twelve-pan Cotman watercolors. Some of the pages are raw. On some of them I "rubber cemented" in Duralene® drafting velum.

This is a self portrait I made directly into my sketchbook the way I had been making the sketches in my last post. As you can see, the page is again crinkly, which as I said, I like, but I have a tendency to overwork my sketches and risk making holes in the paper. So I got an idea...

I wondered what would happen if I "rubber cemented" pieces of Duralene® into my sketchbook. Duralene is a nonporous velum that can be used for drafting as well as sketching. I love working on it because it is easy to erase and because you can "push" wet media around on it. Several of my figure studies were done on this substrate. So, I sliced several pieces and glued them to the pages of my pad. First, I tried another self portrait.

By the way, I am painting with a fine point water pen. Mine is made by Sakura. The paints are the Windsor & Newton Cotman Watercolor Sketcher's Pocket Box. I use the ten color set. And here's a tip I learned from a guy at Dick Blick Art Supplies: If you run out of a color, buy a tube of Cotman watercolor and squeeze it into the little pan. Then let it dry for a day or two. It is the same paint. There is more paint in the tube, and the price is lower than buying a new half pan. I tried it, and it worked perfectly.

These are a few of the sketches I did in London this summer. The first two are of my husband. The third is of my sister. I began sketching in watercolor directly into my sketchbook. I had purchased a small watercolor pad in France (I was there for three weeks before London), but I really liked the crinkly sound of the paper after painting on it so I kept using it for quick sketches.