Having a little artsy fun with pencil and sepia watercolor.

Sketch of Steve drawing by the lagoon, with a bit of Glenn’s head there at the bottom of the frame. (I think I accidentally added 15 years to Steve here; he’s looking a bit older than he really is.)

It was a fun thing to do. Let’s see if we do it again.

This was a little warm-up sketch I did first.

A couple sketches from a recent visit to Disneyland with my cousin Monica and our whole family. Very fun. I think it had been four or five years since we’d all been there at once. We waited to meet my cousin at the Grand Californian Hotel, which was spectacular. In the sketch above, our oldest daughter is taking a picture of our youngest daughter on her phone.

Then we had a tasty lunch at the Italian restaurant just outside the theme park. It was nice to relax and draw for a bit before going into the park itself. It wasn’t too crowded either which was a pleasant surprise.

This action going on in our backyard.

Last Saturday I donated my 1995 Ford Escort to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. We scheduled a pick up and just before the appointed time I figured I’d take the opportunity to sketch my old mechanical companion one last time. I did the line work rapidly, as I had only about ten minutes before the appointed time; but the driver was late, so I spent more time on the watercolor than usual. Fourteen years and 100,000 miles! It stranded me once or twice, but was a good car overall.

Here’s a good quote:

At this point, don’t aspire to be great, or even to be original. Aspire to be prolific. That’s an aspiration you can control, and one that can lead — in less time than you might think — to greatness and originality.

That’s from Freehand Drawing & Discovery Urban Sketching and Concept Drawing for Designers by James Richards. It’s a highly-recommendable book on location sketching and much more.

Just a quick one – it’s a trick drawing / painting while standing up. Behind them is a mirror and you can see me reflected in it drawing this

I went to water our community garden plot over the weekend and captured some moments there.

I saw these carefully pruned trees in a commercial area of Pasadena the other day, and thought they were funny enough to sketch. After a while I kind of got upset, thinking, “Who does this to a tree?” My first thought was of someone so uncomfortable with Nature’s random beauty that they had to square it off. Then it occurred to me that these are probably not trees at all, in fact they’re more than likely shrubs that grew up to tree-size, and they were probably always squared off, so why stop? It’s actually very funny, intentionally or not. I’d like to think it’s intentional.