Sketching in Canada

Last weekend we returned from Nanoose Bay (Vancouver Island) in British Columbia, located between Nanaimo and Parksville.  Our week away was to honor my husband’s birthday…one of those  decade-ending  ‘big ones.’  Now, back home in the real world of our lives, we spent another week  ‘catching up.’

But forget reality, let me share the dream of 'island time': We had early morning coffees on the bluff behind our cottage, watching deer munching tender young greens for breakfast. We walked about cities, towns, villages, and shores. We had a lot of meals in area restaurants and we coffee shop ‘hopped’ as we drove the up the west and east coasts of the island.  It was a week of ‘total vegging’ and enjoying ourselves.

  

I always had my trusty little 4” x 6” Pentalic sketchbook,  a Micron pen, a pencil, a few colored pencils (regular and water soluble), a  waterbrush, and a Tombow Brush Pen  in my shoulder bag, so it was easy to find time, here and there, to sketch. Product Reviews: The sturdy little Pentalic sketchbook handled all the mediums extremely well. 

Here’s some important information for my sketcher and painter friends: 

There’s a great art supply store, independently owned, (a rare beast, in other words) in Nanaimo, BC called Iron Oxide Art Supplies at #5 Victoria Road....should you ever NEED it.  The supplies there are professional quality.  I didn’t really need anything…but, I bought a Tombow brush pen (black ink). I learned the shop owner ‘knew her stuff’ (and was probably an artist herself) when she first confessed to being an ‘art supply junkie’ (like all of us?) and suggested “another approach to brush drawing would be to put different values of india ink in waterbrushes.”  I’m going to try that one of these days…but meanwhile, my first Tombow sketch is below, along with second one done in the same location with Micron .01 pen and colored pencil. 

My other sketches from the week can be found on our Urban Sketchers-Tacoma Flickr site at:

www.flickr.com/groups/tacomasketchers/

Finding Beauty 'In-Between'

When I was in Kindergarten I was given a boxy, plastic device called a View-Master, along with some white cardboard disks that had tiny squares of film around their edges. I would put one of the ‘reels’ into the slot on top, look into the eye-hole lenses, push down the lever on the side…and, Oh My! I would see beautiful, blazing-with-color 3-D scenes of wild flowers in mountain meadows. The context: This was before TV, and, our Brownie Box Camera took black and white pictures. Since that gift, I’ve loved watching for special views through ‘apertures’…like a  garden seen between two broken fence slats,  a carnival parade between two buildings, a school of minnows between two lily pads.

 So, this morning…I wasn’t disappointed when I learned I couldn’t go to the beach edge due to private property ownership issues. A very nice person let me sit on his porch to sketch, and, poor me: I had to peek between his and his neighbor’s roofs to see ‘the scene.’ My original color in the sketches looked ‘regular’…so, I gave them both another dose of pigment, and enjoyed a blazing fond memory of my old View-Master.  Strathmore sketch pad-Toned Tan. 01, 03 Micron pens. Prismacolor pencils.