O’Keeffe Museum of Art, Santa Fe

Our visit to Ghost Ranch wasn’t our only O’Keeffe-centric day. We visited the museum that celebrates her art the day before. It was a treat to be there before hours, with the space to ourselves, and to see our group drawing in every corner of the museum.

Sketching in a museum is a lovely way to look more carefully and notice things I don’t notice if I don’t have a pencil in hand.

The diagram below is an explanation from the museum employees in the sketch above. He was carefully dusting frames and explained how each of them was basically a hermetically sealed chamber.

With two days, one in a museum and one at Ghost Ranch to inspire us, we created collages. Here’s my piece. We had a mini-exhibit of the 30+ pieces when we were done and it was amazing all that the visits inspired.

More art from that week. in Santa Fe coming soon. Maru and I had such a wonderful time, that we decided to run our workshop again in 2025. Here is the link and dates for 2025, if you want to join us!

Ghost Ranch

One of the most amazing days of the week was the day we visited Ghost Ranch. After a morning of demos, we ended the day with some open time. That’s when I sat in the shade of a tree to capture a very small portion of the vista before me.

And what did our super-enthusiastic bunch of sketchers do at the end of a very long day in the sun? Gather together for a drink-and-draw session that night.

I learned something new that night: Maru explained the origin of the word “tapas”. I wrote it down on my sketch below, but here is the longer explanation from Wikipedia.

Downtown Santa Fe

It’s now a little over a week since I returned from teaching a Mixed Media Color workshop with Maru Godas in Santa Fe. We worked hard, taught a lot, sketched a little, (which is how it works when you’re leading a workshop) and had an amazing week.

Our workshop centered around the city and its colors and the work and life of Georgia O’Keeffe. The next few posts are from that week.

A workshop day is intense but Maru and I found the perfect way to wind down by sketching by ourselves at the end of the day. This is the exterior of the New Mexico Museum of Art, sketched at the end of day 1 of our workshop.

I did a second take from a similar angle the next day but in different media. Here it is. What do I do with overworked pieces like this? Add them to the “collage” pile. (More on that in a later post)

To shake off the highly labored piece above, I did a quick sketch of another building on the main square using crayon and brushpen. Media like crayon puts me in a “play” state of mind.

On my very last morning in the city, I returned once more to the square. This time, I stepped into the museum, enjoyed the exhibits and then sketched an inner courtyard for a while before heading back home.

There was more to my week than these sketches on the square. All of that is coming up in the next couple of posts.

A sketch is a memory

Memories from a weekend where my sketches were ‘meh’ but we made fabulous memories. We sketched my backyard orange tree, a my local coffeeshop and with Gay Kraeger in the mountains. it was magical.

Can’t wait to do this again!

Balloon Seller

These two sketches are both made from a photo I took of a balloon seller in San Miguel Allende, Mexico. They’re created s part of a my monthly “Sketching Together” group sketch meet on zoom, where we all do a take on a single image in a half hour.

While this first piece was fine, I got far into it before I realized that I’d focussed almost all my problem-solving skills ( and time) on making the figure read in reverse against a dark background because that’s how the photograph was.

While there is some drama to doing this, the story would remain the same and it would be much easier to capture if I eliminated that background. So I did a second 30-minute version. (below)

Leaving out the dark background let me create a less “trapped” effect and let what attracted me to this scene: the color of all those toys and balloons- leak out into the background space.

You can see a sped-up version of that second take here.

Video Link

Want to join in a monthly sketch-together session? It’s $5/month if you sign up for the year as an Annual Member here.

Pencil Sketches

Pencil is one of my favorite mediums. It is so versatile: you can change line width and value and make all sorts of marks, each with a different character. All with one tool.

This is my cat, Samson. Rendered on textured paper in black colored pencil using long and short strokes that follow the direction of his fur.

These people at a cafe are sketched in charcoal pencil. Messy? Yes, but totally worth it for the dark smooshiness of charcoal turning to dust against paper. (and yes, some finger-smudging is involved)

This scene was all greens. So green, in fact, that I abandoned color and captured it all in brown conte pencil and graphite pencil.

I love all sorts of pencils: Blackwing graphite pencils, Pitt oil pencils, conte pencils, charcoal pencils, watersoluble pencils, and more. They all make marks with slightly different characters, but what they share is the ability to produce a variety of marks that no other medium can come close to.

A Week of Tulips

Here, in images, is a week of tulips on my desk.

Real Life People, TV People

There’s nothing like standing in the corner of a room bustling with energy and drawing it. On San Jose Day, Empire Seven Studios let me hang out in a corner of their gallery and sketch for a bit.

There’s nothing like live sketching.

Still, I kinda enjoyed watching my first-ever full basketball match (on tv) and sketching. The nice thing about basketball is that it’s easy to figure out what’s going on. So even a no-basketball-knowledge person like me enjoys it.

Machines

Some recent machine-centric pages from my sketchbook.

This is Russ, working in the front yard with a very noisy paver-cutting machine.

Spotted in Japantown on San Jose Day, and I had to stop and sketch it, of course; A gorgeous blue lowrider.

I should know the name of this classic red Italian espresso machine at Roy’s Station in Japantown. I don’t, but I do love how it looks like a very sleek, highly polished automobile.

Standing beside the trains at the Railroad Museum in Sacramento made me realize just how huge they are.

My favorite part of the trains is the beautiful hand lettering on their sides.

Pencils4Tea: Online Portraits

Pencils4Tea hosts a Zoom-based portrait sketching session every Thursday where participants take turns posing for each other. Portraits are times by the length of songs.

I drew these two spreads in one such session, mostly using a blue and brown ink combo ( I love these two colors together: the blue really warms up the brown!) with a range of drawing tools. It was a fun, relaxed way to draw and experiment.

I’ll be doing more of these soon! Check out Pencils4Tea‘s profile to see if the Zoom session works for you.

That same brown ink looks quite different when paired with graphite and colored pencil in the sketch below.