These sketches are from when we waited in line. An all-volunteer team runs the museum, and we met so many really friendly balloon pilots. Jeanne Anson is a pilot who used to live in the area, now lives in South Dakota, but comes back every year for the open house. She overheard us wondering how a balloon comes down and explained how it all works, and then showed us pictures of her gorgeous balloons called watermelon Wine and Dragon Moon. Yes, all balloons have names: The bright balloon in the sketch below is named Rubik, and the one in the foreground is the Re/Max balloon that we rode up in.

Our balloon was piloted by David Wakefield and I chatted with his daughter and granddaughter, both part of the volunteer crew that helped hold down the tethers  and basket while people got in and out of the basket after each ride. 

My daughter was old enough to go on a helicopter ride after the balloon ride, but my son wasn’t, so he and I hung out and I sketched the cars nearby. Here’s my Ford Model T and Mustang sketches.
I could have stayed and sketched all day…there was old machinery, vintage planes, and so much more- I didn’t even get to sketching the planes at all- but we had to head back home for the kids soccer game. Still it was a morning packed with fun sketching and so many nice people to chat with.

You can see all my sketches from the morning here on flickr.

Here are a bunch of quick little sketches of kids at the piano.
I watched Hiroko Sasaki, a visiting artist, create pages and pages of beautiful calligraphy on rice paper with India ink.And then there’s all the hands-on crafts for kids. My two favorite ones from this year were ‘Spin Art’ (always a favorite with the kids) and ‘Making Oaxacan Animals’.

On last sketch, of the show. Floor to ceiling displays of the kids’ art. I love the self portraits best of all.

- A Windsor and Newton Travel sketch kit. I use Artist Tubes (also Windsor and Newton) to refill the pans. 12 colors. I always wish I had more, but there is something nice about mixing my colors and not having a zillion pre-made shades that I use.
- 2 little bits of sea sponge jammed into the empty spaces in the box. Great for wiping brushes and little cleanups. Super absorbent.
- My most used brush is a Cotman series #6 brush. Sometimes I also use a #8 or #10 brush, and very rarely, a #4. I have a couple of fancier Kolinsky sable brushes and while they hold paint beautifully, the Cotmans hold up much better to my not-so-gentle handling.
- Extra water. Always. The ONLY problem with my travel kit is that the water bottle built into the kit is miserably small. Ideally, I’d love a compact container with 2 wells for water so I could switch to the less muddy water halfway through my piece. Any recommendations?
- Pencil. Derwent 4B. Sometimes a 6B. I usually work directly with pen, but every once in a while I will roughly sketch out a layout with the main perspective lines drawn in.
- Eraser. I love my white eraser. And somewhere in my sketch bag is always a dirty little balled up kneaded eraser.
- Sharpie Extra Fine Pen. Not Ultra Fine. That works completely differently and I MUCH prefer the Extra Fine one. I always have 4 or 5 of these with me.
- The one bit that’s missing here is my sketchbook. Currently I’m loving my Stillman & Birn Beta series books. I use the wirebound ones. But I’m toying with using the Zeta, which is a much smoother paper for super-quick sketches.

The Lifeguard Hut at Kahalu’u Beach Park. How could I NOT draw something that is such a vivid shade of orange? 

My big regret at Kahalu’u Beach is that there’s no way to sketch while you snorkel. What an incredible sketch the giant corals and tropical fish would have made! So I sketched the snorkellers instead. With their funny-looking, bright colored breathing tubes, they almost look like bright little fish bobbing in the bay.

Traditional double-hulled Hawaiian boats on a beach near Kona.

And finally, a classic hawaiian beach: long stretches of white sand and loads of beachgoers at Spencer Beach.
Houses built on stilts remind you that you are in Tsunami country. I had to race against the afternoon rain clouds that came down from the mountains to get this sketch done. The bright splashes in the foreground are bougainvillea in every shade possible.

I saved my favorite bit for last. I love the unbelievably bright color and the intricately layered effect of the vegetation in Hawaii. We stayed at John and Jae’s Sugar Shack in Kona. Their amazing gardens are where I made the sketches below. To be in their garden is to land right in the middle of a Henri Rousseau painting.

Halema’uma’u Crater as seen in the daytime is huge, impressive and creates a vog all day long. This is the crater sketched from the Jagger Museum, the closest point form which it can be viewed. It is so pitch dark (and cold) once night falls that I couldn’t sketch it, but it is incredible to see the volcano transformed at nightfall: the molten magma, only a couple of hundred feet under the rim, lights up the sky above it in orange, red, and pinks. We stayed at the Volcano House in the Park ( stay there if you ever visit, it is worth it just for the views) and could see the blazing volcano from our room through the night.

Here are my kids, all strapped into their booster seats, ready to drive out to a trailhead.

And this sketch is from the town of Hilo, on the wetter side of the island.  You could plant just about anything here and it would grow into a tree overnight.

All the classic Hawaiian beaches are on the other side of the island, but we did visit a black sand beach called Punalu’u, with gritty volcanic jet black sand. I spotted my first Hawaiian green sea turtle here. He (she?) looked so beautiful, catching some sun on the black sand.

The bluest, clearest sky and Coit Tower. The tower is the recognizable part of the view, but my favorite part is the colorful homes on hill.

Since it was close to lunchtime, I headed towards the Ferry Building. But I just HAD to stop and sketch it first. Maybe I was just hungry, but I wasn’t sure the first one worked. So I came back and did another one after lunch. Not sure which one I like better now, but it is interesting how totally different my take on the same view was, a couple of hours apart.

The ferry building is always full of people eating, but most places have their lunch crowds and then it gets less crazy. Not so with Blue Bottle Coffee. The crowds never thin out here. Two sketches from Blue Bottle Coffee. Funny how I ended up with 2 of everything that day.

One last ‘set of two’. When it’s warm and sunny in the city, everyone is happy. Except the cycle rickshaws that ferry tourists around. Everyone wanted to walk, so I got to sketch the rickshaws as they waited for passengers.

This next sketch is at midday in the blazing sun, when no one is foolish enough to get out to sea. Just the glare on the ocean would blind you. That was our last day before we packed up and headed back to Bangalore, to catch our long, long flight back to San Francisco. Thank you for having followed my 4 week adventure. Blogging it like I did, over 2 weeks made it feel like I was still on vacation.

If you have the patience to look through all 120 sketches, they’re here on flickr.

This garland maker sat right outside Khotachiwadi on a bustling road. He strung together yellow and orange marigold, blood red chrysanthemum, fragrant jasmine and rose petals to create his garlands.
I was at Khotachiwadi on a very special day: The very last day of the festival of Sankranti, when kites are flown. Kiteflying in India isn’t just about getting a kite high up in the sky. The manja or thread that the kite flies up on is coated with a mixture of rice glue and very finely powdered glass. and adults gather on rooftops, fly kites and cut fight kites in the sky and cut each others kites down. This guy on the balcony didn’t have much luck. He got 2 kites up in succession. Both got cut down, which made him curse out loud.
This sketch has a little boy at the end of the alleyway. There were so many gangs of little boys running around the lanes of Khotachiwadi while I sketched. They watched the sky very carefully and as kites got cut down and tumbled down into alleyways, they ran to rescue them and add them to their collections. I’ve been told my dad was an expert at flying and cutting down kites as a kid. He lived in a wadi right by Khotachiwadi. Maybe he was just like these kids, tearing through alleyways, fighting other ids over the brightest colored kites and amassing huge collections of them as they got cut down by other kites.
Time to say goodbye to Bombay and go to Goa. I love Bombay. I lived here when I was in school, and I miss this city that most reminds me of my other favorite city, New York.

This fruit seller spent a good hour lovingly arranging the fruit in his stall. A stand full of fruit is lovely, but it made me wish I were here in the mango season when the air is filled with the heady scent of mangoes ripening in crates of hay.

A mosque at the end of a busy street outside Crawford Market. Someone asked me how I capture the mad chaos and activity of India, and I tried to explain it. This is what I do: I watch the scene for a while. After a bit I start to see a pattern to the madness: what looks like a random moving mass of people has a flow and direction. Then I start to draw, always remembering that even though I’m drawing in the details: the people, the cats, dogs, cars, all of that, there is an underlying pattern. My challenge? To not make the scene look too structured and organized. This means drawing in the people that move against the general flow of the crowd, the handcart that parks itself in the middle of a street and disrupts the traffic…

Victoria Terminus Station. A huge Gothic structure built in 1887. The busiest train station in India with 18 platforms and what looks like a million people on them.
And some people I saw at the station. On a quiet Sunday.

Flora Fountain is a busy circle with street vendors yelling louder than each other as they sell shirts. “Thick material” they say “Export Quality, only Rupees 300.”

Closeby is Hornimon Circle. (mention this to anyone and they will tell you Bombay’s first Starbucks is nearby) I didn’t go to Starbucks. But I did stop at a nearby Frankie stall and have 2 mutton frankies. At Hornimon Circle is St. Thomas Cathedral, an old church built in 1718. Step inside the church and you are transported to another world. The walls on the inside of this church have quaint eulogies to British soldiers who died in battle all over India. 

This is the tyre-puncture-repair-walla, the guy who can rescue a tyre with a long nail in it, or retread the baldest of tyres. All he used was a spanner, some strong glue and a metal bottle cap to work with.

This is the view from Marine Drive, a promenade also known as the Queen’s Necklace because it looks like one when it is all lit up at night. It is one of the few places where you can go for a stroll, enjoy the ocean breeze, take in a sunset and sit in peace and have some space to yourself. And while you’re at it, you can enjoy some channa chor garam. I ate my share of it while I sketched.

These two sketches were made at Mahalaxmi Dhobi Ghat, an open air laundromat where washermen was clothes from thousands of households all over the city in over 700 little cement cubicles filled with water. It is incredible how they keep tabs of which clothes belong to whom. Clothes are washed by hand and beaten against stone to get the dirt out. They then hang to dry in the sun, and are ironed every evening. After that they are tied up in large cloth bundles that the dhobis carry back to households all over the city.

A close-up of a washing cubicle. A washerman stand knee-deep in water, washing a pile of clothes.

Next up: Crawford Market, Churchgate and Victoria Terminus. And all my India sketches, in this flickr set