More sketching in the South Bay

Another great thing about having visiting sketchers? You end up meeting all your local sketching friends that you really should meet more often. Day 2 of sketching with Liz Steel , was an opportunity to meet up with Nina Khashchina and Gay Kraeger, two fabulous artists in the South Bay.

We met at Stanford and did a bit of quick sketching near the Quad and then in the New Guinea Gardens (which sketcher Marcia Milner-Brage introduced me to when she visited last year).

Here’s one of the gates to the Quad.

This sketch of the totems in the garden is drawn with Nina’s Ackerman pump pen. I just might have to get one: imagine having a dip pen that is portable and doesn’t need dipping!

After lunch, we headed out to sketch a street full of Eichler homes.  It was just great to sit on the pavement looking down the street and observe how they all shared an aesthetic yet differed from each other. Eichlers are harder to draw than they seem at first glance: all those straight planes relate to each other beautifully and things line up in ways you’d never expect them to. Contrasting their stark horizontal shapes with the trees made for fun sketching.

Laurie Wigham joined us in the evening and brought Gravenstein apples from her local Farmers’ Market.

I had to sketch them, ofcourse.