Memories of Colorado

My husband and I spent a week along Colorado's Front Range in July, checking it out for retirement. Here are two watercolors of Soapstone Prairie, a 28-square mile Natural Area just north of Fort Collins. Enormous sky, brilliant sun, wild wind, soaring raptors and gazillions of wildflowers -- my kind of place!

The Chair Journal

I've started a new journal -- about chairs. Chairs we spend time in can become good friends, and many of them play a role in our lives. This chair nurtured my musings about drawing and painting when I was a resident artist at the Ragdale Foundation in Chicago a few years ago. I'll be telling its story, along with that of 15 other chairs I have known and loved, in this new "Chair Journal."

Handmade journals

I have used store-bought journals for my sketches for years, but they've always fallen short of what I really wanted, which was to be able to bind pages with a single theme together. Last year I started taking book-binding workshops so I could do this. Here is a selection of my handmade journals to-date. Where I learned to do this was at the John C. Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, NC, where I teach Illustrated Journaling.

Painting with gouache

Watercolor is the medium I use most often for my illustrated journals and for painting "en plein air" -- that is, painting outdoors -- but often I want to paint in a less delicate, more robust style. Lately, what does that for me is gouache, an opaque watercolor. Here's a little scene along Minnesota's Gunflint Trail, created in gouache on museum board.

More desert sketches

The desert journal is taking shape. Here are some more sketches, iconic desert images. I've started writing the text that will accompany the sketches and begun to think about how to bind this new journal.

Desert journal

I've been working on a new "Illustrated Journal" of Big Bend National Park in southwest Texas, following our visit there in February. The winter landscape under pristine and limitless cobalt skies was truly breathtaking. Here are a few samples of that desert world.

Sketch Crawl #22

Another sketching marathon -- this time at Atlanta's historic Oakland Cemetery. But the day was short-lived: a bitter wind and chill temperatures sent most of us scurrying for home after lunch.