Saturday’s workshop students doing their warm up sketches

This is sketching boot camp. Do you see students standing, perching and squatting, bending over and balancing, with pens and paints and water and paper? And on top of it all, a sun so merciless that people were clinging to their spots of shade in the midday sun. And to make matters worse, the Nurse Ratchet-like teacher (me) timed them and gave them only 15 minutes to do the sketch and paint it before ringing an obnoxious bell. But in this amazing group there was not one complaint, only lots of laughter and fun and amazing sketches.

Eating happened alongside sketching all day and often the eating became the sketch. THis clever student, Judy, designed her own little travel palette with Altoids tins and plastic bottle caps – one for cool colors and the other for warm colors.

by Judy Rowe

We lunched in the cool candle-lit interior of the Union Hotel Pizzaria in Occidental where the chianti bottle candles and red table cloths appeared in the most of the colorful sketches done during lunch. The waitresses were so tuned into our sketch mentality that they wouldn’t move a single glass or plate without permission of all the people at the table who might be sketching it!

by Ann Buell

On the restaurant tables we prepared our sketchbooks with collage and stamping for afternoon sketches. The blue lines in this sketch were done by painting onto corrugated cardboard and stamping. Later Ann saw that it was perfect for her placement of the steps in her sketch! and later glued on a suitcase cut out.

by Susan Cornelis

In the afternoon we found a comfortable shady spot and I did this sketch to demonstrate how a little detail goes a long way (and that’s all you have time for anyway when you’ve got a lot to see and your travel mates are ready to move on). And later I added the words about a very old, bent over man who approached me while I was eating my ice cream in front of the grocery store. “Do you need a ride to Windsor?” he asked, and then got in his beat up truck and drove away? ? ? leaving me to ponder. However, that evening my family went out to dinner and ended up in Windsor (the first time in two years!) so do you think the man was psychic? Anyway, I always encourage people to write things like this in travel books, anything relevant to the experience of the moment. Then the book becomes a recording of sensory experience which makes us recall the immediacy of the experience even years after.

There’s a beautiful quote from Wandering by Hermann Hesse which relates this aspect so powerfully:

I leaned on the fountain and made a sketch of the rectory with its green gate, which I really like best, and with the steeple in the background. Possibly I’ve made the gate greener than it really is, and I may have made the steeple taller than it really is. All right. All that matters is that for a quarter of an hour this building was my home. Some day I will think of this rectory and grow homesick, though I just stood outside and looked at it, though I knew no one who lived in it – it will make me homesick as if it were really my home, one of the places where I was a child, happy. Because here, for a quarter hour, I was a child, and I was happy.

Many thanks to the wonderful artists I spent this happy time with on Saturday!

Tomorrow – a cooler Sunday sketch workshop.