Back to some location sketching......

I spent this past weekend at a retreat in the mountains of southeastern New Mexico.  I had a few minutes to sketch one of the cabins at Pine Springs Christian Camp near Sacramento, New Mexico...just up the road from Weed, New Mexico....Watercolor was applied by the pale glow of light through a window and moonlight....

Fredericksburg

I love a chance to get out of town and sketch some of the cool little towns all over Texas. When the chance came to spend some time in the hill country outside Austin I took it. Fredericksburg is a sketching goldmine, but it seemed that every time I was there in the past it was about 104 degrees and miserable for sitting. This week was lovely so I drew my favorite building-the former White Elephant Saloon. It now holds a very swanky home decor shop.

Sketchcrawl Houston

I was a solo crawler today, so I worked my sketch into an errand at the farmer's market where I bought a couple of pumpkins for the front porch. A beautiful day in Houston.

Real Life Real Music Festival

Real Live Real Music at Bernhardt Winery

You might not guess it but there are wineries here in Texas. Just last weekend we went out to the Real Life, Real Music Festival at Bernhardt Winery. A great line up of live music with The Chubby Knuckle Choir, Soul Driven Train and Terry Hendricks & Lloyd Maines. My friends daughter is a teen songwriter and she also performed  in  a lineup of several aspiring teen musicians. A lovely afternoon with live music, wine, my sketchbook and my sweet hubby. We found out they have live music every Sunday at sunset. I think this might need to be a regular event for us.

Blue Trees

About six months ago an artist came to Houston and painted the large stand of crepe myrtle at Memorial and Waugh and electric shade of blue. Well "colored" as he puts it. You can read more
about the artist and the project here.

At any given time on a nice day you can now find groups of people hanging out under the crepe myrtle enjoying the view. I don't think I ever noticed anyone except city crews paying attention to them before.  Today was such a lovely fall day, I decided to go down and enjoy them myself.

People & Places BCN

I am way, way behind on posting about the Urban Sketchers Barcelona Symposium. In a nutshell: fun and energetic group of sketchers, food good, wine also good, sleep (not enough), a full spectrum of architectural styles, weather hot just like home.The cathedral and people shown here are drawn on location with photoshop'd color. The red and purple buildings were done in a workshop with Lynn Chapman. 

The sketch notes were taken during Fred Lynch's entertaining presentation on closing day. I'm not so sure it is a good likeness of him as I wasn't particularly close to where he was standing. But you can catch some of the flavor of his lively talk.

The last drawing I drew the day after the symposium ended. The colorful shop front caught my eye and it was on a quiet corner.  

Nerdville.

The local AIGA chapter is hosting Design Week here in Houston. A different activity each day. Speakers and presentations etc. On Thursday I went to the Houston Museum of Fine Arts for the Design Week presentation by Jonathan Hoefler. He is a type designer, specializing in web fonts. Since I am a graphic designer mostly working with print media, web fonts are relatively new to me. Now I know - print fonts on the web are bad, don't do it.
At the end there was a Q&A segment. One of the Q-ers was pretty enthusiastic, her comment, "I'm not a designer, so I'm like WHOA…is this Sci-Fi?". She cracked me up. A theatre with a couple hundred people to hear this dude talk about pixels and letter spacing. Nerdville and I'm a resident.