Menil Museum with USk Tx Houston

A few sketchers met on the 20th of Sept. at the Menil Museum. Sitting in the shade on the wide porch the weather was pleasant and we had a nice visit as we sketched the area around the museum. As it warmed up we went inside ( free admission, yay) and sketched a while longer before it got to be time for a lunch break at Lowbrow around the corner. Loved the name of the restaurant. Good food too. Here are Laura and Ngbede sketching on the walkway around the Menil designed by Renzo Piano. Also a sketch from a mask inside the museum and of course inside Lowbrow where the last of us visited (obsessed) over our art supplies. I forgot to take a group photo.

A little time to sketch in San Diego...

My wife and I spent a few days in San Diego last week celebrating our 29th wedding anniversary!  I was able to squeeze in a little sketching!

 

The Pier Cafe is down on the waterfront near our hotel...didn't eat there...probably should have!  The view was great!

Spent one day over on Coronado Island.  This is the beach out side the famous Hotel del Coronado.

Seaport Village is a great little shopping area along the waterfront.

All sketches were done on location and watercolor added back in Texas.

North Cascades (The Book)

cover art

Well, I managed to miss the international USk symposium in Brazil this year. And I've been a no-show at the DFW are sketch crawls too. But I certainly haven't been lounging about in my little hermitage of late.

location sketching began Day 1

This Monday (September 15) the Apple iBooks Store launched the pre-order of my latest enhanced (what Apple calls Multi-Touch) iBook entitled The North Cascades: A Tale of Two Seasons (Spring). The book is 155 pages long and (in addition to text) is chock-full of all sorts of visual goodies from my first stint as Artist-in-Residency with North Cascades National Park: 83 works on paper (including sketches, drawings, and hand-drawn maps), 23 plain air oils, 13 videos, 152 photos, scrolling text sidebars, and numerous journal entries.

If you have access to an iPad, iPod Touch, Mac, or MacBook Pro, I invite you to download the free sample excerpt and see what you think. (The free iBook app that powers all iBooks is currently available only on Apple devices. But I'm hoping that, like iTunes before it, we'll see the release of a Windows-compatable version soon.) Pre-order runs through Oct. 14 and the complete book can be downloaded beginning Oct. 15.

plein air sketching -- sometimes in graphite, sometimes pen & ink, sometimes oils

The North Cascades: A Tale of Two Seasons (Autumn), which documents my second residency at the national park, is already in the works.