A Brief Emergence from Hibernation

Last Friday the SUN appeared for the first time in a long time and the temperature got close to fifty, so I was able to ESCAPE the confines of human habitation!

I took the Hounds for a walk at the McNary Wildlife Refuge in nearby Burbank in order to look for Snow Geese, and hey, I found a few.

Snow Geese migrate every winter from the Far North to more pleasant climes.  Many of them seem to like the Skagit Valley (an hour or so north of Seattle), where I used to see 30-40,000 of them hanging out.  Down here we get fewer, but still a few thousand.

I timed my visit just right -- a large flock was on the water, and then began moving en masse to the fields to feed.

There were other birds around -- hundeds of Mallards, and a couple of Canvasback ducks, but I only had eyes for the Snow Geese.

Two other random birders were there enjoying the show, and we had a nice chat about Snow Geese We Have Seen (and Heard -- the honking is quite something).

I'm glad the weather cooperated so I could see these lovely birds.  Of course, next day the overcast and the cold returned -- so I am hunkering back down into hibernation mode once more.

Happy Winter!

Going into Hibernation

Just a note to let folks know that I haven't been doing anything (other than reading, watching TV, walking the dogs, and vegetating), and don't have anything to post about.  I don't anticipate this changing anytime soon due to The Dark Times of Winter.

So I am putting the blog into Hibernation Mode (posting only as needed if I actually do something interesting).  Thank you for stopping by.

I wanted to end with a Christmassy photo of Truman and Pippin, but they didn't entirely cooperate.

The Hounds do NOT want their photo taken:

Truman cooperates but Pippin messes up:

Both Hounds are now thoroughly annoyed:

I give up -- this is the best one, and will just have to do!

HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

A little more doodling

I did one more wacky doodle last week, and now I think I'm all doodled out, at least for a while.  This final piece can be looked at in any of four ways, so I'm including all four views:

This is only doodle I tried to color in, which I think was mostly successful:

Other than that, I mostly hung around the house puttering about, except for one Urban Sketch group outing.  We met at the local art gallery, where I drew a display of ceramic art.

The Hounds and I have been enjoying lazing around the house very much.  Here is Truman after experiencing a bit of static electricity thanks to the plush blanket on the sofa, which he loves to roll around on.

I hope everyone out there has a happy Thanksgiving!

Out of Control Art

This past week I did some doodling.  It got a little out of control, which you will soon see.  But first, I did some non-out-of-control art in watercolor.

My issue, as you may remember from previous posts, was coming up with artistic subject matter.  Usually I just go outside and find something I want to draw, and as we know, this doesn't work as well when it's forty degrees or raining or when leaves are being blown into your face.  So I went in search of pretty pictures to use in the comfort of my home, and at the library book shop I found a magazine about Britain.  Yay!

After all that ink drawing in October, I decided to ditch the pens and do watercolor only, at least for a few days.  The lovely English home above just called out to be painted, as did the coastline of northern Scotland below:

Then someone donated a calendar to the bookshop, with lovely bird photos, so I did this Blue Jay next:

And that was it for my watercolor-only experiment.  I missed the pens!  I still couldn't think of anything to draw, though, and so one morning I simply sat down and started doodling.  The doodle began with a little doorway and some stairs, and then it kept growing and growing and getting odder and odder and I kept adding one peculiar bit after another until I wound up with whatever this is:

[CLICK on PICTURE for clearer view]

What can I say?  It's a doodle on overdrive.  I put in things that I like -- lighthouses, hot air balloons, a bird, plants, bricks...it was completely unplanned, with no preliminary pencil sketching at all.  And I had a ton of fun.  It reminded me of wacky stuff I used to do way back in grade school when I was bored in class, which was a lot of the time, although back then there would have been dinosaurs.

Anyway, I had such fun with it that the next day I did it again!  This time I started in the upper left corner with a roof line and a wacky claw, and then just kept going wherever it decided to go.  I decided it would be a cross-section of a bizarre house -- there's a bedroom, a bath, a kitchen, a library...and of course, you can't have a bizarre house without an owl, a frog, a hybrid lizard-fish, and plumbing that turns into a tree root...right?  Right!

Now I'm thinking of doing one in color -- whee!

And I'm happy to have found something to draw when I can't get outside -- all I have to do is step inside my own wacky mind.

A Little Scottish Rock

Last week I gave a tour of my area to a rock that came from Scotland.  How's that, you ask?  Well, I'll tell you!

Vivian Swift is an author/illustrator (When Wanderers Cease to Roam; Le Road Trip; Gardens of Awe and Folly) from Long Island, NY.  I love her work and follow her blog.  Earlier this year, Vivian went to Scotland, and while in the town of Stromness she found a painted rock.  One side was blue with white lettering ("Shh...I'm hiding") and the other side said "Stromness Rocks" with a Facebook logo. 

This is a thing in many places around the world -- people paint rocks, leave them in public places, and strangers who find them can either keep them or put them somewhere new, and they post about it on social media. 

Vivian decided to take the rock that she found back to Long Island, and then she asked for volunteers to "host" it on a U.S. tour.  She mailed the rock to the first host, who took photos of it at local sights, and then mailed it on to the next person.  Eventually it will get back to Vivian, who will make a scrapbook to send the rock with back to Stromness in Scotland.  Okay, it's a bit of an odd thing to do, but hey, why not?

Above is the rock in front of the conning tower of a nuclear submarine -- one of Richland's attractions.  It was the first submarine to circumnavigate the world completely submerged. 

Yes, I volunteered to host the rock from Stromness.  It reached me last Monday, and I showed it around the area as best I could.  I took it with me to my volunteer gig at the Friends of the Library book shop.

Vivian's town also has such a shop, which she co-manages.

The next day I drove it 68 miles north to Vantage, WA to see the ancient rock carvings at the Gingko Petrified Forest State Park.

And I posed it on one of the petrified tree stumps overlooking the Columbia River Gorge.

There's a gem and rock shop in Vantage, with dinosaur statues out front.  I had to stop there!

The little blue rock is hiding nicely among these agates:

The next day I tootled on over to the local museum.

It has a natural history section:

Which has a lot of information about the ice-age floods that carved out our unique region:

Over in the history section about the role the area played in the Manhattan Project, there's a Geiger counter display.  I used the wand there to check the rock's radioactivity, which luckily registered hardly at all.

The next day I took it to see our vintage 1949 Uptown Shopping Center:

 And down at our main park, I spotted one of the paddle wheel riverboats that ply our waters:

And later I went to the Atomic Lanes bowling alley to show the rock how small town Americans entertain themselves:

It was a fun and silly little adventure, which I enjoyed participating in, and I hope to get a copy of the scrapbook someday.

In Which I Fail to Create Art, Mostly

First, the temps here barely broke 40 degrees for most of last week, which made me loath to step outside at all.  Dog walks were quick and chilly.  Outdoor sketch adventures were entirely out of the picture.  And I had to bundle up like Scott of the Antarctic to rake and bag the darn leaves that keep blowing into my yard.  In other words, BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!

So I thought it would be good to make art indoors.  I had this idea about painting a large (for me, that is -- which is 16 x 20") and colorful acrylic painting to go with the very large and very colorful acrylic painting that I bought recently.  After several days of messing about with that, I discovered a few things.

1.  I didn't have any idea what to paint.
2.  I didn't have any clue how to paint it even if I figured out what the subject was.
3.  I don't really like painting with acrylics. 

This turned out to be a problem.  I am not sharing the messy, ugly, crappy effort that was sort of a scene with rolling hills and trees with a puffy cloud sky.  Trust me, you are better off without seeing it.  I know I am, which is why it now sits in the back of a closet far far away.

Then I did this:

This is watercolor.  I like painting in watercolor.  It works for me.  Why am I not painting a colorful large picture with watercolor?  Well, because I wanted something for the wall, and to display watercolors, you have to mat them and frame them and I didn't want that particular look.  The large colorful acrylic painting I bought is on stretched canvas, unframed, with the sides painted so you can just hang it on the wall as is.  A matted and framed painting would look odd next to it, if you ask me.

Imagine my happiness, then, when I discovered that you don't have to frame a watercolor!

See that?  It's watercolor paper glued to a wood frame!  You can just hang it on the wall as it is!  Aha!

I tested it out, as you can see above, on a smaller 8x10" panel, and having found success, decided that was the way to go for the bigger piece.  I ordered two more panels, one 9x12" and one 11x14".  They should arrive soon, and then we shall see if my new plan works. 

Otherwise, the only artistic effort I made last week involved a little bird.  My friend Mary sent me a photo of a slightly cranky looking fledgling with a note saying, "Why don't you paint me?"  So I did.

It made me happy, because drawing in ink and painting in watercolor works for me (well, most of them time...) and that's what I should stick to. 

Of course, I still need to figure out what to paint for those larger pieces. 

Argh. 

Approaching the Dark Times

I'm getting ready to hunker down for the coming Dark Times, which for me does not mean Winter but rather the end of baseball season.  The World Series will end this week, and there will be nothing to watch on TV until Spring Training in March.  How will I cope?  I tried to save some of the better Mariners games on the DVR to rewatch during the Dark Times, but they were so very bad this year that I have only six games to view over and over and over.  Sigh.

I hope to come up with some painting projects to get me through.  Meanwhile, I bailed on InkTober after 25 or so days.  Not a bad effort, and I enjoyed most of it.  I drew this last week:

It was one of the exercises in the Pen & Ink Sketching Step by Step book, and it took some time, and it was a good exercise in cross-hatching.  

Another day I did a quick and not entirely successful sketch of what I can see of the sycamore in my mother's back yard from my back yard:

On Wednesday the sketch group met up at a retail area where this optometrist building provided some architectural interest:

Thursday was the first day that I skipped doing an ink drawing, though I did do some pencil sketching while teaching a friend how to draw birch trees.  If I rename it ArtTober, meaning to just do something artistic every day, then I'm still good!

Friday I did another exercise from the Pen & Ink Sketching book:

On Saturday I slapped a colored ground on a canvas.  I'm hoping to do an acrylic painting, something colorful to go with that quail painting I recently bought.  No idea what it might turn out to be yet.  On Sunday I slapped a bit more paint on it and then watched several YouTube videos on acrylic painting techniques.  Possibly that wasn't an entirely artistic weekend since I didn't actually draw or paint anything recognizable but hey, I thought artistic thoughts, so I'm counting it.

Finally, it truly is Fall here, with the end of the Farmer's Market season, and the end of the riverboat cruise season.   Both ended last week, and I shall miss them.  

It's been a weekly tradition for Truman and Pippin and I to go to the Farmer's Market every Friday, and to visit the main riverfront park to see if a boat is in.

Last week there were TWO boats there, the last ones of the season.  Sniff.

We're going to have a cold snap this week, so I am planning to hunker down with the Hounds, thinking artistic thoughts while watching the end of the World Series...sigh. 

Welcome to the Dark Times.

To the Hinterlands and Beyond

Last week was a tad more adventurous than usual.  First, I went to the McNary National Wildlife Refuge near Burbank (not that far, maybe a 20 minute drive) in search of a rare bird that visited the area for many days, and which everyone else saw except me.  It was a Leconte's Sparrow, and I went several times, to the exact spot where everyone else except me saw it at the same time that everyone else except me saw it, and the reason I didn't see it was because I was in the right place at the right time on the wrong day.  Oh, well.  So it goes.

On the plus side, on one of those ill-fated mornings, I encountered a group of bird banders at the Refuge.  I'd never seen banding before, and they invited me to watch.  At one point they even let me carry a bagged bird to the banding table:

Most of the birds were either Dark-eyed Juncos or White-crowned Sparrows.

This is a White-crowned Sparrow:

A female California Quail ran into the net, and they don't band quail, but they did let folks get up close looks while they checked her over before releasing her.

Even though I dipped out (birder slang!) on the Leconte's Sparrow, I did enjoy my visits to the Refuge.

Here are a couple of male California Quails I spotted there:

And a Downy Woodpecker, who managed to avoid the nets:

My bigger adventure for the week, though, was a trip to Palouse Falls.  Boy howdy, was that fun...mostly.  The Falls is 78 or so miles northeast of Richland, and I headed north up the nice four-lane divided freeway for 30 or so of those miles before turning east on two-lane Highway 260.  It was a well-maintained road but I quickly realized that it was also in the middle of absolutely nowhere.

I drove and I drove and I drove through low rolling hills for miles and miles and miles and didn't see anything.  Or anyone.  No signs of civilization at all.  Now, I enjoy being away from civilization, especially dense civilization.  However, this was a little disconcerting even for me.  I began to fret.  What if something happened to the car?  THERE IS NOTHING OUT HERE.

I also had the Hounds with me, which made me fret even more.  What if something happened and I had to leave the car where there wasn't even a shoulder and walk miles and miles to anywhere when there wasn't anywhere to walk to and how could I leave the dogs alone in the car and how could I take them with me without a shoulder to walk on and what if I couldn't get cell reception if I stayed in the car and what if no one could get to me for hours and hours and it would cost a bundle because I don't have a roadside assistance plan and OMG GET ME OUT OF HERE.

Eventually I passed a farm house.  One.  And then another car passed me from the other direction.  Once.  I tried focusing on how pretty it was, because it was really pretty, and how I'd just taken the car in for service and also had bought new tires a month ago and everything was fine, honest.  Then, after thirty-five miles of this, I spotted the sign for Palouse Falls Road.  HOORAH!

It was another eight miles to the Falls, the last two of which were unpaved and incredibly bumpy and involved driving at 2 miles an hour but I made it!  "This better be worth it," I said as I got the Hounds out of the car and walked over to the view point.

Okay, yeah.  It was worth it.  Mostly.  Here is a cool rock formation:

And here is another view:

And this is what you see when you look the opposite direction -- not bad!

The Hounds were unimpressed.

Then I drove back up the bumpy road and when I got to the junction for Highway 260, I decided not to return that way.  If I turned the other direction, Highway 261 would take me south through slightly more populated countryside (farm houses galore!) and then lead to Highway 12 which passed through actual towns.  Whew.

First, though, I stopped at a spot called Lyons Ferry Park, to let the Hounds have some grass to pee and poop upon.

And then I stopped at a fish hatchery parking lot to check out a big boat that I spotted.  It turned out to be the National Geographic Quest, which does adventure tours for small groups.  They were following the Lewis and Clark trail, more or less.

The drive back was lovely, full of rolling hills that were covered with colorful autumn trees, and quaint little towns full of historic buildings.  This is one -- Dayton -- and this is its courthouse:

I enjoyed the drive back immensely, and I don't ever want to visit the Palouse Falls again.

In art news for the week, the local art folks were all busy with an annual event called the Tour d'Arts.   The idea is that you get to visit artists' homes/studios and check out their work and eat snacks and chat and maybe buy something.  I visited several of my new friends' places, and wound up checking out their work and eating snacks and chatting and I even bought something!

This lovely portrait of a quail and butterfly was painted by my friend Gail Roadhouse, and it's BIG.  Here it is on my living room wall:

It is obvious that I now need to liven up the space around it with more colorful paintings, so I'll have to get cracking on that.

I also continued with the  InkTober challenge, and did at least one drawing with ink every day.  I even used one of the official prompts -- "Overgrown."  I found a photo of some ruins in Cambodia on the copyright-free site Unsplash:

Later I added watercolor, though I think I like the unadorned version above better.

The next day I returned to drawing whatever I wanted, which was the Downy Woodpecker that I spotted at McNary:

Another time when I was out at McNary looking for that rare sparrow that I never found, I decided to tootle a few more miles down the road to Ice Harbor Dam to do my daily drawing.  The dam turned out to be too complex so I stopped at the Native American Memorial rock above the dam and drew that instead. 

I wound up drawing it very quickly, on account of a bothersome bee.  But hey, it counts!

I spent quite a bit more time on this drawing:

And quite a bit of time on this one, which was from one of my photos of Yakutania Point in Skagway, Alaska:

For the next day, I chose one of my pics of a Snow Goose:

I was running out of ideas on what to draw when I found a book called Pen & Ink Sketching Step by Step (Frank Lohan) which has tons of good stuff to practice on, like this old door:

I'll be making good use of that book.

That's my report -- just one more thing to say for today, October 21: 

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO MY SISTER LYNNE!