Kate offered a workshop called Celebrating Place with the Four S’s — Spaces, Senses, Scenes, Souvenirs. I couldn’t attend the class because I was offering my own workshop at the same time, but I used her handout as inspiration to create this spread.
Painting with found objects (in this case, sticks) is a great way to loosen up and achieve unexpected marks. And there’s something delightfully meta (no, not that Meta) about using a piece of a tree to paint a tree, with ink made from a tree.
A new-to-me parasitic plant, discovered at Sand Pond in the Sierra Nevada.
On my first evening at Big Springs Garden Retreat Centre, I fell down a set of (carpeted) stairs in the Main House. There’s an odd landing arrangement at the top of the stairs, and I just missed the top step and walked into air. My nose and sternum bore the brunt of the impact. Nothing was broken, and I was very lucky that an EMT witnessed my fall and provided immediate first aid.
I spent the rest of the retreat with a swollen, rug-burned nose, black eyes, and an aching sternum, which I took as reminders to up my proprioception.
I’d planned to get a ride from San Francisco airport up into the Sierra Nevada mountains for our nature journal retreat, but Jack came down sick and couldn’t attend. So instead I caught a bus an hour and a half north of SFO to Petaluma, where another participant met me and drove the rest of the way. It all worked out in the end, but it was a long day.
It’s been a while since I drew with the Draw With Me gang. We took inspiration from a Norman Rockwell painting, Pride Of Parenthood.
