On the first and third friday of every month the cafe that I frequent has live traditional music featuring fiddles, banjos, and guitars. The lineup of musicians changes from session to session and they don’t have a list of songs they play, instead they chit chat and play stuff that comes to mind. It’s spontaneous and free flowing music. It’s really cool to watch a bunch of really good musicians jam together. I did a few good drawings but mostly they weren’t very good. Mostly though I simply had a good time drawing and sketching.

I wanted to show you some of the progress I’m making on the thank you ATC. I’m (as of this writing) on card number 19. I’ve stumbled into some great images in the Flickr Commons of Civil War era people. The great thing about that era is the mustaches on the dudes. There are some seriously awesome mustaches in those archives. The other things that is interesting is the contrast in women’s hair styles, some are completely severe and look like they hurt and others have some unkempt hair.

The interesting thing in the photographs is how washed out many of them are, as if proper lighting wasn’t thought of, or they were purposefully over exposed to hide some wrinkles and other imperfections. The overexposure of much of the face leaves the viewer with sharp contrast around the eyes and clear views of crow’s feet. I really love drawing from these images.

So here you have cards 16 through 19:




I also wanted to show you the business end of the Uniball Signo Bit 0.18 pen I’m using to start most of these images. It’s so small my camera had a really hard time focusing on it. I put my uni kuru toga in the pic to give you a reference of the size of that tip. The kuru toga is a 0.5 tip. The Signo Bit is a 0.18. It’s tiny and allows me to get miniscule hair thin lines. It’s also waterproof and lightfast. It’s not quite as dark a black as the Signo Bit pens but for a micro tip pen it’s pretty great. I highly recommend this pen to anyone who wants a micro tipped pen to throw in their sketching bag. (You can get it at Jetpens as well as refills!)

Well it’s been a crazy few weeks here in Comfortable Shoes Studio. A few weeks back I had car troubles and it completely depleted my reserves. It came as quite a shock when Ning sent me the email telling me that the yearly fee was coming due soon. Now, I know that the fee is due in the last week of July, it’s an every year sort of thing. It’s also one of those things I set out of my mind, especially when things are rough. So I paid for the brake system on one car and then the muffler on the other and didn’t think of poor Ning.

Like many people, I live paycheck to paycheck with a small reserve of funds built up over time. In fact I had been doing pretty well, I had cashed in my stock options, bought a shiny new computer and video camera and paid a bill or two. Needless to say I had a little buyer’s remorse when both cars decided to break down at once. So when that Ning bill came up as due soon, I decided to do my usual funding drive, but unlike most years where I ask for part of the fee, I asked the members for as much of it as we could get.

The outpouring of support, kind emails, and love of the group has been overwhelming and has on more than one occasion brought tears to my eyes. The members of Artjournaling.ning.com are the best in the world. I received donations from Germany, Australia, Canada, South America, England, and South Africa. I closed donations as soon as we hit the amount needed to pay the fee. After I closed the doors, people still wanted to donate, they sent in tips via the tip jar in the Challenge group. I got many more emails, again positive about the group.

It was simply overwhelming. We raised the full fee in 18 hours.

I’ve received a few extra donations and I’m finding a way to sink that into the site. I decided straight away that the first thing I’d do to thank everyone who donated was send them a handwritten thank you note. After we reached the funding goal in 18 hours I wanted to do something a little more, so I decided I could fit an ATC into each envelope. I cut a bunch of ATC from some nice watercolor paper grabbed my pens and set to work.

I thought that the ATC size would be a fast way to get everyone a small token of thanks. Heh. Heh. Heh. It is small, I’m working with smaller pens- Uniball Signo Bit 0.18 and Signo DX 0.28 in black with a wash of watercolor. These pens are tiny and I decided to stretch my artistic muscles by doing tiny little portraits. It took me a few cards to get accustomed to the ATC size but now I’m 13 cards into making a set of 34. Each card is taking much longer to complete than I had expected. Though I’ve shrunk the size of the portraits down I have not shrunk the time of creation down. Each of the ATC takes as long as a 5×7 inch portrait to create. So I’m spending anywhere from 15 to 45 minutes on each card. I was planning on spending a mere 15 min per card, but working with micro tips simply doesn’t allow me to speed the process up. If anyone ever tells you ATC are easy, they are totally wrong.

I’ve done some of the cards from life while sitting in Atomic Cafe and sipping an iced Americano, the rest have been drawn from images in the Flickr Commons. I’ve been giving my own spin to each image. I’m enjoying the process even if it was unexpected.

Every Monday I’ve been making time to go to the local farmer’s market and pick up some local bread and produce. I need to draw one of the breakfast rolls that I get from Piantidosi’s bakery but they are so good I can’t draw it before I eat it. (Seriously good, a soft squishy roll with either mocha chips or a fruity cinnamon roll oh yum!) So I’ve stuck to drawing my veggies, primarily my tomatoes. I also drew my  lovely sunny yellow  patti pan squashes. They aren’t pictured. This little drawing is in my Stillman and Birns Beta series sketchbook with delightful thick 180lb pages that just beg to be saturated with water. The page didn’t buckle or warp, but did swell as I painted, but dried almost completely flat. This is a great sketchbook for ink and watercolor work. I’m pretty excited to say they are coming out with these in a case bound version.

The beta sketchbook won’t need gesso as a surface prep for art journalers. This will be great for those of us who don’t want to bother with gesso on our pages or who want to use fountain pens in our art journals.

I haven’t had enough time with this sketchbook to do a good review but I’m sure this one is going to be as awesome as the rest.