21st July - plein air sketching and a banquet

On Friday, Louise and Kathy were in a workshop all day - with Cecile Baird, Gordon was on airport duty and I was determined to get some time for "proper sketching" in the way I normally do - which essentially means on a much larger piece of paper than my Moleskine.

However, I'm in a slight quandary with this post - the reason being that the sketches in question are still sitting in California. I left my Saunders Waterford HP pad behind along with some pastel support - and that's being posted to New England rather than coming back to the UK and then back out there again.

Unfortunately I 'd done my sketches on the Saunders Waterford and had left the sketches in the pad!

So what we have instead are photos (click for larger version) of:

• the view (rather limited by lack of car and how far I can walk carrying a chair and kit - this is the car park next to the shopping centre near the convention hotel)
  
• the set-up - you see I really do take all that kit out with me when I go sketching!
  
• and the initial stages - on the right is my Daler A4 sketchbook which I used to try out landscape and portrait formats (and the framing of of the content) for a slice of the view - plus, on the left, the first layers of the sketch. The yellow green is the background colour of trees - to be reserved for highlights as I continue with layers of darker greens. Then the blue mountains and then sky with clouds.
• I was supposed to take another photo (in situ) when I finished - but I forgot!
  

I rather enjoyed my location. I was under a tree which gave good shade for three hours while I did two sketches which were both 12" x 9", had my feet in the grass while I sketched and then got to go shopping afterwards!

Nicole Caulfield - who had a piece accepted for the CPSA 14th international exhibition - flew in from New England and joined our group in the afternoon (L to R: Louise, Nicole, me and Kathy). We celebrated all four of us getting together in person for the very first time before heading off to the CPSA banquet where the prizes were announced.

Each year entrants to the CPSA international exhibition are judged by an independent juror - in this case the Director of the Gallery where the exhibition was being held. For a medium which seems to be largely dominated by female artists, it was very interesting to see quite how many men were left in the last group of 6-8 people getting the bigger money prizes.

The 'top' prize - the CPSA Award for Exceptional Merit ($1,500) and the CIPPY award went to Linda Koffenburger CPSA. Linda is an instructor in the Botanical Illustration Certificate Program at the North Carolina Botanical Gardens at UNC-Chapel Hill and teaches classes on colored pencil at the Sertoma Art Center in Raleigh, NC. She is a member of the Guild of Natural Science Illustrators (GNSI) and is also a member of the CPSA Governing Board (as Director of Ways and Means). You can see her work and the names of the rest of the award winners and their pieces on the CPSA website here.

We all got to meet a lot of people who we have previously only known by their coloured pencil artwork and their screen names. It's very odd having to take-in what people look like, their accents and then remembering who was who - because, of course, you 'know' all these people even if this is the very first time you've actually met them!

And finally,

• I've now posted a colour swatch and a commentary on the new shades of Prismacolor coloured pencil referred to in my last post


• another hangover from the last post - this is the sketch of the corner of my room at the Mauger. We discovered that they were all decorated slightly differently from traditional and in keeping with the age of the house (like mine) to very contemporary. It's A3 in size (approx 11.5" x 17") which is a double page spread in my A4 Daler Rowney black hardback sketchbook
  

Links:

• Nicole Caulfield
• Katherine Ellis
• Linda Koffenberger CPSA
  
• Award winners, Colored Pencil Society of America - 14th international Exhibitio, Albuqerque
  

Technorati tags: art , drawing , coloured pencils , plein air , sketching

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