Showing posts with label Arizona. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Arizona. Show all posts

Monday, November 26, 2007

Interior landscapes with food - a Sketchbook

Lots of my sketches on my travels end up being done in restaurants, cafes and tea rooms. One day I may do a book.........

In the meantime, this summary post:

  • lists all the sketches by title, with their locations. I've organised it geographically in case anybody else fancies having a go at sketching the same view.
  • links to the locations in the title of the place

I'm also planning to post more of my sketches in various restaurants and other eateries which have already appeared on my other blog - see 'Making A Mark' - Interiors. While most of the sketches are of interiors (hence the title), a few involve facilities where the eating and drinking frequently takes place on a terrace outside eg Kew Gardens. Some are purely are of my view while I was taking refreshments.

Also ...... a post about my tips for people wanting to sketch in restaurants and other eateries.

10 "Dos and Don'ts" for how to draw people while eating


An Orangery Afternoon Tea
Kew Gardens

London (from west to east)

Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

Chelsea

Kensington Palace

Rex Whistler Restaurant 
Tate Britain, London

Tate Britain

Piccadilly - Royal Academy of Arts

St James Restaurant
Fortnum & Mason, London

Piccadilly - Fortnum and Masons

Mall Galleries

National Gallery

The National Cafe
National Gallery, London

National Portrait Gallery: Portrait Restaurant and Portrait Cafe

    Tate Modern

    "Fish! Restaurant, Borough Market
    Bankside, London

    Bankside


    City of London - Smithfield

    Northern England

    The Ferry Inn, Cookham
    Berkshire, England

    Southern England


    Europe

    Menu du Terroir, La Grillade Gourmande, Épernay
    Auberge du Terroir
    Servon, Normandy

    France

    Italy

    Trattoria alla Madonna
    Venice
    Venice:


    USA

    USA - California
    Tommys
    San Clemente, California

    USA - Arizona

    Cafe on Route 66
    Grants, New Mexico, USA

    USA- New Mexico

    USA Massachusetts

    Burdicks, Walpole,
    New Hampshire, USA

    USA - New Hampshire

    USA - Vermont

    USA - Maine

    In Good Company,
    Rockland, Maine


    More travel sketches 


    You can see more of my travels with a sketchbook on my website or by clicking the links to the summaries of blog posts for different areas in the right hand column. These are the links to my travels with a sketchbook in London; England; Venice and the USA.

    This post will be updated as new sketches are added to this blog.
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    Tuesday, August 29, 2006

    Monday 24th July: 2,000 miles later - Louise drives the desert with style


    "Louise drives the desert with style" 1.30am, 24.7.06. 118 degrees F
    pen and ink and coloured pencil in moleskine sketchbook 8" x 10"

    On Monday we were crossing two deserts during one of the hottest heatwaves the USA has ever known. Louise did it in style!

    It was an odd day. We were all really tired after the very long day on Sunday. It had also been a long trip overall - Louise calculated late on Monday that we'd done about 2,000 miles on the trip altogether. I know I felt like I couldn't look at anything more. My eyes/brain simply did not want to try and absorb any more scenery given the surfeit I'd enjoyed the previous day. I took very few photos that Monday - but that was also in part because the scenery changed and then stayed the same for a very long while. However I did do three sketches.


    "Cloud crossing the Sonoran Desert" 9.00am Mon 24.7.06. 101 degrees F
    pen and ink and coloured pencil in Moleskine sketchbook 8" x 10"

    From Prescott, we headed for Yuma through the Sonoran Desert. Louise was very keen we got started no later than 6.30am so that we got over the mountains in the Anza-Borrego Desert in California before the worst of the afternoon heat. She also seemed determined to drive with style as you can see from the sketch at the top of this post! How can anything go wrong if you drive the desert in a stetson hat with a splendid feather, sunglasses and silver earrings like Louise?

    Probably one of the best ways I can describe the day is to to just 'download' the annotations for each sketch - with the temperature reading. They're succinct and paint the picture rather well
    • Mon. 24.7.06 9.00am 101 degrees F "Clouds crossing the Sonoran Desert"
    • 24.7.06. 11.30am 109 degrees F "Penny's Diner, Yuma, Arizona"
    • 24.7.06. 1.30am 118 degrees F "Sea level in (Mohave) Desert" (this is the sketch of Louise driving - and I'd misunderstood which desert we were in! The Mohave is actually above Interstate 40 and we were still in the Sonoran Desert)
    .........and then, as we begin to climb 3,000 feet in the space of two miles up the major incline produced by Interstate-8 crossing the Jacumba Mountains, I started to make more notes on the sketch of Louise driving
    • no air-conditioning for the climb
    • tyres gone on three vehicles (by the side of the road)
    • 3000 feet - 101 degrees F (we'd dropped 17 degrees during the climb and heat in the 90s started to feel cool)
    There were more notes I could have made on the trip such as how pink the Sonoran Desert looked that morning but how incredibly flat the desert colours were under the cloud cover; how odd it was to have yet more rain in the desert - and how amazing the rainbows were; how big the parking lots for the snowbird RVs were in the middle of nowhere; how the heat radiated off the metal on the outside of Penny's Diner in Yuma (a great 50s diner where we eat brunch) as we walked from the air-con of the car to the air-con in the diner - and how worrying it was to see the bins of water for radiators every few hundred yards as we climbed the big incline back into California without the air-con on.

    As we began the long climb over the mountains, we entered the giant granite boulder fields of the Anza-Borrego desert. Switching the air-con off is instructed by road signs along Interstate-8 and is designed to avoid a car over-heating as it makes the enormous but rapid climb from sea level to 3,000 feet. It's a fast transition if you can keep moving, however most of the big trucks had to crawl up at a rate only marginally faster than snail's pace.

    All we knew was that we were very glad when we got to the top with no mishaps - and could switch the air-con back on and stop avoiding thoughts of what would happen if our tyres burst!

    As we came over the ridge and headed back down into San Diego County, there were fires burning off to our left towards Mexico, dense cloud cover and a very humid atmosphere - which apparently is very unusual for Southern California. Where had the sun gone?

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    Monday, August 28, 2006

    Sunday 23rd July: Big clouds, big holes and big rocks


    20 miles outside Flagstaff, 6000 feet, 98 degrees F
    coloured pencil in Moleskine sketchbook 8" x 10"

    After breakfast, we travelled on from Gallup, along Interstate-40 and alongside Route 66, crossed over the state border back into Arizona and had a debate about whether we going to go and look at the Petrified Forest or visit cliff dwellings at Walnut Canyon. Pressures of time meant we couldn't do both - and in the end we opted for the latter - while keeping an eye out for dead tree rocks along the road side...........

    As we approached Flagstaff we saw terrific cloud formations - of a lot less worrying variety than those we had seen the previous Tuesday. I photographed and sketched them in the Moleskine and had a go at trying to match coloured pencils to cloud colours - never an easy exercise. I also started to make a record of temperatures on my sketches - the car's dashboard said it was 98 degrees outside.

    Walnut Canyon National Monument is a very big hole. It's 20 miles long, 400 feet deep and a ¼-mile wide and was carved by the Walnut Creek over a period of 60 million years.

    It has very steep sides in sandstone and some fascinating geological features - such as what according to the website are "the wind-scoured dunes of an ancient desert." Higher up the walls turn to limestone and contain marine fossils from the sea which appeared later in thegeologicall timeline.

    After lathering ourselves with high factor sun cream, we split up. Around 100 people lived here between 1100 and 1250. Gordon and Kathy walked down a very, very long flight of steps to get half way down the canyon and see the houses of the cliff dwellers........and then walked all the way up again.

    I got about a third of the way and then realised, judging by the faces of the young and athletic coming back up (they were a bit 'puffed'), that I wouldn't enjoy the climb back up and stopped, sat on a step and sketched (see left). Louise, who has got 'the wise woman' off pat by now, stayed at the top and investigated exhibits.

    Leaving the canyon, just before we got to Flagstaff we turned south and headed for Sedona. My goodness, those rocks are BIG and RED! None of my photos really did them justice and it was cloudy overhead so we didn't get the impact of the light on them. I was so close to them I couldn't sketch them at all - if that makes sense. It would have been great to have been able to stop but it had started raining and we still had miles to cover. Here's a link to a site which does show just how impressive Sedona really is.

    And here's something else you don't see often. In fact the peacock green McDonalds sign in the centre of Sedona is very much a one-off!

    We finally landed in Prescott after a side trip to Jerome which was once called 'the wickedest town in the west' where we think we found a brothel masquerading as an art gallery - which was something we all agreed was a new one on us! Staggering views from Jerome - but one of those - 'you have to be there to see it' ones, impossible to capture on camera - well my camera!

    This is one of my favourite shots of the trip - I think it's the neon lights of the theatre and the cars on main street in Prescott against the more subtle but equallystunningy colour of the sunset - behind a great big mesa!

    Prescott has the nicest town square and looks like it ought to be doing auditions for films - maybe something inbetween Back to the Future and Close Encounters.

    We went to bed with strict instructions from Louise that we had to be up and on the road at the crack of dawn if we were to beat the heat the next day!

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    Sunday, August 27, 2006

    Sunday 23rd July: Back in time to Route 66........and a bit more

    On Sunday I did three sketches before we even had breakfast!

    This sketch of an extended family at their Sunday morning breakfast in Grants, New Mexico was done in pen and ink in my moleskine between sitting down and my breakfast arriving on the table.

    We were up early as we had a long trip to get to Prescott, Arizona by the evening. We set off after saying goodbye to Nicole who was flying back east. We watched her jog off in her running gear (Nicole heaves a sigh of relief due to the absence of any photos from the photo opportunity presented by us driving by as she jogged along!)

    Our planned route had to be changed because of the extreme hot weather being experienced in the southwest. Louise had originally planned that we should travel back through Arizona via Flagstaff and Kington Arizona and return to California through Death Valley - one of the hottest places . The increase in temperatures that weekend meant that was no longer wise - and our journey home was not going to be without some nail-biting moments.........

    It was a "historic heatwave" which affected the whole country - with abnormal temperatures being experienced in the southwestern states and inland California during that weekend and the following week. Phoenix hit 118 degrees two days earlier on 21 July and it broke many local records in California with temperatures reaching 119 degrees in LA County on the 22nd. By the end of July it was identified as the cause of death for some 164 fatalities in California.

    Check the temperature maps in the links - we traveled right through the big red bit labeled 110+ degrees. We expected it might be a bit hot and packed in as much water as we could carry.

    We started early and travelled to Grants along Interstate 40 before stopping for breakfast. We were now traveling alongside Route 66 - America's most famous road which was opened in 1926 and stretches 2,448 miles from Chicago to Los Angeles.

    Our route took us across the continental divide - that point in the North American land mass where all rivers to the east drain to the Gulf Coast or the Atlantic and those on the west drain to the Pacific. The sketches of mesas are of the scenery en route.

    We planned to try and visit the Acoma Pueblo (Sky City) which is claimed to be the oldest continuously inhabited city in the United States. We didn't quite make it.........

    One of the things I hadn't appreciated until visiting the southwest was the extent to which some of the tribal communities, within the larger native american community, have embraced gambling and casinos as a way of generating income. I also didn't realise that tribal territory is covered by different laws and practices. Examples in Arizona include most ( but not all) the territories being an hour different to the time in the rest of the State (which does not observe daylight saving) and all photography by visitors being illegal unless a permit has been obtained in advance. The latter is a point which is not well covered in guidebooks.........but it's now duly noted in my moleskine after the visit from the very nice policeman. I'm not going to embarrass any of us by saying who was taking photos on behalf of who - but it was rather funny to find out afterwards that there was no memory card in the camera anyway! ;)

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    Monday, August 14, 2006

    A Tombstone epitaph

    Tombstone, Arizona
    The rain finally stopped and we reached Tombstone in the early evening - although the above photo is what it looked like the next morning just before we left.

    Tombstone was christened by Ed Schieffelin - a prospector who called his silver claim and the camp that grew up around it after what he was told was the only stone he might find if he went "looking for stones" in Apache territory. He founded it in 1877, by 1879 it had 40 cabins and a 100 people. Two years later it had 5,000 people as the mining camp grew. It developed a reputation as a place of complete lawlessness and violence.

    Tombstone has certainly been a very popular place in film history with four films made about it, its inhabitants (Marshall Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, the Clantons) and the fabled gunfight at the OK Corral in 1881 (it's the 125th anniversary this year) - see the links below.

    •  A resume of the various clashes associated with the Earps and Clantons can be found here.  
    • Archived extracts from the Tombstone Epitaph (the local paper - what else!) and photos can be seen here.
    It's been characterised as "the town too tough to die". It faded into obscurity over the years but has recently been revived by those interested in restoration and the search for the tourist dollar. Overall, I was generally impressed with the quality of the restoration and the protection of original buildings - it suggested an authenticity.......minus the lawlessness!


    Tombstone Cowboys
    After a dinner of great mexican food (and an excellent margarita) at the Lamplight Restaurant at the Tombstone Boarding House, we ran into one of the Tombstone cowboys in the street still dressed in his clothing from the regular re-enactment of the gunfight at the OK Corral that afternoon. We chatted and it turned out that he was actually from Louisiana!

    We finished the evening with a visit to Big Nose Kate's Saloon and stroll around Tombstone, which is when I snapped some of the modern day cowboys exiting one of the local saloons.

    The sign at the OK Corral
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    Thursday, August 10, 2006

    Gordon drives Dome Valley - with "the boss"

    Gordon drives Dome Valley
    Gordon took over the driving as we left Yuma and became a captive model for my next sketch! Apparently the likeness is fairly good. It was not too difficult to sketch him as Interstate 8 through the Sonoran Desert is very largely a straight road so he didn't move much! ;) Sketching is an activity which I can highly recommend for passengers on a long trip who'd like to practice their skills at sketching people. The trick is to hold the pen fairly lightly. Let it skip over the page and don't mind too much if you hit a bump - it only adds authenticity to the sketch! ;)

    "The boss" in this instance is Bruce Springsteen who started playing just as I began to title the piece. Louise's husband had lent us his satellite radio as reception on normal radio stations in the desert can be very patchy. Gordon managed to work out how the radio worked and then kept us tuned to a radio station which played a lot of Jimmy Buffet for most of the journey. Everybody was amazed I'd never heard of him......

    After a while I began to realise that there was an opportunity to sketch from the car because the view is the same for mile after mile so accuracy in terms of what you can see from an exact spot becomes rather redundant and it's also easier to get a good sense of the place. Thus the next sketch (pen and ink and coloured pencil in my Moleskine travel sketchbook) is a composite of the desert landscape we were passing. The hills come from one bit of the road, the sky from another and the shapes of cacti were filled in as we passd them.

    Sand Tank Mountains, Arizona
    Although everything in the desert landscape looks really washed out at first, the desert colours in the desert are actually quite complex and quite unlike any other landscape. I found that I could see more and more colours the more I looked at it - which then became reflected in the coloured pencil work where I was trying for an optical mixing effect.

    The large cacti in the sketch of this particular part of the Sonoran desert are called Saguaro Cactus. The other main vegetation we saw everywhere on this part of the trip is called the Ocotillo - and it's not a cactus, its a shrub . This is a photo of what an ocotillo looks like close up.

    One of the main features of the trip that day were the cloud formations. We had great big cumulus clouds initially over the various mountain ranges in the distance and then just before we turned right on to Interstate 10 Louise and I spotted an anvil cloud - which usually means there's a storm hovering somewhere in the vicinity.

    We drove past Tucson heading for San Xavier du Bac Mission on its outskirts The history of this church is explained in the history section of its website. In outline, the first church foundations were built in 1700 and the present church was built between 1783 and 1797. It's suggested to be one of the very finest examples of Mission architecture given the blending of various styles and the dazzling ornamentation and colour of the interior. It was incredibly hot and humid while we were there. As we began to leave we could not help but notice that there was a dramatic change in the sky - the storm clouds were gathering.


    As we started the next leg of the journey to Tombstone the rain started - and it 'bucketed down' I feel it necessary to point out that I announced that this was nothing to do with me ;) as England currently has a ban on the use of hose pipe due to a lack of rain. I felt it much more likely that it had something to do with the man from Maine (and by the end of the trip I was calling him the 'rainmaker'). Two weeks later the area we were moving through had some really bad summer flash floods.

    Then we arrived in Tombstone, home of the OK Corral........

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    Gordon drives Dome Valley Arizona - with "the boss"

    Gordon took over the driving as we left Yuma and became a captive model for my next sketch! Apparently the likeness is fairly good. It was not too difficult to sketch him as Interstate 8 through the Sonoran Desert is very largely a straight road so he didn't move much! ;)

    8.00am Gordon drives Dome Valley, Arizona - listening to Bruce Springsteen
    pen and ink and coloured pencils in Moleskine Sketchbook
    copyright Katherine Tyrrell
    Sketching is an activity which I can highly recommend for passengers on a long trip who'd like to practice their skills at sketching people. The trick is to hold the pen fairly lightly. Let it skip over the page and don't mind too much if you hit a bump - it only adds authenticity to the sketch! ;)

    "The boss" in this instance is Bruce Springsteen who started playing just as I began to title the piece. Louise's husband had lent us his satellite radio as reception on normal radio stations in the desert can be very patchy. Gordon managed to work out how the radio worked and then kept us tuned to a radio station which played a lot of Jimmy Buffet for most of the journey. Everybody was amazed I'd never heard of him......

    Once we passed Yuma and the Fortuna Foothills we were driving through Dome Valley - very near to the trail of the old Butterfield stage coaches which carried both mail and passengers in the nineteenth century.  In effect we were travelling eastbound along the I-8 but very near to their Butterfield Division 3 route between Fort Yuma and Tucson (click the link to check out the old stagecoach stops on this route)
    The schedule was very specific. The westbound stage was scheduled to leave Tucson, Arizona, for instance, every Tuesday and Friday at 1:30pm, arriving at Ft. Yuma, California three days later at 3am.National Postal Museum - Butterfield Overland Mail Record Book
    After a while I began to realise that there was an opportunity to sketch The Sand Tank Mountains south of I-8 (located within the Sonoran Desert National Monument) from the car because the view is the same for mile after mile so accuracy in terms of what you can see from an exact spot becomes rather redundant and it's also easier to get a good sense of the place.

    Although everything in the desert landscape looks really washed out at first, the desert colours in the desert are actually quite complex and quite unlike any other landscape. I found that I could see more and more colours the more I looked at it - which then became reflected in the coloured pencil work where I was trying for an optical mixing effect.

    Thus the next sketch (pen and ink and coloured pencil in my Moleskine travel sketchbook) is a composite of the desert landscape we were passing. The hills come from one bit of the road, the sky from another and the shapes of cacti in the Saguaro Cactus Forests were filled in as we passd them.


    Composite Sketch of The Sand Tank Mountains
    sketched from the car driving along Interstate 8
    pen and ink and coloured pencils in Moleskine Sketchbook
    copyright Katherine Tyrrell
    Saguero Cactus at San Xavier du Bac
    - this was a BIG one!
    The large cacti in the sketch of this particular part of the Lower Sonoran Desert are called Saguaro Cactus (see left for one I photographed at the Mission) and there are a number of Saguaero Cactus Forests in the area.

    Ocatillo in Arizona - this is not a cactus
     The other main vegetation we saw everywhere on this part of the trip is called the Ocotillo - and it's not a cactus, its a shrub. Below is a photo of what an ocotillo looks like close up.

    One of the main features of the trip that day were the cloud formations. We had great big cumulus clouds initially over the various mountain ranges in the distance and then just before we turned right on to Interstate 10 Louise and I both spotted an anvil cloud - which usually means there's a storm hovering somewhere in the vicinity.

    We drove past Tucson heading for San Xavier du Bac Mission on its outskirts The history of this church is explained in the history section of its website.

    In outline, the first church foundations were built in 1700 and the present church was built between 1783 and 1797. It's suggested to be one of the very finest examples of Mission architecture given the blending of various styles and the dazzling ornamentation and colour of the interior.

    Storm clouds gathering at San Xavier du Bac Mission
    It was incredibly hot and humid while we were there. As we began to leave we could not help but notice that there was a dramatic change in the sky - the storm clouds were gathering.

    As we started the next leg of the journey to Tombstone the rain started - and it 'bucketed down' I feel it necessary to point out that I announced that this was nothing to do with me ;) as England currently has a ban on the use of hose pipe due to a lack of rain. I felt it much more likely that it had something to do with the man from Maine (and by the end of the trip I was calling him the 'rainmaker'). Two weeks later the area we were moving through had some really bad summer flash floods.

    Then we arrived in Tombstone, home of the OK Corral........

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    Wednesday, August 09, 2006

    Breakfast in Yuma

    6.00am on Tuesday 18th July, the first leg of THE BIG ROAD TRIP - otherwise known as "Katherine, Katherine, Gordon and Louise go to Albuquerque" - got underway. We were off to the annual convention and exhibition of the Coloured Pencil Society of America which none of us had attended before. The road trip was an added extra.......

    Some introductions:

    Louise is a grandmother who owns and rides two Harley Davidson motorbikes, teaches people how to drive and operate very expensive machines of a rather different nature and is a lifelong artist and fellow art supplies addict. She's got more than me - she could open her own store! Louise is Driver in Charge and Chief Navigator for this trip - and insisted we all get up at 5.00am so that we could do as many miles of travelling through the desert as possible while it was still relatively cool.

    In her very busy life in Maine Katherine Ellis manages to fit in being an award winning artist who works in coloured pencil. She produces stunning still lifes of food and shiny reflective objects - particularly ones with old advertising slogans and wonderfully life like dog portraits - which keep winning prizes. Check out "Not Begging. Much" on the main page of her portrait gallery to see what I mean.

    Gordon, her husband, is 'in TV' and raises large sums for money for charity on a regular basis with various activities in his home town in Maine. Let's put it this way, the local police now provide directions to the venue of his Haunted House at Halloween production which people travel miles to see. He plays Brad Pitt in this road trip saga - except in this instance he has to sweet talk three middle aged women of strong character for four days. That's when he's not 'the man in charge of the satellite radio thing' or 'the man with his own well in a desert'. By the end he was 'the man who survived four days in a car with us'! Which I guess makes him a man of great diplomacy and infinite patience. Anyway, so far as my sketchbook was concerned, having a beard makes him interesting to draw so he pops up in a few sketches.......including the one at the top of this post which was done during breakfast in Yuma.


    Back to the beginning - after we filled up at Starbucks with the essentials - including my small tray of cheese and fruit(!) Gordon opened the maps, I opened the guidebook and Louise guided us on to Interstate 8 and we headed for the deserts and Arizona. That's right - plural - we needed to travel through two deserts, the Anza-Borrego and Sonoran deserts. At this point I was going to include a link to the route from Google Maps but as it's crashed my computer three times so far I've had another think about that idea.

    Our first stop and my first sketch was over breakfast at the Cracker Barrel in Yuma, just over the border in Arizona. I still hadn't quite got to grips with what the items on the menu (click for larger version) actually meant and this is what arrived.......... It was a mistake and I learned my lesson!

    Looking back now, I've noticed that what is interesting about a number of the sketches on the trip is that, as in San Clemente, sketching has to be done while doing other things - there's usually no time to stop to sketch. Also, the speed means that decisions about 'what to do' have to be made very fast - and I found that this helped to produce some interesting decisions about focus and composition which I probably wouldn't have done if I'd had more time to think. No bad thing methinks! ;) The main sketch done at breakfast is an example of this. It was done in pen and sepia ink on a double page spread in my large Moleskine sketchbook while waiting for and then eating breakfast. Coloured pencil was then added afterwards while I still had a clear visual memory about colours in my head. The repetition of motif was entirely unconscious.

    As I got back to the car the coloured pencils pencil cases (warms and cools) came out of the trunk/boot and made their way to the foot well. I had decided to try and sketch on the move.............

    Addendum:  I was hugely impressed with some hot pink cacti located right outside the Cracker Barrel.  See also X is for Xerophytes at Yuma
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    Monday, July 31, 2006

    Sketching in the southwestern states of the USA - what happened next....

    Three road trips across SW States and a stay in Southern California
    Top row: (left) San Clemente (right) Sand Bank Mountains
    Bottom row: (left) Point Lobos (right) Ventura

    It's raining here in southern California on the last day of my trip so I thought I might try and do something really sensible(!) and pull together a list of the blog posts that I need to start creating when I get home to London (end of this week) and back to my computer/scanner/software/etc.

    As has been correctly surmised already, trying to post on the road has proved to be well nigh impossible. On the couple of days I've actually had access to a computer I've also had lots of other practical trip related matters to sort out.

    So - by way of a tempter - here's a summary of my trip to the south western states of the USA. I'll insert all the blog post links to this summary as I post the entry for each day.

    The preliminary indications of some blog post titles are given below - along with some brief descriptions of the journey and some indications of images to come! As you can see there are quite a few sketches and I've very nearly filled my new Moleskine.


    [1 October 2006: This blog entry has now been updated to include the final titles and posts relating to this trip and associated hyperlinks - plus a sample of images from the trip.]


    A short stay and a pastels workshop in Southern California

    I visited my friend Louise - she and her husband showed me the sights and then Louise and I took a weekend pastels workshop in San Clemente
    Road Trip #1 - Santee, Southern California to Albuquerque, New Mexico via Tombstone, Arizona

    This trip started because my friends and I decided to go to the Annual Exhibition of the Coloured Pencil Society of America.  The trip to get there from Southern California took two long days.
    • Tuesday 18th July "Breakfast in Yuma" and "Gordon drives Dome Valley with the boss" - Day 1 of the San Diego-Albuquerque Road Trip - starting from Santee to Tombstone, Arizona via Breakfast in Yuma, lots of desert and cacti, the Mission San Xavier del Bac and a major rain storm outside Tucson plus how to sketch on the move! (3 sketches plus photos)  Note: The latter updates the original which had coding problems when I tried to update it and hence could not be amended.
    • Tuesday 18th July "A Tombstone Epitaph" (photos) an account of an evening with the cowboys in Tombstone
    • Wednesday 19th July "Chillis and a big elephant butt" - Day 1 of the San Diego-Albuquerque Road Trip - involved Tombstone to Albuquerque via Hatch (home of the hot chilli), Truth and Consequences and Elephant Butte. (3 sketches)
    • Thursday 20th July - Plein air sketching in "Old Town Albuquerque"; CPSA slide show of all entries for the annual exhibition (2 sketches plus photos)
    • Friday 21st July - "Plein Air Sketching and a Banquet" Plein air sketching, champagne and the CPSA Banquet (2 sketches)
    • Friday 21st July (out of order): "Plein Air Sketching the Sandia Mountains" - a follow on from the previous process with a detailed explanation of the process re developing a diptych sketch
    • Saturday 22nd July - "Santa Fe and Georgia O'Keeffe" visiting Santa Fe and the Georgia O'Keefe Museum in blissful weather.  
    • Saturday 22nd July - "The CPSA Artists' Reception" - for the Annual Exhibition of the Coloured Pencil Society of America (2 sketches and photos)
    Road Trip #2 - Albuquerque, New Mexico to Santee, California via Prescott, Arizona

    The main challenge for the drive back was that in the summer of 2006 the USA had a major heatwave . It had started on 15th July and got hotter as July progressed.  There were extremely high temperatures in the deserts making planning for the route for the trip back rather critical.  The aim was to avoid major inclines for a fully loaded car with four people.
    Road Trip #3 - Pacific Coast Highway Trip from San Francisco to San Diego

    On this trip I found out that the marine inversions on the coast tend to accompany very high temperatures inland!
    As well as sketching details, my posts also include details of

    • routes I travelled
    • places I stayed and/or visited
    • descriptions of places where I ate meals (which often became the subjects for sketches) 
    • PLUS places to buy art supplies .


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