Mosteiros - Sao Miguel, Azores

 As you might have guessed, this sketch covers two pages of an open sketchbook.  Often people ask me if that's a frustration.  Not at all, in fact I kind of like the fold in the middle as it shows that it is a sketchbook.

You see, for me the whole book is the "piece".  A frustration that they don't display well, but so what, I've found it to be more rewarding when I just do this to entertain myself.

And btw - I adore, and take extraordinary measures to use Laloran sketch books.  Both for the high quality paper that accepts my pen and paint but also because you can mistreat by opening them flat on the scanner and they don't fall apart.

Sao Miguel - Paddocks

I haven't been sketching in more than a year since visiting Cuba.  There was a some print making last winter and spring, but a trip to the Azores opened my sketching valves.

These Portuguese Islands out in the Atlantic offer a verdant cultural landscape that was just what I needed to make use of my sketching kit, appropriately including a Laloran sketch book.

before dinner cocktail

Just mix, water, paint and a small dog together in your neighbourhood park and you have a delightful late summer afternoon cocktail.  My friend got to run crazy with a succession of afterwork dogs, as I focussed on the various hues of green and reflections in Upper Brown's Inlet.

This is a tiny little painting in my 5" x 3 1/2" Laloran sketchbook - minus the taped edges.  Maybe someday, I'll have the courage to paint without lines, but in the meantime I did manage to avoid the "detail trap" just by working small.

Cupolas

Another sketch from tea time in France...this one with water not tea.   Not that it improved the accuracy of my draughtsmanship.

This was done in a tiny 3" x  5" sketchbook that begs to be opened and used as double pages. I prefer the landscape format but shouldn't quibble as Laloran was generous enough to provide these to the Urban Sketcher participants in Barcelona last summer and more to the point, I love the paper they use.

Sketcher's Travel Kit

So I am headed off for an adventure in Spain. I'm going there to walk the Camino and have been obsessively selecting equipment and clothing to keep my pack weight to an absolute minimum.  A large part of the trip will be sketching, but I have been very disciplined to keep that kit minimal also.

I have two small Laloran sketchbooks (approx. 5 1/2" x 8',  1 landscape, 1 portrait) which are the heavy things.  I have a brush protector with 3 brushes - No 12, 4 and a 3/4" flat.  A few pencils , 2  trusty Lamy pens and some Noodler's Bulletproof Black Ink in a plastic bottle, double sealed in zip-lock plastic bags.  A collapsible cup for water and  a nice little watercolour field box with 2 yellows, 2 reds, 2 browns , 3 blues , 2 greens and ochre.  I am also taking a few tubes to provide some different primaries  - cadmium red and cerulean blue and a what I think of as "Shari Blaukopf's Barcelona Primaries" - Cadmium Orange, Ultramarine Blue and  Rose Madder. Shari is one of my Urban Sketching mentors and that palette is what she intends to use in her workshop this summer at the Symposium in Barcelona.   I intend to to use Shari's primaries as much as possible to give my sketches continuity. I'm debating throwing another sketchbook in my pack as, the ultimate disappointment would be to run out of paper on this trip of a lifetime.