New Mexico Trip, Part 2

Juliana’s kitchen, looking into the yard

 Wednesday, August 3. The day started with taking a salsa aerobics class with Juliana at her gym. On the way back, she told me to grab her new sketchbook (that I gave her), and sketch what I saw as she was driving. Everything was moving fast, and I sketched fast as things went by, doing quick drawings on top of each other. It was fun, and freeing, and it forced me to not worry about what it looked like. It made me wish I had a little sketchbook for this kind of drawing. The one I brought was bigger, with watercolor paper in it. You know, for “real” drawings.

After lunch, we went to Artisan Art supply store. I’m so envious of people who have a real art supply store in their town since I pretty much just have craft stores in mine. I picked up a few more markers, which I can never resist, and some other things. And, I got a little sketchbook to do quickie sketches in. It’s 5.25″ x 6.25″–perfect for quick, crazy sketches and small enough to fit in my purse.

I started using it on the way back to Juliana’s house. But first we needed to stop for gas. Mercury Retrograde struck again.

After getting gas, her truck wouldn’t start. Some nice people (wanting to get gas), helped me push her out of the way. Then some nice guys figured out that her truck wouldn’t start because the wires that connect to the battery were fried off. I of course took pictures while this was happening. They rigged it enough to get it started, then one of them followed us to an auto store to fix it. He was an ice cream man!

These are some quick sketches I did in my little sketchbook while I was riding in Juliana’s truck. These are only 2 of the pages that I did, and both pages have 2 drawings on top of each other. I did the one of the O’Reilly Auto Parts store while the very nice ice cream truck guy was fixing her truck for us. I had an ice cream sandwich. I’m not sure which kind of ice cream she had.

We got back to her place in time to get ready for her Thursday night drawing group, also held at the Third Street Arts. Albuquerque has a very active arts community that made me very envious. Juliana said she can go to a life drawing session every night if she wanted to. Man! How lucky.

Thursday nights are just one long pose. I had never been to a life drawing session with just one long pose before. I’m used to multiple poses with the longest one being about 20 or 30 minutes. I really liked that the model did the same pose for the whole night. It gave me time to work on more involved pieces and things I struggle with.

Both of these are watercolor, using my Koi Watecolor set. For the first one, I used a water soluble pencil to first do the sketch. I used a Sharpie Fine Point Pen to sketch the second one.

I also did an acrylic painting on canvas. Before we went to drawing, I collaged some papers onto the canvas to have some background texture. Then I did the painting during the drawing session. I’m not totally crazy about the painting, but this was the first time I did a “live acrylic painting” on the spot, so in many ways, it was a break through for me. I was a little scared to get started, but once I jumped in, I enjoyed it and felt very excited. The black outline was done with a Pitt Big Brush Pen.

After the session, we stayed to help get her boyfriend’s show set up for his opening the next night. We transformed it from a drawing space with plastic covering the floors, and easels and drawing benches all over the place into a gallery. That will be in the next post. You can see the other posts for my trip here.