Incidental on-site sketches

I had one pause during the holidays when I wasn't making art for gifts or gift tags, which was the afternoon I spent picking up my cousin Toni from Texas from the airport (LAX). My other cousin, Carol Sue, with whom she was staying, has a foolproof pick-up routine that she shared with me and I followed: You drive to the Westchester Starbucks, which is just up the road from the airport, wait for whoever is arriving to get through baggage check and out to the curb, at which point they call you, and you're five minutes away from retrieving them. So I headed off to LAX with plenty of time to spare, just in case traffic decided to be heavy (it was the weekend before Christmas, after all), and arrived in time to do a quick sketch of part of the insides of the Starbucks before Toni paged me to Southwest Airlines. It turned out taking a little more than five minutes to get there, but we met up in the end and headed back to Woodland Hills for supper.

The rest of the week was a combination of Christmas Day and New Year's Eve festivities, chat-fests with family and friends, and hibernation in my very cold house, in which the furnace has ceased to function! I've been living in triple layers of clothing and spending lots of time reading in front of the oven in the kitchen. I did need to go to the chiropractor this week, and decided to do some other errands and then take myself out to a late breakfast afterwards, so I took along the sketchbook. I've been observing that many people take even a sketchbook this wide and do a panorama across two pages (my book is 5x8 inches, so that becomes 5x16), so I managed to do this by a combination of close-up objects and part of the scene I could see from my table:

After that one outing, I stayed in my cocoon and avoided going out for a couple more days. I had been eager to get back to water aerobics this week to work off my holiday lethargy; but despite the sunny weather, the wind has been glacial, and I just couldn't bear the thought of the outdoor pool in that frigid air. But after eating too much and moving too little for way too long, I was beginning to get both stiff muscles and a stir-crazy brain, so today I put on my sweats and headed over to Lake Balboa, to have a gentle walk-and-sketch session. I strolled around the lake, enjoying the sun, and realized the wind had finally abated. I stopped a couple of times at different vista points to make a drawing, and I swear, it was the warmest I've been in three weeks! I'm going to have to repeat this at noon at regular intervals, until I get my nerve back up for water aerobics. Here are my two sketches:

This above is looking west, toward the Santa Monica mountains. Below: The lake has always had paddle-boats, but now there is a new innovation: Swan boats, which have caught the imagination (and the rental fees) of a lot more people.

Lots of birds out today, including coots galore, fat noisy geese, small white cranes, some cormorants, and even a few stately pelicans settled here after migration.

Finally, the last picture I have to share is a small illustration I made to go on a postcard advertising a T-shirt stenciling workshop I'm hoping to promote at libraries. It's fun to realize that the flyer you are making needs an illustration, and then be able to decide what it should be, draw and paint it, scan it, and put it right into the spot for which you designed it.

That's all for now...but I have a couple of breakfasts coming up for which I plan to be early...