Every Day in August, and...

I've gone from not participating in anything to participating in two separate groups on Facebook this month--the Every Day in August group, and the World Watercolor Group "August Adventure." By doing simple drawings instead of always insisting on watercolor, and by giving up some (let's face it, fairly inane) television time, I've gotten a few things done in the first four days of August!

The Every Day in August theme is "stuff you're grateful for," and each day it's something new.

EDiA #1 was "someone," and mine was my friend and colleague at the library, Anarda. I am the senior teen librarian in charge of planning programs and events for teens at my library, and she is the teen librarian at one of our branches. She collaborates in such a wonderful way, taking the ideas I have and always suggesting some detail that will make them better, more original, more exciting and accessible to the teens. She's also a great friend--always encouraging and kind.

EDiA #2: Something in nature

A house finch has been sitting on the phone wire in my back yard, warbling away for the past few days. It made me think of this maxim from the great conservationist Rachel Carson (which is also stenciled on my living room wall). It also made my cats crazy(er). I guess I should have drawn a picture of a bug, but the songbird was way more appealing!

EDiA #3: A tool or form of technology

Not very technological, but these are my tools...

EDiA #4: A smell

Many people did flowers (or soup), but mine was a childhood memory, one of those visceral aromas that immediately carries you to a time and place. The scent of blueberries takes me back to my childhood. From age 6 months to four years old, my dad was stationed at the Air Force base at Goose Bay, Labrador. Behind the base housing was a woods, and in the summer (which was about 30 days of 68-degree weather in July and August--the rest of the year we were buried in snow) the ground was covered with loaded blueberry bushes. Mom would send me out with a bowl to fill up, and then she'd wash them for me and I'd sit on the steps and eat them.

This got a little too juicy (pardon the pun), because I did it in my sketchbook when I should have used watercolor paper to better control the paint. I'd like to try this one again sometime. Pencil and watercolor.

Then, for the "August Adventure," we're painting "favorites." I shared some old paintings for some of the posts (because no one there has seen them, and I DO work full-time, after all). So for "favorite dessert" I posted this sketch I made for our library cookbook, because cookies are my faves but they are kind of boring to draw, and ingredients are much more fun and challenging!

And for favorite flower, I posted one of many paintings of daffodils:

But I DID manage to do a new one for "favorite toy."

My favorite "toy" was books, always. But this one was a particular favorite when I was very little, because it was a book that featured toys. Dare Wright photographed her Lenci doll, Edith, with two bears she bought at FAO Schwartz, and in 1958, when I was three years old, my parents bought me Holiday for Edith and the Bears. The writer posed the doll and the two bears in various ways and took photographs of them as they had adventures on the island of Ocracoke, climbing dunes, meeting horses, swimming, and having adventures. (Little Bear and Edith go out by themselves in a rowboat, though expressly forbidden to by Mr. Bear, losing their oars and getting pulled out by the tide. But Mr. Bear saves them.)

This was a hard one to paint, because all of the photographs are black and white that has aged to a faint sepiatone. Pencil and watercolor.

We'll see how long I can keep this up!

Reward for hard work

I've been taking it easy this week of vacation, mostly because it's so horribly hot that I can't bring myself to do much! And also, despite many undone projects, I need the rest after a hectic six weeks of Teen Summer Reading Club. But this morning was a little cooler, and I woke up early for a change, so I decided to tackle the patio. I carried or rolled all the furniture out into the yard, and then I swept out the patio, I hosed it out, I washed it down with soapy water with a scrubber and a mop and rinsed well, and then while it dried, I did the same to all the furniture.

This was all done by 8:30 a.m., so I jumped in the shower (okay, it was more of a gimpy limp to the shower), and then headed for the chiropractor for a much-needed tune-up. Afterwards, I decided I deserved a reward of breakfast out. I headed for a favorite place in Encino, but by this time it was 10 a.m., and there was no parking and a line at the door. So I drove up Ventura Blvd., trying to decide whether to try somewhere else or go home and cook.

There is a semi-new building on Ventura Blvd. east of Hayvenhurst with a bunch of fast food places--Chipotle, Jersey Mike's, and so on--but as I drove past it, I spotted the name "Claudine" and the subheading of "baked goods," a place I had never noticed before, so I grabbed an empty parking place out front and went in to scope it out.

The place is light, bright, and inviting, featuring racks of cake holders, some put to good use and some standing by and looking ornamental. It's an order-at-the-counter kind of place, and then they bring your food to you. They serve a limited breakfast menu (in addition to the baked goods), and promised good café latte, so I settled in and started a sketch of what fell within my sightline while I waited for my order to be delivered to my table.

I finished the sketch after I ate (perfect scrambled eggs, crispy potato wedges, and brioche toast), and when I got home, I went out on my pristine patio and completed it with some watercolor. And now, I'm going to take a nap!

(LePen .05 and watercolor--featuring a favorite, Daniel Smith cobalt turquoise!)

Hairfie

I decided it was time for a new Facebook Profile Picture, so I took a "Hairfie" of me "wearing" my new favorite hairstyle, a French braid down each side that gets wrapped into a bun at the back. The perfect 'do for someone with long hair, when it's 100 degrees outside! (Please let it get cooler soon...)

LePen and watercolor.

A few laggardly July prompts

As I mentioned before, I didn't connect with too many of the Every Day in July prompts, but I thought I'd do a couple to finish out the month.

#20: Iced Tea

Well, I love cold tea, but I don't really like it iced, because the ice dilutes the tea and I like my tea strong. So I make tea in my trusty old blue teapot and stick the pot in the refrigerator to get it cold. And sometimes I make an Arnold Palmer (half tea, half lemonade). LePen .05, watercolor.

#29: Drive-in Movie

I have great memories of going to the drive-in with my parents. We'd pack a lunch (because concession stand food was too expensive! and also not fresh), I'd put on my pajamas, and for most of the movie I would lean over the middle of the bench seat between my parents to watch the show. The speakers never worked right, and there would always be a battle between Mom, who wanted to move to another spot to see if that one would work better, and Dad, who insisted he could fix it if she'd just give him a minute. I don't think I saw the ending of most of those movies--the back seat, thoughtfully furnished with a blanket and pillow, was just too seductive. Which was probably my parents' plan all along--at least half a movie's worth of alone time!

This one was a quickie, and not too well executed, but the palm tree gives it that quintessential California identity. LePen .05, watercolor.

Shelf-Talkers

Anarda and I, while still mired in the tail end of the Teen Summer Reading Program, are having short but creative little meetings to plan out our teen programs for the next six months or so.

One thing we always "celebrate" with some activity is Teen Read Week, designated by the American Library Association as the second week in October. In the past, we have featured a writing contest, and may do so again (we had a pretty brilliant idea yesterday); but this year we also came up with an idea to help us with display and give the teens a creative outlet to share their favorite books: Shelf Talkers.

You see these more commonly in bookstores (mostly independent ones) than you do libraries, for some reason. There will be a display with "staff picks" cards, and the best are not the typewritten ones on pre-made forms, but hand-made, fancifully embellished comments that draw your eye to the book and make you want to read it.

Rather than do a display (since at Anarda's branch she is lamentably short on display space), we decided to compromise and make them hang over the shelves like the pre-made ones in little plastic cases, but to encourage the teens to personalize them (and not use the plastic cases!). With that in mind, I made up a simple form.

I divided a manila-colored sheet of thin cardstock into quarters, at 4.25x5.5 inches. Then I put a dotted line across the short side at the 1.25-inch mark, so once the folding part is folded over the shelf and taped there, the shelf-talker itself will be approximately square. And then I looked at my list of books on Goodreads and made shelf-talkers for three of the books on there.

I already know what Anarda will tell me: "Some of us don't draw." So I plan to do a few more with simple embellishments like squiggly borders or lettering and no illustrations. But I had fun with these.

Manila cardstock, LePen 0.5, watercolor, colored pencils.

A record of some successful programs

My friend Hubert, at the library, has a past as the manager of the bookstore at the Huntington Library, and is very good at both display and programming. After he moved from the children's department at our library, where he did awesome story times and decorated everything beautifully with the help of a skillfully wielded exacto knife, he became a reference librarian, and for a while he was frustrated because he had no creative outlet. But once we got new management, Hubert was allowed to cut loose and start creating adult programming for the library, and he has done it wholeheartedly and successfully.

His specialty is to find an interesting, topical nonfiction book that's just about to be published, and contact the author, the publisher, the agent, or whoever will get back to him, about doing an author event. He pursues authors whose works are particularly relevant to people in our city or region or county, and he does an amazing job of crafting and then promoting the events, with the result that we have had attendance of between 150-200 people at each of them.

Hubert had a birthday lately, and he has also been feeling down because he got transferred away from the Central Library to a branch, where he is trying to find his feet, so I decided he deserved a gift as a pick-me-up. So I checked the books from his three most successful programs out of the library, and I made him this painting of them to commemorate his successes. I hope looking at it reminds him just how great he is at this and encourages him to continue!

These were not the easiest books to paint: Rocket Girls was probably the simplest and also the most fun, because of the blending of colors; but The Last Innocents was a crazy combination of tiny black and white photos mixed with color, containing shots from the civil rights movement as well as shots of various Dodgers, and getting the illustration to look even a little like the cover, with those tiny figures in those blurry photos, was a challenge. I think Floodpath was the hardest to paint, however, because I had no idea what I was painting! I gave up on drawing it except for a very few defining lines, and just went in behind the lettering with watercolor and tried to mimic what I was seeing. There's water, and rocks, and part of a dam, I think? But it's a very dim sepia photograph with a lot going on, so I simply did the best I could to give the general idea.

I have linked the title of each book in the paragraph above to Hubert's reviews of the books on our Burbank Library Blog, as a reference if you are interested in them but also to note that in addition to being a great event planner, Hubert is an amazing, erudite, thoughtful book reviewer whose reviews lift our blog above the ordinary every time he writes one. You might want to check out the blog from time to time, if you are a nonfiction enthusiast with an historical focus.

Happy Birthday, Hubert!

EDiJ #9

Today's prompt was "ghost stories." I was a little bit at a loss--hard to paint something that's invisible, right? But then I decided to multitask.

I read the first book in Jonathan Stroud's series "Lockwood & Co.," called The Screaming Staircase, with my 6+7 Book Club at the library, and I've been meaning to read the second book ever since it came out (book #3 is also published by now!), but haven't gotten to it yet. I decided to paint the book cover so that when I finally do read it, I'll have a little illustration to go along with my review for the teen blog.

It's a charming horror-lite concept: An alternate London has inexplicably become infested with ghosts. They're everywhere--in houses, on the streets, and roaming the countryside. Only children and teens can see them or sense their presence, but they wreak all kinds of havoc on adults, even though invisible to them. So the adults quake indoors with all the lights on and all the doors locked, while the teenagers form up into companies and train to capture or destroy the ghosts, ridding people's houses of hauntings, poltergeists and the like. The series follows one company called Lockwood & Co., which consists of Anthony Lockwood, Lucy Carlyle, and George Cubbins, who gird up with silver chains and locking boxes (or jars) designed to contain the supernatural beings, and head out to spend the night in haunted mansions to do their thing.

I have a couple of books ahead of it, so I won't get to it for a while, but when I do, I'll be ready to review!