Seven days on the Rhine

Today was supposed to be a day of scanning all my sketches from a recent trip to Europe, but my scanner did not cooperate. After 15+ years as “my trusty scanner”, it has either died or needs a new power adapter. I hope it’s the latter, which is a much cheaper option. The adapter is on order and I will know more as soon as it arrives. If the scanner itself has reached the end of its life, I will thank it and say that I certainly got my money’s worth. I’m not exaggerating when I say that I’ve scanned thousands of sketches with it, and it has always worked perfectly.

I have always preferred scanned sketches to photographed ones. I find the colour is truer and the images require fewer adjustments in Photoshop to brighten the whites and get them to match the originals. But in the interests of time, today I took my book outside and photographed my sketches in the overcast light of this rainy day. They’re not as sharp as the scans I am used to, but they will do for now.

And now for the sketches…

I’m never sure what to put on the first page of a new sketchbook, but this time it was easy. I was in Europe to teach a French Escapade workshop on a Rhine River cruise boat along with my very talented friends Brenda Swenson and Suhita Shirodkar, so I designed some lettering for the page and added a sketch of a decorative ceramic frieze that I saw above a door in Amsterdam.

We spent a few days before the cruise with good friends in Amsterdam, and besides visiting the Rembrandts and the Vermeers at the Rijksmuseum, we had some time to draw along the canals. Can you spot The Girl with a Pearl Earring in my sketch?

The river journey started in Amsterdam (imagine 45 sketchers boarding the boat with all their gear!) and ended in Basel, Switzerland. Along the way we had tons of fun sketching at the open air museum in Arnhem, and then in Nijmegen, Cologne, Mainz, Strasbourg and Ribeauvillé. Below are my spreads from the trip, including some workshops demos and some sketches done on free afternoons — windmills, old wooden boats, timbered houses, the people on another boat when we were side by side in one if the many locks we went through along the way, and of course the very gothic cathedral in Cologne.

I regret not taking more photos of the sketchers on location in all of these places, but I was too busy teaching and sketching. Thankfully our wonderful organizers from French Escapade did a lot of that. Have a look at their Instagram or Facebook feeds to see some videos of the fantastic work from our talented group. It was thrilling to see all of the sketchbooks on our final night together! Tomorrow (or when my scanner cable arrives) I’ll post the sketches from my second teaching week, this time in Alsace. And if it turns out that my scanner is trusty no more, I will be certainly asking for recommendations!

Alice, this way and that

Alice is a bit like me during hockey playoffs. There is too much tension in the tv room so she tunes out. I like to think that she is listening to the play-by-play and imagining the game in her mind. When I draw her, I try not to use good sketchbook paper because I have to start the drawings again and again until she falls into a deep sleep and stops moving around. For last night’s drawings I used a small Prism Studio sketchbook that is filled with smooth, cream-coloured paper. Great for ink drawings.

As for me during the playoffs, I find activities that are tv-room-adjacent. Like Alice, I listen to the game but do other things at the same time. Last night’s adjacent activity was cleaning my fountain pens. I think that I had recently used some Platinum Carbon ink that was old and full of sediment. I didn’t realize it when I filled the pens but they clogged almost immediately and required a very good rinsing before I refilled them with a newer and fresher De Atramentis ink. And to all you Buffalo fans out there, congrats on that win.