Inkvember? Ruffle Bar Seal Sighting

As promised/threatened - here's a quick sketch of our Saturday seal sighting on Ruffle Bar!

BTW, speaking of drawing, I did pull off a mostly successful Inktober. I fell off the one drawing a day pace while we were on vacation, but in the end there were 31+ drawings for the month, one for every prompt with a couple of bonus drawings, even! I'll probably write more about that on another night but if you're interested in seeing what I drew, I put them all in a Flickr album. Click here to view.  

Inktober!

I found out about Inktober when I got a group of friends together to go see Margaret Atwood at Town Hall. It was a great evening, Samantha Bee interviewed her, and their conversation was fascinating and thoroughly leavened with dry Canadian wit. Before the show, of course, everyone was pulling out their cell phones to take photos of the stage -- everyone, that is, except me (I'm still resisting the smartphone) and my friend Shari B, who pulled out a small sketchpad and a pen and proceeded to draw it!

I thought that was rather delightful and I said so - I liked her drawing, too, it was simple and clear and did a good job of showing the stage. She told me she'd been taking a drawing class that was specifically aimed at those who consider themselves artistically uninclined, and it sounded pretty interesting.

She also told me about Inktober, invented by illustrator Jake Parker. It started out as something he came up with for himself "as a challenge to improve my inking skills and develop positive drawing habits", and then people wanted to join in. I've joined a Facebook group and a Flickr group for Inktober, and I'm really enjoying it - the group participants range from people like me up to professional artists, there are doodles, there are comics, there's a woman who's doing a gorgeous noir graphic-novel presentation, there's Chicken Month, there's an alternative set of horror prompts called Shocktober, there are drawings that are silly, gorgeous, simple, elaborate - and so far I haven't seen ANYBODY say anything negative. Is it that possible this is the one set of spaces on the internet where if somebody doesn't like something they just scroll on by? Even the FB admin mentioned that today. Pretty nice, I hope I haven't just cursed it.

Anyways, so far so good, I did fall one day behind during a weekend at Lake Sebago where we ate and paddled and then ate some more and then talked on into the evening all of the sudden I was just ready for bed - but I caught up tonight by reining in my tendency to throw in everything but the kitchen sink (almost literally on Day 2 when I drew a wave of trash where there are even legible labels on some of the things) and doing something simple for Frail.

No great masterpieces so far and I but I'm having fun with it and I'll be curious to see if I notice any difference in my drawing by the end of the month. If you've been following this blog for any length of time at all, you'll know that I like to art every now and then, but it's sporadic - I'm doodling all the time but this idea of sitting down and Drawing A Thing every day for 31 days is new.

That's it for the write-up - click on any photo for a slideshow view of what I've drawn

Loon Doodle

Haven't done a good doodle in a while, but back in February our Jamaica Bay Guardian Don Riepe had taken a lovely shot of a loon in winter plumage, and I'd had that in mind as something that would be fun to draw since then. I love seeing (and hearing) loons in the bay in the wintertime, when they're dressed in soft charcoal grays. There were still a couple around during my last paddle, on Saturday the 13th; they'd changed into the snappy black and white summer plumage that most people picture when they think of loons, and by the next time I get out on the bay, I expect they'll all have left for the northern freshwater lakes where they spend the warmer months. Safe travels, lovely laughers, see you back in the bay next winter. 

 Quiet week at work this week and I got home early enough last night to have time for a quickish rendition of Don's winter loon.

Going On An Early Bird Hunt

Still got my usual bit of post-cold asthma cough after last weekend's cold, but it's a beautiful, quiet, and relatively warm day out there so I'm going to go see what kind of a paddle I can manage. It's still February, and I ordinarily see the first oystercatcher of Spring (robins stay in the city all year, so it's oystercatchers that are the harbinger in my book) in March, but a few years back I was with a Sebago hiking group at Jones Beach when we saw one in February. Something to watch for!

This is the unusually elaborate doodle I did after seeing an oystercatcher in the snow one March. It started out as a cartoon on a post-it but then I got a watercolor set and decided to play. Oystercatchers return well before the possibility of the last snow of the year and I always wonder if they're thinking any regretful thoughts about the tropics they just left when the northeast throws some spring snow at them. It does seem like animals handle bad weather way better than we do, but still...

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Evening update: No oystercatchers, just the usual winter mix of brants, buffleheads, and a couple of loons. Very nice paddle though, this time out to the ruined old pier that's attached to JFK airport and back, with a short pause to watch the planes take off and drink some hot tea. 13 miles again - that seems to be my favorite midrange cruise distance this winter! Photos tomorrow. 

The Ducks of January

Actually, these were the ducks of April 2014, from a Sheepshead Bay duck walk photo taken in February of that year - I'm not sure I ever shared them here, though! No time for doodling right now as I'm getting ready to fly south for a week myself (can't wait) and the blog is getting neglected for the same reason, but I am taking time for a quack quick post today to to share one of the most entertaining Twitter threads I think I've ever seen.

That's not necessarily saying much as I'm not on Twitter myself and only go there occasionally when a friend shares something, but this is entirely delightful and I'm so glad Laura over at Coast of Illinois saw it and thought of my occasional obsession with (and this is the link to Twitter) artistic anatidae!

December Ducky Doodle - The Famous Fancy Duck of Central Park (with review of the Harry Potter History of Magic exhibit)

So, hooray, last week I broke out the colored pencils and crayons again and produced another ducky doodle. When I shared this one on Facebook I called it the "Ardith Bondi Duckydoodle Challenge"; the inspiration for it was twofold, with the original prompt being the stunning photo below of the increasingly famous "Hot Duck" of Central Park. Seriously, I've been thinking of him as the "Fancy Duck" -- because isn't he just the fanciest duck you've ever seen? -- but apparently "Hot Duck" is getting to be his accepted nickname as his likeness spreads across media both social and traditional, to the point that if you google "Hot Duck" it will most likely auto-suggest Central Park.

He's not really supposed to be here, the best guess is that he's a pet somebody released, but he seems to have settled in just fine and posts about him are all the rage among the NYC social media set. I will most likely try to go see him at some point, I don't really have a zoom lens that will do him justice but I'll take my camera and just plan a picture-taking day in the park, and if I get to see the duck, yay. If I get to take a picture, double yay, but with so many great photos of him out there, getting the shot is not really that important (kind of like I don't worry so much about getting whale shots on the American Princess because I know Artie Raslich will almost certainly share something spectacular from the same trip).  

Ardith Bondi, the photographer who got this lovely shot of the fancy duck, is another friend I've met through Gotham Whale, the local citizen science group that researches our local marine mammals from seals on up to the humpbacks who have returned to our area with increasing frequency as our waterways (which have grown cleaner and cleaner since the Clean Water Act was enacted) support larger and larger schools of menhaden (the small oil-rich fish that is a favorite summertime food for whales). I'm not sure I've ever met Ardith in person but we're Facebook friends, I love her photos and always look forward to her postings. Click here to see more of her photography.

She'd gone to Central Park to see if she could get some fancy duck photos back at the beginning of November; she said there was a mob of people there and it was hard to get a clear shot, but her patience was rewarded with this lovely photo of the mandarin in a perfect showboat moment, fluffing out his feathers at some pesky mallards. I'd seen a few shots of him at this point but this was the one that made me think "Oh, wow, I gotta draw that duck!"

That ended up not happening until Inspiration Part 2, which was (of all the unexpected sources of inspiration ever) this year's Scholastic Trade holiday party.

Ordinarily, "inspirational" is the last adjective I would apply to a company holiday party. I'm an introvert, not an extreme one but enough so that the small talk just feels awkward. I like Scholastic's more since the company's been doing them in house for the last few years, it really helps to NOT have music blasting the way they do at the catering spaces you can rent for your company's holiday shindigs (I hate that, I'm bad enough at small talk without having it be impossible to hear what anyone says back to you), plus the food service company that runs our company cafeteria and coffee bar actually does a really good job with the food and decor, but I still just consider myself bad at company parties.

This year, though, the Trade division got an extra special treat - somebody on high decided we were going to have our party at the Harry Potter: A History of Magic exhibit at the New-York Historical society. I'd already been to see this as a fun warm-up for seeing Harry Potter and the Cursed Child on Halloween, but I was delighted to have more time to go back and look over the exhibit again. The Harry Potter series is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, and the exhibit was curated by the British Library in honor of that milestone. They did a wonderful job of putting together examples of real-life historical artifacts and tying them in with the world that J.K. Rowling created, and the art is plentiful and luscious -- there are Harry Potter drawings and paintings by Mary Grand Pre (the illustrator of the American editions), Kazu Kibuishi (my favorite of all the Scholastic Graphix imprint artists, who did a lovely set of covers for a 15th anniversary paperback box set), Brian Selznick (Hugo Cabret illustrator who did covers for the 20th anniversary box set), Jim Kay (illustrator of the magnificent illustrated editions that are the latest offering in the Harry Potter re-issues, just glorious stuff so far) and J.K. Rowling herself - she's quite talented on the art side too and you get to see a lot of these charming little drawings she did to help herself envision Harry's world. So those are scattered all through, and then many of the historical artifacts are also beautiful, with illuminated manuscripts and scrolls and globes and, oh, all sorts of lovely things to look at.

This did actually end up being the first time I've ever gone home from a company party hungry. Food and drinks were not allowed in the gallery, just in the lobby area. I had one drink and a couple of hor's d'oeuvres and then dove into the exhibit. By the time I came back out it was five minutes before time for us to get out and all the food was gone - but I didn't care and if I were to go back and do it again I would do the same thing. Sometimes you feed the mouth, this time I feasted my eyes and went home going "MUST ART! MUST ART!" - fixed myself a super-quick dinner (because I was ravenous, lunch had been a long time ago) and then set myself a challenge of drawing Ardith's duck in half an hour. Nothing to do with the exhibit, just been thinking of drawing him for a while so being in a drawing mood, I picked him as my subject. And the 30-minute challenge was just because with no art training, I can be really slow figuring out how to show something, but I needed to get some sleep and it was already late. I dispensed with my usual obsessing over the reflections in the water (seriously, I think I spend twice as long on the background as on the subject when I do these drawings) and pulled it off it 45 minutes and was pretty happy with it too!

So there is both a review of the Harry Potter History of Magic AND my NYC social media participant mandatory #hotduck entry! 

Doodle du jour - Kemp's Ridley sea turtle hatchlings, NYC

I haven't done much drawing this year, but I was inspired today when my sailing friend Jenn shared a Facebook post from the Gateway National Recreation Area featuring a photo of three brand new little Kemp's Ridley sea turtle hatchlings heading for the sea - right here in New York City, on the Rockaway Peninsula. Incredible! First time on record that one of these turtles has nested in New York State.

There's a good article about it on the National Park Service website, and a somewhat compressed version on their Facebook page.

NYBG Holiday Train Show - Flickr album + special Doodle Du Jour, NYBG edition!

What a weekend! Paddling got short-changed in favor of getting in some holiday fun; on Saturday I joined in on Holiday Hymns for Hounds, carolling in Union Square to raise funds for the Mighty Mutts shelter dogs for the second year in a row, and then on Sunday I went to see the New York Botanical Garden's amazing Holiday Train Show. The NYBG is a bit of a hike from deep in the heart of Brooklyn, where I live, so I've only been to see it once, years ago when friends from Seattle were visiting with their then-very-young children, who are now in high school (and one of them maybe college even? yikes!), but it's a spectacular thing, so when my friend Mandy mentioned that she and her friend M. were going, I asked if I could tag along, so yesterday she and I rode Metro North up to the Bronx (or is that properly Da Bronx?) where we met M. and M.'s friend T. for a fantastic afternoon. The exhibit, which consists of large-scale model trains running around amazing scale models of NY architectural gems of all sorts, with the buildings (and even a couple of the trains!) all being done in plants and fungi. It's definitely grown since the last time I was there, and I think my very favorite addition was an amazing Coney Island part, complete with Deno's Wonder Wheel and a Cyclone with passengers shrieking in terrified delight!

Great stuff, too many pictures for a blog post, click here for the Flickr album.

I can't resist pulling out an excerpt - with 50+ pictures I tried to keep the captions short, but there was one exception which I can't resist sharing as one of my "Doodle du jour" series. I got to doodle somewhere MUCH fancier than my usual doodling venues - check it out! 

This was really fun - after we saw the trains and took a tram tour of the garden, we stopped at the library building to see the "Redouté to Warhol: Bunny Mellon’s Botanical Art" exhibit, and found that the American Society of Botanical Artists had a table set up there with paper and pencil and various things to draw - and there were chairs free! 

T. and I turned out to be a like-minded pair when it came to drawing, we saw this and our eyes just lit up so bright that the folks who were working there pulled us right in. So we sat down at the table and had a great time while the other checked out the exhibit, which was just one room - when they reappeared we decided it was time to wrap up, we then went and had a high-speed look at the gallery. Good fun! I wish I had thought to have someone take a picture of the two of us holding up our drawings, we took very different approaches and they both came out well and that would've been a fun picture, as seeing our different takes was really interesting; I also wish I had gotten a picture of the watercolor that the artist was doing of that spiky seedpod thing under the light, it was beautiful!

Here's mine, though - "Mini Still Life with Almond, Cherry, and Hazelnut". MMM. Wouldn't that make a good chocolate bar? :D

Erie Canal Day 3 - Lyons to Fairport

Morning in Lyons

Day 3, 10/12/16 Another unhurried start in Lyons, breakfast, hot showers in the very nice boater facilities provided by the Lyons Fire Department, and a walk into town to get something or other (oh, I think this was the day we plugged the galley sink and the one thing we couldn't find on the boat when we needed it was a plunger, so we went to a hardware store to get one), then we set out for the town of Fairport.

It was another beautiful day, we cruised around 25 miles and went through locks 27, 28 A and B, 29, and 30. I did a little bit of a journal entry partway through the trip, saying "Not to curse us since we haven't hit 30 yet but we are getting reasonably good at these". I also mentioned that the weather was continuing to be spectacular and that there were more jumping fish and herons and kingfishers and some nice foliage too - that was about all I got in at that point before something (possibly Lock 30) came up to distract me. We made good time and got to Fairport by 3:30, which gave us a little time to relax before Dave and Lenore, who we'd sailed with in the US Virgin Islands back in January 2015; we did a little walking around scoping things out, checked in with the dockmaster and paid our exorbitant docking fee - seven dollars for our little 24 foot cruiser, no, not $7 a foot, $7 for the whole boat for the whole night!

After that we went back to the boat and got out our books, but that's when I remembered I'd brought a sketch pad along, and with a bridge quite nearby and the canal not being very wide here,  this was a perfect setup for actually trying to draw our boat, so I did, and was happy enough with the result that I'll share it again. :) Mostly when I draw anything that's more than an actual doodle (all of my artsy stuff gets labelled "doodles" here, but there's real doodles and then there's the stuff I actually spend some time on) I'm copying from a picture so it was interesting to actually draw our boat from life, and with something of a time limit too (the thing I find the most frustrating about my attempts at drawing and painting is how unbelievably slow I am, so doing this with the clock sort of ticking was a good little challenge). 

Lenore and Dave showed up right on time - I think it was 5 - one of the things we'd done in the scoping-out-the-area process was get some more beer, because I'd envisioned us maybe having some cheese and crackers on board before we headed out and I wanted to be able to offer some nice local beer, but as it turns out, four adults on this boat turns out to make for a very crowded Nomad, so we dropped that idea and just showed them the boat (which took all of 5 minutes and even that was kind of superfluous as it turned out Lenore's dad had done the exact same kind of trip as we were doing at some point, so they'd seen it before) and then headed out for the fun trip to Powell's that I'd already shared as my Halloween post. After that, we came back for dinner at Mulconry's Pub, which had some really good Irish pub grub (I had a steak and mushroom pie that was just wonderful), then repaired to the Fairport Brewing Company for one more round, they have a great setup there for pleasant Fall evenings with an outdoor seating area where there are tables with firepits to keep you nice and warm. It was great catching up, I think the only thing that could've improved that would've been if there were marshmallows to roast over the firepits. I suppose that could get messy, though.

Another fine day on the canal. This was the westernmost spot on our travels.

As usual, click on any picture for a better view, but I did put some captions and additional info that you might find interesting in amongst the pictures this time

 Fire department heading out for a call - boater facilities for Lyons are here in the firehouse.

More morning in Lyons shots as we go to the hardware store

Lock 27, leaving Lyons

There were tubs of peppermint at the stairs up to the firehouse, prominently labelled "Peppermint"; I didn't recognize the significance of that until we were leaving town and saw the big sign - remember how I was learning about each of these canal towns having a manufacturing specialty of one sort or another? It turns out that Lyons was "Once the Peppermint Capital of the World". 

There's another canal boat,

 This old tug caught my eye - turns out she's caught my friend Will's eye too, more than once, her name is Grouper and Will's done a whole series of posts about her over on Tugster. 

Cruising, lovely day, lots of people out fishing

Lock 28 B - going up

Newark, NY, loved these murals they had on the bridge - wish the brush hadn't been allowed to grow up over the one on the side, it's neat how it shows a mule team walking right where the towpath would've been.

More of these later in the trip.

Foliage

More Foliage

Heron!

Speaking of towpath, a lot of the old towpaths are now maintained as recreational trails, and there were tons of bikers and hikers and joggers out enjoying the day. This would be another great way to explore the area - you can cycle town to town, inn to inn - I'm not even a cyclist and that sounds like a lot of fun to me.  

The railroad follows a good bit of the Erie Canal route; I wish I could've gotten a shot of one of the Amtrak trains coming through because I'd seen a canal boat from the train when I went home from Michigan that way during the summer and it was fun now to be seeing the train from a boat - they all came through too fast though, so this CSX locomotive will have to do. 

Rower a little ways outside of Fairport

Same rower in Fairport heading home again.

Fairport foliage

Canal from the lift bridge - we're on the left, up by the smokestack and the reddest tree (that's the one shown above). 

This is when I went across the canal to draw our boat - didn't have time to do the whole scene but at least I took a picture. 

A couple more pix of Fairport's  waterfront, and that's it for today. 

Erie Canal Day 2 Addendum: Doodle du jour - Belted Kingfisher

There were lots of kingfishers on the Erie Canal, but they're much smaller and faster-moving than great blue herons and the modest zoom lens I have is not sufficient to the task. Haven't done one of my bird drawings in a while, but I was thinking about these great-looking birds tonight and decided I would try drawing one, and here she is. 

Happy Thanksgiving!

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Doodle du jour - nameless Nimble Nomad

OK, actually it's doodle du two weeks ago, and it IS vacation-related. That's right, TQ and I left our kayaks and our camping gear in Brooklyn and went to the dark side - for part 2 of our western (NY) adventure, we rented a motor vessel And we liked it! I drew this in Fairport, been a while since I broke out the sketchbook but I took it along on this trip in hopes of getting at least a little scribbling in. After a couple of false starts where I just got one thing or another completely messed up, this ended up being my best rendition of the Nimble Nomad that we called home for a week. What a comfy little cruiser she was. Funny thing was, she didn't seem to have a name - we forgot to ask in the hustle of learning everything we needed to know before we set out on Monday afternoon, but the registration card didn't show anything but the registration number and as we motored north toward the canal system, we were singing, "You see I been through Cayuga on a boat with no name..." 

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Painting again

Sorry no posts for so long, April's been the usual crazy month with the fiscal 2017 budget due at work, plus a much more unusual office move (I've been in the same cubicle for 10 years and accumulating crap for the entire time, so this is not going to be easy - I think it will be good in the end as there's a lot that can be pitched given motivation to do so, but the timing's rough), plus of course continuing medical stuff (chemo's over but now there are doctor appointments to prepare for reconstructive surgery at the end of April). I actually treated myself to a weekend entirely in my own neighborhood last weekend, didn't set foot on public transportation and only walked as far as the Cortelyou Road greenmarket. It was a pleasant combination of lazing about and getting things done that needed to be done; I'd planned to do a blog post in there but then I remembered that I had a pigment marker drawing of a ketch that I'd done on watercolor paper last year with the full intent of painting her, and decided to bust out the paint sets instead. Got a ways to go but off to a decent start.

In a funny coincidence, it turns out (according to the Facebook memory pages) that the night I finally started painting my friend Sean's Araner was exactly one year after I'd stayed up half the night doing a preliminary pencil drawing.

 I know I'm not a fast painter (I guess I have a reasonably good eye, but I have no training at all, I just try things and see if they work, and that's not a fast process for me) but this is ridiculous! 

To be continued, of course.

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