More Loudoun Landscapes

Yet more landscapes from what used to be beautiful rolling hills and farmland. This land is soon to be covered with McMansions and concrete. Below is a serious jackhammer. I did this in pen and ink using a Rapidograph. I then added watercolor - not my best effort - I think I should have stuck with the pen and ink.

This is a study I did in pen and ink before the sketch above.

If You Build It They Will Come - In Droves

These are a very familiar sight around my county, thanks to the corrupt county politicians. I think I will try to do a series of the construction equipment in use around our once sparsely populated county. This one was sort of fun as I am experimenting with watercolor on ink. So this was done with black India ink using a 00 Koh-i-Noor Rapidograph and colored with water colors from my home made water color set.

Traffic Lights

Traffic lights - traffic lights! They're every where - they're everywhere! So I drew one.



When you really look at these they are quite interesting.

More Moleskine Suff

Here are a few pages from my mole. Over the past year I have tried lots of different things to draw with and on. One of the tools I found was the Lamy Safari fountain pen. Several other folks have raved about this pen and I decided to give one a try (since they are not expensive). I really like the feel of the pen. It is light and comfortable - it also comes in several colors and nib sizes. I tend to like an extra fine nib but wanted to try a medium and broad as well. So I got one of each. I found that the EF nib was not as fine as my Rotring EF pens (Artpen and fountain) and that all the pens EF, M, and B tended to scratch or drag on the paper. With my Rotring the writing and drawing is very smooth no mater how I hold the pen. I can even use the nib upside down and get a really fine line. With the Lamy if I try that the pen skips or doesn't have any ink flow at all. I do use the Lamy a lot though so I tried to hone the nib a little using the stone and leather strop that came with the Rotring caligraphy set I got my wife for Christmas a year ago. It helped some - will give it another go to see if I can get rid of some more of the drag because it is a pretty reliable and comfortable pen.

Pretty soon it will be time start my chili pepper seedlings for this years crop of peppers. This mole entry is a sketch of last years batch.


I saw a couple of plan perspective drawings done in a molekine a couple of months ago and thought I might try a Danny Gregory exercise and draw the floor plan of the appartment I lived in in Key West many years ago.



Last June our 19 year old cat, Emma, passed away. In September we found two new kittens at the local shelter and brought them home. This is one of their faovirite play grounds - the rest of the house is also their playground.



I got interested in watercolor pencils and picked up a few to experiment with. I did a couple test patches in my mole to see what they looked like. These pages had been pre-treated with a thin coat of white absorbent ground. I am waiting on a copy of Cathy Johnson's book 'Watercolor Pencil Magic' to see what nifty things she can teach me about these.