M&M's! It's What For Dinner!

I've been on a bit of a sketching tear lately...and boy am I rusty.  I was watching this video posted by Jane LaFazio of an interview with Danny Gregory and Danny made a comment about how easy it is to get out of the habit of daily sketching, but when you start again, you wonder why you ever stopped.  That's exactly how I feel!  So even though I'm rusty AND I'm using a Moleskine sketchbook with watercolors (FRUSTRATING!), I'm trying to get a sketch in every day.

This was a sketch of my dinner while on a 3 hour drive, on a very bumpy road (might need to lodge a complaint with the Road Department, sheesh!), using a Pitt pen, waterbrush, and watercolors.  AND while I highly recommend the Mint M&M's, I will concede that they are probably not the healthiest choice for dinner! 

Play Book's Summer Adventures

Wow!  It's been a crazy, busy summer for us around here.  Most of my summer has been spent on fun, little adventures and recovering from fun, little adventures (and, obviously, not spent updating my blog).  This little friend has been with me on most of them.

My Play book is almost finished.  I just have a few more pages in it.  It will be bittersweet to finish it, but plans are already in the works on my next journal (Thank you Mary Ann Moss!), which is super exciting.
Here are some of Play book's summer adventures:

My husband and I rented a vacation house for our 20th anniversary and this was my indoor setup.



 And every evening when the sun would start casting long shadows, this was my outdoor setup.  It was beautiful and peaceful and was, without question, the best studio I have had this summer!  The funnest part would be these little friends...

...They would come and hang out with me while I painted in Play book.  They just watched me and ate their dinner.  Cool, huh?
I also took Play book along to my family reunion, but I didn't even touch a brush to it and do you want to know why?  I'll show you...

 ...because these sweet kids were so inspired by Play book, that we had an impromptu art journal school.  We bought a bunch of books from a local thrift store and started tearing and gluing and painting and making an absolute mess.  It was a blast!  Watching kids create is one of my favorite things to do.  It's remarkable what you can learn watching the fearless way kids approach art.  Love it!  We had some journal masterpieces and some paint experiments that are, quite possibly, still not dry. I do not know how many journals we made that day but it seems like hundreds (probably more like 30).  Cute little kids were coming and going all afternoon.  We even ran out of books.  I went to bed (on my air mattress, in my tent that I set up by myself, but that is another story all together) totally exhausted but completely happy AND with a new name, "Miss Jolene, My Art Teacher".  Yep!  That's me!  I used to be just "Jolene" in my family, but no more.  I like my new, longer name better!  Might need to make myself a name tag!