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Visiting Minnesota—A Drawing Student’s Question
Recently a former Sketchbook Skool Student wrote to me asking me what to see when she was in Minnesota. (Evidently she was traveling here to go up north in Wisconsin for a drawing class at one of the resorts.) Of course whenever you ask someone a question like that you are taking into account their […]
Television: Frank of Ireland
There are some televisions shows I can’t really tell you about—you just need to experience them. To tell you specifics of “Frank of Ireland” (available on Amazon Prime) would be to spoil all the little and large discoveries you’ll make along the crazy, hilarious way. Frank is a 32-year-old would-be musician who lives at […]
Television Mysteries
Things have come up and interrupted my writing of blog posts. I’ve got little folders with the dates and topics and the drawings all set up and yet I keep getting “called” away. I decided rather than try to make the reasoned, composed, and collected blog post about all the mysteries on television I’ve been […]
Testing the Twone Sketchbook with Kraft Cardstock Covers
Do I actively seek out the most obscure commercially bound books containing non-art paper to test? No, it simply seems like that sometimes. I grew up with a small weekly allowance paid after the completion of standard house and family chores. That allowance had to stretch from candy to art materials. Let’s just say I […]
Can’t Resist Those Almost Dried Out Brush Pens
Because of some equipment failures and other glitches in the system I’ve been behind in processing journal page scans. Here’s one of my favorites from 2020. This is a sketch, using a dried out brush pen, of the detective in “Dead Still.” I’ve written about the show before. It’s a favorite of mine. It involves […]
Demonstration Review of the Pilot Shunpitsu Pocket Brush Pen
Sometimes when I’m under the weather the best thing I can do is test new tools and materials. I find that it takes my focus aways from any aches, pains, or in the current case coughs and general systems failures. (I don’t have Covid, I just have a bad case of bronchitis which even with […]
Testing Langton-Prestige Watercolor Paper
I have just started testing Daler-Rowney’s Langton-Prestige Cold Press Watercolor paper. In the above video you can see my first experiments with it and my first thoughts. If the video doesn’t play you can view it on Vimeo at this link. Normally in my demonstration videos I include any photo reference or still life […]
Television Recommendation—Dead Still
I’ve been meaning to recommend “Dead Still” for over a year. This show popped up on Acorn. It’s about a postmortem photographer working in the late 19th century in Ireland. There are some very interesting characters, a mystery about the man’s past which runs through the whole season, and incredible set decoration, wardrobe, and hairstyles. […]
A Little Bit of TV for the Pandemic
I’ll have more to say about television for the Pandemic, but today I want to recommend something I watched while recovering from cataract surgery in 2019. If you haven’t watched it now would be a good time: “Godless.” (On Netflix.) Scott Frank who created and wrote “Queen’s Gambit” wrote it. It’s a Western. The acting, […]
Things Our Journals Tell Us
If you look at my journal from January and February 2020 you learn a lot about me. You learn that I like to use my lunch break to watch a little bit of TV and sketch. You’ll learn that I became fascinated with the young James Corden in “Gaven & Stacey.” You’ll also learn that […]