Tag Archives: farms

Buggy ride

Now, commuting by cowboy hearse or by dinghy might seem a little unusual to us, but for some people, just a family station wagon would be downright outlandish…

This sketch was a complete—and happy—accident. The Tailor and I happened to pass through Amish country on a Sunday, so I figured nobody would be out and about. We stopped just so I could draw a few farm scenes, but while I was at it these folks passed by.

All I can say is I’m glad I had a pencil on me (so I could jot down a rough sketch more quickly)—and that buggies move pretty slowly.

Field geometry

Wednesday’s post reminded me that like lighthouses, I seem to have a whole collection of farm field drawings—like this sketch I did last year. I always thought the inherent lesson in one-point perspective (sketching nerds unite!) is what made these fun to draw. But now I think it’s the geometry. There’s just something so satisfying about finding perfectly ordered stripes and shapes interrupting a wild, unpredictable landscape.

Big Apple, Big Sky

I did both of these sketches on the same road trip. What I love best about traveling this way is that it makes it so easy to see many facets of a complex country—all in one long stretch. If you want to go from a place where the buildings are so tall you have to look up to see the sky…

…to a landscape so vast you can see both ends of a freight train at once…

…all you have to do is get in the car and drive.

Tabula rasa

We don’t get a lot of snow in my part of Washington. So if I want to see winter weather, I usually have to do some traveling first. I always seem to feel this urge right around now, the first of the year. Maybe it’s just the white of the snow—or the hush of winter—but something about a crisp winter day feels like a blank slate.

Here’s to a fresh start—or if you’re like me, a blank page in a brand new sketchbook. Happy new year!

Sunkissed sketching

In my studio I have a massive collection of vintage fruit crate labels from the 1930s and 40s (they’re still fairly easily obtained here on the West Coast). So it’s probably no surprise that when I found myself standing in an orange grove this winter, all I could do was imagine my sketchbook plastered on a box of citrus and transported to a bygone era.

A world where there are Octobers

“I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers. It would be terrible if we just skipped from September to November, wouldn’t it?”

—L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

And I’m so glad my first visit to Prince Edward Island was an October one.

Even without the peak fall color everywhere, the island was easily one of the most beautiful, picturesque places I’ve ever seen. In fact, the gratuitous beauty got to be a running gag between my travel companion and me—with each new jaw-dropping vista, one of us would roll our eyes and sigh, “Jeez, I guess I’ll just look at another pretty scene…” and then laugh.

Actually, laughing about it was about the only way we could keep our sanity. It was all I could do not to abandon any attempt at sketching (because what puny drawing could ever hold a candle to the real thing?) and just burst into dumbfounded tears over the enormity of it all. Because all those October trees, and October fields, and October skies made for two days so perfect that no amount of careful painting could ever do them justice.

Cropping up

I spent one of my teenage years living on a rural military base in North Dakota. An interesting side effect of having to bus half an hour into town every day for school is that I learned to recognize every type of crop in the fields along the way. But when I moved to Washington, where they grow all kinds of things that won’t survive the short season of the northern plains, I had no idea what I was looking at half the time.

Enter the kind folks of Grant County—who clearly understand the incurably curious people of the world. As you pass the farms along any state or federal highway in the Quincy Valley (many of which are certified organic—bonus!), you’re greeted with helpful crop labels in front of every field.

It’s like they knew I was coming, and was going to want to label my sketches!

Dark skies

One of my very favorite things about the Red River Valley (of the north) is that the land is so perfectly, endlessly flat that you can see entire weather systems grow and unfold before your very eyes.

Then again, it’s not so fun when that weather catches up with you. I did this painting in the passenger seat while the Tailor drove, and not ten minutes later those roiling clouds went from pretty picture fodder to terrifying death trap. It rained so hard we couldn’t see past the end of our windshield, and I had to put my paintbrush down in order to cross my fingers and hope the storm didn’t come equipped with car-crushing hailstones.

Then it was over, just as quickly as it had come—driving home the point that no matter how quick on the, er, draw I think I might be, nature will beat me every time.

Bearing fruit

The Tailor and I love peaches (and he loves canning them) so much that we’re willing to drive four hours to get them fresh from the orchard.

(Of course, that also means I get that Movin’ to the Country, Gonna Eat a Lotta Peaches song stuck in my head every year…)

You’ll find a few orchards on our side of the Cascades, but most of our famous Washington fruit is grown in the central part of the state, near the Columbia River Gorge. Crossing the mountains is a lot like entering a parallel-universe Washington, where instead of rain and emerald greens, you get high rugged cliffs and desert sun.

And sweet, delicious fruit.

So even though the farmstand ladies look at us like we can’t possibly know what we’re in for (oh, we do), we fill our tiny car to the brim—

—and break out the mason jars when we get home.

40-watt bulbs

Every year I head north to the Skagit Valley to catch the tulip fields in bloom. If you’re looking for good travel weather, spring is a tricky time of year in the Northwest. But if you manage to get there on a rare sunny day, you’ll be in for a treat. The whole valley lights up with a dazzling colored glow that seems to come from the flowers themselves.