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Frozen desert
In my humble opinion, the absolute best time to visit Arches is in the winter. Sure, you’ll have to wrap up extra warm (it barely got above zero degrees F during the day!), and if you’re sketching, you’ll have to think ahead to keep your paints from freezing. But the rewards far outweigh any annoyances.…
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Baa ram ewe
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Bird- and beastwatching
Whenever I travel closer to home, where the flora and fauna are familiar to me, my birdwatching sketches look a lot like any other in my sketchbooks: full scenes, with plenty of time taken to get the details right. (And if my subject should happen to wander away—well, if it’s something I’ve seen before, memory…
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Engineered by mountain goats
When I’m planning a road trip, I try to avoid interstate highways whenever possible. When in doubt, state and U.S. highways are almost always a better choice—both for scenic drives and for interesting road vistas. But even better than that are the roads through most national parks—which are specifically designed to give visitors the most…
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The road ahead
Tomorrow this little travel blog turns one year old. In that time, I’ve jumped around in time and place, in hopes of showing you as many different sketches as I could: country scenes, cityscapes, vintage kitsch, wildlife, you name it. But while I love me some roadside attractions, I must confess that my very favorite…
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Guiding Light
Okay, so the title of this post is not an accident. Apparently this lighthouse actually was a guiding light—on the soap opera of the same name, that is. But I’ll have to take Wikipedia’s word for that one, because vintage soap operas aren’t really my cup of tea. Vintage lighthouses, on the other hand, are…
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Perfect panorama
For the many days of the year, these mountains are invisible. If you showed up in western Washington in November, you might not even know we had mountains here. Our rainy Northwest climate makes these peaks disappear into the clouds on most days—even, sometimes, when you’re right there, standing amongst them. Not in the summertime,…
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Stones and subdivisions
The very same day the Tailor and I breezed by a sign painter’s version of a petroglyph, we also got to see the real thing, up close. Of course, they were beautiful and fascinating—but what really got me was the fact that the remnants of an ancient pueblo civilization were perched above a modern suburban…
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B.P.O.E.
Probably the most spectacular thing about Rocky Mountain National Park is the alpine tundra landscape above the treeline. The Tailor and I found a well-marked hiking trail up there and struck out, hoping to catch a glimpse of a pika or two among the glacier-strewn rocks. What we got instead was a little more than…
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Living library
I love sketching wildflowers and other plants—but unfortunately, I’m really not great at identifying them. Of course, sketching is an excellent way to cement the information into your brain, but it doesn’t help much when you’re not sure what you’re looking at. I’m not a fan of standing there, juggling sketchbook and guidebook, trying to…