rue Manuel bis

Way back in August, Steve Penberthy left a comment saying he’d awarded me the Stroke of the Brush Award.( Check out Steve’s blog, he’s having an exhibition soon, and he does wonderful work) I was extremely flattered, but it was a crazy time for me, and, as these things take time, I am only now getting around to it.  The rules are to state seven little-known facts about myself and to nominate seven other blogs.

1.  Although I am American and live in France, I was actually born in Kenya.  My husband is French but was born in Ghana.  My children are French, but two of them studied in Ireland and all carry American passports.  It’s always fun filling out official papers in our house!

Alors que je suis américaine et j’habile en France, je suis née au Kenya.  Mon mari est français, mais il est né au Ghana. Mes enfants sont français, mais deux d’entre eux ont fait leurs études en Ireland, et ils ont tous les trois des passeports français.  C’est une vrai joie de remplir des papier officiels chez nous!

2. I have a cat who is obsessed with water.  His favorite thing to do is watch us shower in the morning, after which he goes in and lets the shower head drip on him.

J’ai un chat qui est obsédé par l’eau.  Le matin, il adore nous regarder pendant la douche, et après il rentre dans la douche pour profiter des gouttes qui tombent.

3. I resisted joing facebook for a long time, but I finally gave in last weeK

J’ai résisté facebook pendant longtemps, mais j’ai craqué la semaine dernière.

4. I gave up eating sugar in all forms about 2 years ago, and have been driving my friends crazy ever since. (I feel great though)

J’ai arreté de manger toutes formes de sucre il y a deux ans, et cela embête beaucoup mes amis qui veulent m’inviter- moi je vais bien pourtant!

5. I have a tendency to let myself be exploited.  I’m working on that.

J’ai tendance à me faire exploiter, mais j’y travaille.

6. I love the contacts I’ve made on internet, but sometimes I find it difficult to keep up, and I regret this.

J’adore mes amis internautes mais parfois j’ai du mal à garder le contact,  à mon regret.

7. I would not miss the seasons if I lived in a tropical climate!

Les saisons ne me manqueraient pas du tout si j’habitais un climat tropical.

I have picked 7 artists from a sketchbook exchange I’m involved with, les carnets baladeurs, which is mostly French speakers. Check out their work, I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.

1.Isabelle Zyskind, who seems to have invented the technique of embedding a bit of photograph into a watercolor. They are amazing.  She recently did a tutorial on the subject.

2. Cathy Giordana-Bricka, who is French, but lives in South Africa, and beautifully captures that country in watercolor.

3. Josée Prudh’homme, in Quebec for her boldly colorful watercolors

4. Nathalie Boyaval- who does gorgeous ink and wash work, as well as other media.

5. Bibi does masterful drawings and paintings from her home in one of my favorite parts of France.

6. Yoyo – an incredibly productive and talented painter from the South of France, who has been soo encouraging to all of us at Les Carnets Baladeurs.

7. Malela does joyful watercolors from her home in Switzerland

Sometimes Laura and I get together on Skype – it’s wonderful to be able to sit and chat with a good friend, even while she’s on another continent.  I’ve heard that some of the big telephone operators in Europe are working hard against skype – for example, you can’t access it from an iphone over here – and I really hope they don’t succeed.  Anyway, two evenings ago, during an intense discussion, she sketched me.  I love the way she caught that concerned look I must have had – I’m sure I smiled at least a couple of times during the conversation, but you can’t draw two expressions at once!  Here’s the result :

Thanks Laura! It’s amazing the way she can capture a likeness in a few lines, and yet her portraits all have an elegance which is pure Laura.

Last weekend, I bought a sketchbook from a local card shop which I just love – the owner had been promising to get these in for months, but they are made by a disorganized local company better known for their envelopes.  Anyway, I chose two with a brown cardboard color paper.  I took the small one for  a sketching outing last week – I brought watercolor, ink and some brown and white pencils, and had a tough time getting any color to show up.  I finally decided on a brush pen as the best way to do line on this.  Anyone else ever worked on this sort of surface?  I’m thinking that gouache is probably the best medium, but that’s a little complicated to do while out on a walk.  Here are my first attempts, anyway :

I’ve been a pretty intermittent blogger lately, because life has been getting in the way. A few weeks ago, I posted about my trip to Brittany with Laura – she’s already up to her fifth post of beautiful sketches ! So here are a few from my moleskine that hadn’t yet made it into a post.  I have other sketchbooks that haven’t even been scanned yet, but I’ll leave that until another day.

As you can see,  when in the field I work quickly, with waterbrushes, a small watercolor set and a Pilot V-ball, and I rarely touch them after.

We had the same model in both life drawing groups this week  Oddly enough, on Wednesday evening I really felt good about the way my drawing was going, while on Saturday morning (same model, better place, less tired) I just couldn’t seem to do what I wanted. These are mostly done with a brush pen – a new purchase for me, which I love. These are from both sessions.

He finally stopped moving long enough for me to do a quick sketch.

In another register, please go read about Marta’s recent experience on her blog.  I promise you will be changed by it.

He didn’t pull through this time.  We’re very sad, but glad to have had him around for 16+ years.  I was going to post some happy pictures from my trip to Brittany with Laura, but I’ll do that tomorrow.

Here are some of the drawings from last Wednesday – some of the ones that don’t just look like mangled body parts. It was difficult to get back into life drawing after the summer break, and we were all feeling very rusty, so we did only 5 minute poses.  I think doing 1 and 2 minute poses at frst helps you to concentrate better, but no one was up to it.  We’ll see how we all do tonight.  The model last week was very tall and beautiful – I just could not fit her onto my page -even though I was working on a very large format……

The late afternoon sun was so beautiful in my living room that I did a quick pastel sketch to try to capture it.