Impressions of Cape Cod in Winter

I don't travel to Cape Cod all that much, even though it's one of New England's most popular summer destinations.  But last month, I found myself in Dennis, in the wintertime, in the ice and snow.  And it was a very unique experience.

I got a Lifer!  Which is to say, I got to add the Surf Scoter to my Life List, the big list of all the birds a birdwatcher has encountered and/or observed their whole life (or, really, since they started keeping track).   I love beautiful ducks and this fellow is a stunner!

Can I recommend visiting the Cape in winter?  Well, not much is open after Labor Day and won't be open again until Memorial Day.  It's eerie, but the birdwatching and beachcombing was terrific.  Common Eiders, Black Brants, gulls of all sorts, and even a wintering Common Loon were among the other birds I got to see and sketch over the weekend. 

As a bonus, here's a scan of a whole Sketchbook page! I just like to share ~*~The Process~*~ sometimes, you know?

On Moleskine Altenatives - Again...

Here at the old art blog, I like Sketchbooks a lot.  And I like testing Sketchbooks that are sometimes promoted as Moleskine alternatives.  Over the years, I've met and drawn in quite a few Moleskine alternatives and their quality can vary wildly.  So, in the spirit of the holiday season, here are the four most recent Sketchbooks, reviewed:

I talked a bit about the ZenArt Supplies B6 Sketchbook before and much of my opinion still stands.  I did learn that this Sketchbook takes art markers very well (with insane bleed-through) as seen above, which helps alleviate some of my criticisms.

This awesomeness is the Illo Sketchbook and it is so good.  The pages are nice and thick, and I think I could've easily got away with drawing on both sides, which is a very unique feature among the books I'm reviewing today.  It loves watercolor, pencils, inks, markers and more.  This is, after all, the Sketchbook that saw me through this year's MerMay.  The Illo is my favorite Sketchbook out of the lot and I've already got another one waiting in the wings.

Unfortunately, this means our next two Sketchbooks aren't so great.  This is the Leda Art Supplies Sketchbook.  If you bought a Sketchbook from Amazon recently, you've almost certainly seen it advertised.  I really didn't like the thinness of the paper and that floppy flexible cover is a killer.  And speaking of covers...

We've come to my current Sketchbook and... Look, I love all me Sketchbooks like they are my babies.  This is the Handbook Flexi-Sketch, and about halfway through it's rating a big old "Yikes."  Those pages are thin, thin, thin and they even roll over and give up at the sight of one of my trusty ballpoint pens.  But it's the cardstock-thick cover that seriously messes me up.  What a shame; I really liked the other Handbook I tried way way back in that first post.

So there you have it, four different Moleskine-alikes reviewed.  My verdict is get yourself an Illo, then maybe get another for your Secret Santa.  Have a great holiday season everyone!

Impressions de New Hampshire

I'd brought my "new" Moleskine along on a scenic train ride along Lake Winnipesaukee last October.  This was during a weekend in my childhood romping ground, the White Mountains of New Hampshire.  It wasn't quite peak foliage yet, but the mountains look beautiful no matter what.  Here are my inept little landscape paintings and drawings of them:

Let's Go Down to "Turtle Town"

My current Sketchbook is a little pocket-sized Moleskine that's been riding around in my purse with me for some time now. Since I'm going to be traveling a bit this month, I decided to finally make it my main Sketchbook and fill the dear little thing.



There were already quite a few very nice drawings and paintings in it from this past October.  The first few pages were full of watercolors of a place we call Turtle Town.  It's a tiny little inlet off the main section of the Lake.  It's easy to kayak to and, yes, you can often see turtles of unusual size hanging out on the sunny logs or lurking in the mud.

I didn't see any turtles last October when I paddled down to take reference photos and do a watercolor sketch or two, but I did find a lot of cool water plants.  So here's a page of botanical studies and a couple of landscapes.

Travel Sketchbooks

It's been a while since I wrote a post about Sketchbooks, hasn't it? I figure I owe you a post about arty stuff, dear reader, after those last two ranty, only-obliquely-art-related posts.
Of course, there was a prompt for this one. I recently got this little fellow in the mail from the wonderful, if strangely-named, Dick Blick art supply catalog:


You may recall from a much earlier Sketchbook-related post that I first saw this brand of Sketchbook at the Massachusetts College of Art store. This is an Art Supply Enterprises Pen and Ink Watercolor Book (an Art Alternatives Watercolor Book according to the Blick catalog). As you can see, it looks like another lowfat Moleskine alternative, especially with it's rubber-band closure, it's (maybe) fake leather cover, and it's hilarious wrap-around dust jacket thingy:
"Embrace the Immediacy of Watercolor... and bathe your sketches in color!"


With the help of my handsome assistant*, you can see that this little book looks like a Watercolor Moleskine on the inside as well, and even sports a pocket. The only difference -and this is a bit of a disappointment for me- is that the pages are perforated. Maybe there are people out there who like the option of removing pages out of their Sketchbook, but I am not one of them.
* - My Oviraptor mascot needs a name!
So the only thing left to do is personalize this little fellow:


Obviously, this is the Sketchbook I'm taking to Florida with me in a few weeks. I usually go small when choosing a travel Sketchbook. It should be able to fit inside a fanny pack. This little guy could fit in a pocket if it had to!
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Now, I know making fun of Twilight is like shooting fish in a barrel at this point, but I recently got an issue of a magazine that had a special preview of the Twilight comic book. And as somebody who went through four years of art school, I can't let this pass without comment. (Illustrations by Young Kim. I can't find much about him online, so hopefully he was hampered by the source material -I know all too intimately what that's like- and this is not indicative of what he can do.)
Ladies and gentlemen, the many expressions of Mr. E. Cullen:


Bonus: Here is Bella scared out of her mind:


Yeah.
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Feederwatch Thursday!
Not much goin' on this week. To be fair, the rain/snow hadn't started yet really and I only had the suet feeder full.
Blue Jay 1
American Crow 2
White-breasted Nuthatch 1
House Sparrow 15
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Sketch of the Day!
I've been editing some more older pieces for DeviantArt this week, so I haven't had the time to upload anything new at the time of writing. Here are some dragons:

Bermuda Trip Report: In which Trish Feels the Lo-ooooooove...

Note that much of the following post will just be me repeating the text from this set of photographs, but it'll be a little more coherent.
So I went to Bermuda for a family reunion. We had planned this trip over a year ago, and we were partially inspired by this:

We knew that my Grandfather was stationed in Bermuda during World War Two for a while. After he passed away, we found this beautiful scrapbook he kept during that time period. It was remarkably well preserved. It turns out that, sixty-seven years ago (if I'm doing my math right; it was in 1942), he arrived in the archipelago on the same day we arrived. Very cool; we toasted him several times during the trip. We decided early on that we'd try to visit as many places as possible that he mentioned frequently.
We went to Bermuda by boat; specifically, the Norwegian Spirit. She's a big, beautiful ship and I am still digesting the cruise itself. It could easily fill another whole post. For the most part, trying to describe the fun my family and I had would be like trying to explain why that awesome time you had once in college was so much fun. There are a few specific events worth mentioning later. One of them involves Salvador Dali.

Really, the biggest highlight overall was the fact that it took me only this one week to fill an entire Arches Carnet de Voyage. I usually act like it's the hardest damn thing in the world to fill a Sketchbook in one month, so this was a pretty big deal.
Landscapes usually aren't my thing; turns out SEAscapes might be my thing. The one above might be my favorite. This little (Barn?) Swallow flew along our ship for a while, then flew off to God knows where in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Think about this for a second. I can add swallows to my list of animals who have unexpectedly turned out to be pretty badass.

We docked in King's Warf. This used to be the Royal Naval Dockyard and I'm not sure if it's still used by the military, but it was a very crucial Naval base not too long ago. All of the buildings are very old, but they are still in use. The building in the picture above is the old Commissioner's House, and it's now the main building of the Maritime Museum. The Museum contained a lovely collection of Wartime memorobilia, a herd of invisible sheep (seriously, I kept dodging their poop on the ground but saw neither hoof nor horn of them), and something called DolphinQuest.

This is how I spent my Towel Day, appropriately enough. On the one hand, you are a mere seven feet away from an alien intelligence. On the other hand, you are also seven feet away from tourists who have payed upwards of $300.00 to touch that alien.
Can't help but think that, when the human/dolphin communication gap is finally breached for good, we will not enjoy what the dolphins have to say about us.
Honestly, in hindsight, King's Warf was the nicest of all the ports we visited. We hit Bermuda's other two main cities: Hamilton and St. George. They were both very nice in their own respective ways, but King's Warf wasn't as crowded as either of them and was relatively quiet.
Also, we only had two and a half days to play on the islands. Of those days, everything was closed for a day and a half. See, we arrived on the Sunday before Bermuda's national holiday. Visiting Hamilton (or any city, really) when nothing is open and there are almost no people hanging out was eerie. Fortunately, we spent Bermuda Day snorkeling, and that made up for it:

I did the first painting after a shore excursion (funny how Norwegian calls them shore excursions even though most of them in Bermuda took place at sea) to the Seagardens, an offshore series of coral reefs. The second painting I did on-sight at Tobacco Bay, a well-known beach near St. George. Both places were amazing for completely different reasons and they are two of my top three highlights from Bermuda. I think I'm hooked on snorkeling. I just need to figure out the logistics of snorkeling off Wollaston Beach...
My third favorite place in Bermuda was the Crystal and Fantasy Caves park. This was my one "if I don't get to see this, I will be very sad" must-see place. It defies description but I will say this: you half expect to turn a corner and see a half-eaten Doozer construction. Jim Henson's art directors absolutely did not make anything up. I caught glimpses of "Labyrinth" and "Dark Crystal" as well as "Fraggle Rock" down there. Fine time for my camera to run out of memory.
I can honestly say that I was sad to leave the islands. But the ride there and back again is a story all it's own. I'll cover that in a future post.
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I just rescued all of Nessie's reviews and they can now be found on The All-New, All-Different Realm of Mad-Ness. Happy Independence Day!