Buttnekkiddoodles

The one place I thought I could go during this time of pandemic lockdowns with Chicago Police dispersing gatherings of a half dozen or more was a cemetery. So Giamila and I agreed to meet up, masked up as well, at Chicago’s elegant Graceland Cemetery.
In general, cemeteries are very sparsely attended so I was a bit surprised to find dozens of people, solitary, and groups of five, roaming the ground. Kids were zooming about on bicycles, a practice generally discouraged by cemeteries. Many unmasked. Lady G and I sat by this tombstone for an hour and a half while I drew and then roamed the grounds, her first time ever at Graceland.
If you have the opportunity I highly recommend a visit wherein you will find the tombstones of luminaries such as Louis Sullivan, Jack Johnson, Mies Van Der Rohe, Daniel Burnham, Dorthy Page, Pinkerton, Cyrus McCormick, and many others after whom Chicago streets, Parks and buildings are named.

Pitt Artist Pens, fountain pen on Clairefontaine Goldline Watercolour sketchbook. #fabercastellusa #clairefontaine

A couple weeks ago my dear pal Alexandria and I felt a need for a visit in these isolating times, so, we each masked up and met for a 3 hour visit at Calvary Cemetery.
Calvary is a modest size cemetery which sits between Chicago and Evanston along the shore of Lake Michigan. It’s very open being flat and not forested with minimal trees and plantings. It is quite pleasant, very bright and enjoys the benefit of the lake’s breeze.
Alex and I brought chairs and I proceeded to sketch her as she surfed the net while we talked of how we were coping with the extraordinary times.
I worked on a Stillman & Birn Nova Series Beige sketchbook. The warm tinted Pages provide a great tonal base allowing a selective use of a brighter value by adding white as I did here with a Faber-Castell Pitt Artist Brush Pen. The page has just enough tooth that when I dragged or rubbed an inky finger across the surface I was able to emulate the surface and look of the tombstone behind Alex. Yes, those are my fingerprints which when inky create a perfect look of pine needles and grass.
Tools included a Graf von Faber-Castell Chevron fountain pen filled with DeAtramentis Document Black Ink, Pitt Artist Pens of various grays and nib sizes and the S&B sketchbook mentioned above. #Stillmanandbirn #fabercastellusa

Dreary weather at end of April. Stuck indoors because of the pandemic and cold wet day, so, making the most of it by sagging a sketch from the window by my drawing table. Giving y’all a glimpse of the building across the street from me. Not delighted by the final results and had already grown tiered of drawing it as it was being erected.

At this point I need to make a full disclosure as I am now receiving funding as an “influencer”. My sponsors are Faber-Castell which should not come as a surprise to anyone who’s followed me for any of the past 12 years and knows that I like their product and have worked as a demonstrator on their behalf. For a number of those years I traveled the country demonstrating tools and techniques in the brick and mortar world of art stores as well as at trade shows. I’ve also made my way to teach and lecture at colleges and schools around the country, an experience I greatly enjoyed. All during my travel to these venues I documented my treks here and there and there on the Internet on this site and on the internet as Don Colley’s Road Trip. Faber-Castell was the entity that made all that possible and now I am very appreciative for their sponsorship of my online blogs.

In addition to Faber-Castell, I’m most delighted to be working with Clairefontaine and Stillman & Birn (now owned by the parent company Clairefontaine). I wholly support both lines of paper and sketchbooks by these companies and have made considerable use of their products as you may have noticed in my posts over the years.

There are loads of wonderful products in the marketplace to work with and I’m a big advocate for experimentation and trying them out. When I find pens or sketchbooks I enjoy, I keep going to the well more so these days.

As always, this format is suited to me answering your questions and I do encourage followers to strike up a dialogue regarding the craft of drawing, the tools of the trade, or the themes I may be working around.

The above drawing was made with Faber-Castell Pitt Artist Pens, an F-C Basic Black Leather fountain pen using a waterproof ink, I’m currently using several as long as they hold up to over washes and don’t clog my pens. Mind you, regular cleaning is necessary for any fountain pen ink that claims it is waterproof. The sketchbook is a Goldline Watercolor Sketchbook by Clairefontaine.

#fabercastellusa #clairefontaine

Spent a solid month trekkin about the West coast and sat on my duff for a goodly number of hours. It’s the sort of thing that puts demands onyer fashion choices, ie comfy britches with a properly deep inseam and good travel shoes.

The lanscapes below were draw from a bus. The one with the birds on the telephone lines was a 15 minute sketch at a rest stop in southern Oregon, the others were enroute at 60 mph.

All drawings executed with ink, fountain pens, Pitt Artist Brush Pens, Platinum Carbon Ink, in various hbooks, Rhodia, Moleskine, Stillman & Birn, Tomoe River Paper.

I grew up in pretty suburbs and the bucolic residential neighborhoods of places like Phoenix. Arizona, Lakewood, Washington, Ridgewood, N.J., Monterey, California,Camp Springs, Md.,  Austin, Texas. And I do like trees and gardens and sweet bungalows and St. Augustine grass. But man, something about the grit , scale, and muscularity of large urban environments has always held magnetic appeal for me. There’s the dynamic, move over and make room way that cities evolve. Some subs just have a plow-it-under and drop-it- down- from-the-sky development, that plans from the outset to organize and control everything. The excitement of seeing a grand scheme have to yield to new needs while hanging on to previous requirements and cherished attributes, creates a scenario that realizes in concrete, steel, asphalt, glass, and landscapes the dynamic influx on new arrivals and migratory populations that are our life blood as a society.

The scene  above was drawn up on the loading platform at Ashland, Cortland, and Clybourne, while I waited for a Metra commuter train to  Rockford College, and the variety of architectural texture that is offered from the 360 degree view up on that platform is one big reason I live in a rust belt behemoth of a city.

These were drawn in a Stillman & Birn watercolor spiral sketch pad with fountain pen filled with Platinum Carbon Ink, Pitt Artist Pens, and F-C water soluble graphite pencils.