Fall Foliage is a site that will be of interest to sketchers, photographers, and other nature lovers. Though I haven’t yet “made it” to landscape in my drawing because the subject before the eyes is so vast and I don’t know where to begin, I do like to photograph landscape, and also to go out and draw smaller things. So this autumn I’m going to get out there and draw nature at least once.

The other day I was at my father’s, helping him after his recent minor surgery. During a break, I sketched the pencil cup, salt shaker, and scissors on the kitchen table. I added the watercolor later at home, and the type in Photoshop. It’s so nice to be able to sketch at odd moments like this. Yes, that’s a tomato paste can, and it must be very old, because we haven’t made that kind of spaghetti (not “pasta”) sauce for years—the sauce you simmer for hours with pork bones and meatballs or maybe sausage, and in which tomato paste is a minor but essential ingredient. I think we stopped making it when the word “pasta” came into general usage. Loretta mentioned the slow-cooking kind of sauce in the last paragraph of a recent post. Hmmm…maybe when the weather gets a little cooler here. It has turned humid again.

I bought several new art supplies this weekend. A Brause pen holder and six broad-edged lettering nibs, a four-bottle set of Sennelier drawing inks—The Art Store (now owned by Dick Blick) didn’t carry the bottles separately, and the set was packaged in an appealing box. Also a sketchbook which was an impulse buy, too, but one that I could justify. Well, I can actually justify all of them. I’ve wanted to try Brause pen nibs forever, and having tried them, I’m glad I bought. They give a crisp line and sharp edges.

The sketchbook is by Holbein, spiral bound, about 5″x7″, and is called Multi-Drawing Book. They had several other sizes. It has 30 sheets of a heavy paper suitable for watercolor and multimedia, and a hard cover, which I want for support when writing and drawing. But it’s small enough to carry around. I’m tired of thin paper that buckles.

The inks: I had wanted some walnut ink, but the only one I could find locally had a vile odor. (In The Art & Craft of Hand Lettering, Annie Cicale says that most commercial walnut ink is actually made from peat moss!) So when I saw this Sennelier set which contained an ink called “walnut stain,” I decided to go for it even though I know it’s not true walnut ink. The other colors in the set are black (India ink), sepia, and cobalt blue. I used the walnut color and one of the Brause nibs to letter the heading in the sketch.