Yesterday afternoon I walked to Borders and sat in the cafe for a couple of hours. No one seemed to mind my sketching them though I imagined that some were aware of it. I drew all of these people plus one more man who is on the next page. I realize they’re all rather stiff, and the gestures and attitudes I wanted to capture didn’t really come through. However, I think this page is better than the last one I did. I drew in ink and put the watercolor on later at home. The coffee was excellent, in part because it was served in a china cup. After so many paper cups (with their lids, which I tend to leave on) I had forgotten how much the aroma wafting up from the cup—uncompromised by any hint of paper—completes the taste. Perfect for a crisp October afternoon.

Colored pencil artist, author, and teacher Bet Borgeson has written a review of the new Lightfast Prismacolor pencils. I’m looking forward to trying some of these.

I sat in Borders cafe yesterday and sketched and made notes about what people were wearing, which always interests me.

I have not posted in a while, but thanks to the Everyday Matters group, I have been drawing almost daily. Now I’m playing around with Flickr to see if this feature will work. You’re supposed to be able to e-mail a photo to your blog and to Flickr simultaneously. Here goes! Well… A lot of things went wrong, and the way the post looks now is the result of a few edits. Flickr inserts a div tag and floats the image to the right. The body of the post was chopped up, probably due to the line breaks in Yahoo e-mail. Yes, I tried it from there, the worst possible scenario, just to see if it would work at all. But the most unforgivable thing Flickr does is to put a black border around the picture, with no way to remove it save for going to the HTML after the fact. Now if I had a digital camera and was running around snapping pictures all the time and posting from on a daily basis, or posting from wi-fi hot spots, I’d probably care about this more. But since I only post every couple of weeks at best, doing it from home with Ecto is still the best way for me to blog. Still, I like to try out these features and play “what if.”