Sketchbook Journeys: Italy - Days 2 & 3 (Mmm - Italian food!)

The food in Italy is AMAZING! (That's the understatement of the year!) Everything is prepared with extra care and attention to detail. The ingredients are fresh, the flavors are incredible, and everything is beautifully arranged and served.

10" x 7", ink & watercolor, Stillman & Birn Beta series sketchbook

Even though I have to follow a gluten-free diet, I was able to have wonderful meals everywhere we went. The waiters and chefs were, almost without exception, knowledgeable about gluten and happy to help me find suitable choices from their menus. Instead of feeling like an oddity or a nuisance, as I often do in American restaurants, I felt accepted and reassured that I would get a meal which was safe for me to eat.

Our favorite restaurant, La Colombara, was just ten minutes from our house. They had a gluten-free menu, great food, reasonable prices, and a helpful waitress who spoke English...an unbeatable combination! The pizza was out-of-this world!

They even had gluten-free rosemary crackers for me to eat while everyone else was enjoying their bread.

Since we were lucky enough to be staying in a private home, we cooked many of our own meals. Shopping in an Italian supermarket was an interesting experience - lots to learn, and the language barrier made it all the more challenging, but with lots of laughter and plenty of signs and gestures from helpful customers and clerks, we managed.

The produce in the grocery stores was so beautiful and fresh! We oohed and aahed over the radicchio, white asparagus, and pretty little baby artichokes. I wanted to sketch right there among the fruits and vegetables, but I settled for adding a row of produce to my sketchbook later that day.
 

Even on a page filled primarily with text, I like to add some color accents with a simple border or a small sketch.

A swirly line helped to tie all the tiny fruits and veggies together.

This next sketch was painted the first morning I was in Italy, and I think the exuberant colors and loose style show just how euphoric and happy I was feeling at the time. Maybe it helped that I was pumped up on espresso, too!

10" x 7", ink & watercolor, Stillman & Birn Beta series sketchbook

I started this composite page of food sketches when I had my very first cappuccino the morning after we arrived. It was so tasty, and I knew it was probably just a hint of all the delightful things to come, so I began keeping a visual record of some of the best things I ate in Italy. (There were so many yummy new taste sensations that, after filling this page, I started another one further along in my sketchbook.)

10" x 7", ink & watercolor, Stillman & Birn Beta series sketchbook

Can you believe I actually had enough self-control to draw and paint the cappuccino before I drank it? It wasn't easy!

Later that day, I had my first gelato when we escaped the drizzle in Marostica to sit in a cozy little coffee shop/cafe and try the first of many flavors of this ubiquitous Italian treat.

I drew the apple torta one evening when we splurged on dessert at La Colombara. I dashed off a quick pencil sketch, but there was no way I was willing to delay eating that yummy cake while I added paint. The paint could wait; I couldn't!

This hazelnut nougat candy beckoned me from a pastry shop window in Venice...delicious!

Polenta with mushrooms and freshly grated Asiago and Parmesan cheese - my lunch in San Giorgio.

And lunch in Venice...

Asiago cheese is made in the area around Vicenza, and we ate plenty of it while we were there. Fresh asiago has a buttery texture and a milder flavor than the harder aged Asiago that is commonly found in the US. With crackers, apples, and glass of wine, it made a great light supper.

We treated ourselves to cappuccino almost every day during our trip and occasionally I was able to find a little something gluten-free to go along with it. In Vicenza, I found this lovely macaroon biscotti.

One morning I decided to try hot chocolate instead of my usual cappuccino. What a surprise! Italian hot chocolate is thick and rich and decadent, like drinking chocolate pudding. I ended up eating it with a spoon as it cooled and got even thicker. I think I prefer the hot chocolate I make at home with Trader Joe's cocoa powder, but it was fun having a chance to try the very different Italian version.

Coming up next: a castle on a hill, a sidewalk cafe, and cyclamen on a windowsill

Sketchbook Journeys: Italy - Days 1 & 2 (The flight over + our canine companions)

A sketching trip to Italy - what a dream come true! I left Pittsburgh, PA, at 4:00 in the afternoon on April 2 and watched the sun rise the next morning over the Swiss Alps. I'd wished for this for years, and I almost had to pinch myself to believe I was actually on my way to Venice!

10" x 7", ink and watercolor, Stillman & Birn Beta sketchbook

I had hardly sketched at all for almost two months prior to the trip, despite having every intention of practicing and loosening up before I left. But as soon as I settled into my seat on the plane, it was like someone had fired the starting gun at the beginning of a race and said, "Start sketching! What are you waiting for?!" The adventure had begun. It was time to dive in and do what I'd been saying I was going to do... draw!

We flew across the full width of Pennsylvania. The land was just beginning to show hints of the luscious spring green that we've been waiting for all winter.

The sun was low in the sky as I flew into New York, and the Manhattan skyline looked all dreamy and soft, silhouetted against the distant hills. I sketched this in the 30 seconds it took to fly past as we made our approach into LaGuardia (and painted it later at home.)

At JFK, I met up with my friend, Suzie Althens, who had flown all the way from Anchorage, Alaska, and before we knew it, we were on our way to Italy! Try as I might, I can never sleep on airplanes, so I got to enjoy the view from 36,000 feet above the Atlantic... a deep indigo blue night sky with millions of stars, a waning crescent moon, and a beautiful rainbow-colored sunrise. 

My friend, Ann, picked us up at the airport in Venice and we headed to her house to meet our housemates for the week... Aspen and Bailey.

10" x 7", ink and watercolor, Stillman & Birn Beta sketchbook

Aspen was a mellow, laid-back golden retriever/collie mix with a sweet disposition. Her only flaw...she snores!

Her buddy, Bailey, a little spaniel mix, was a bit shy, but with lots of petting and encouragement, he warmed up to us.

It was so nice to have a home to stay in while we were in the Vicenza area. Sleeping in the same bed every night and having a fully stocked kitchen at our disposal made for a relaxing stay and helped ease the inevitable stresses of travel.

Coming up next: Eating our way through northern Italy...YUM!

Sketchbook Journeys: Italy - Page 1 Travel Map

When I returned recently from a wonderful two-week vacation in Italy, I mentioned here that I had brought home a travel journal filled with lots of unfinished sketches from my trip. Well, I'm happy to say that, little by little, the drawings are being brought to life with watercolor. I've been managing to snatch a few minutes here and there during the day to work on it, and it's coming together slowly but surely. I'll be posting the sketches as I finish them, so keep checking back to read the ongoing saga of my great Italian adventure.

10" x 7", ink and watercolor, Stillman & Birn Beta Series sketchbook 

On page one, I've drawn a map of the places we visited while staying in the Veneto region, just west of Venice. It may look like a hodge-podge, but it shows all the day trips we took from our home base in the little village of Poianella. The pup (see detail below) represents Aspen, the sweet little golden retriever mix that we dogsat for ten days, along with her pal, Bailey. To the right is the house where we stayed.

The building near Lupia is a fantastic restaurant where they serve the most delicious gluten free pizza. I couldn't get enough of it! The COOP supermarket in Bolzano Vicentino is where we did most of our grocery shopping.

In Marostica, we ate our first gelato and explored the 14th century castle on the hill. Nove, just 25 minutes from our home base, is world famous for their ceramics. We visited several of the small shops and were impressed with the beautiful hand-painting on the pottery.

The funny-looking trees (shown above) were a memorable part of the local scenery. The severe pruning they receive every year or two causes all the branches to grow from the thick, stubby trunk. The cut branches are used as fuel for the winter.

One of our favorite places was the wine country around Lake Garda. The hilltop view from San Giorgio is something I'll never forget. I'll tell you all about it on page 18 of my journal.

Our one day in Venice gave us a taste of that magical place and made me long to go back some day when I'll have more time to explore.

Vicenza was just a 20-minute drive from our house. It's a lovely city with many buildings designed in the 16th century by Andrea Palladio. Our trip to the weekly flea market was such a treat! Everything from clothing and household goods to octopus, cheese, and salami was offered for sale. But the flower stalls were the best! Oh, the colors!

There was beauty everywhere we looked ... red-tile roofs, warm golden walls, old wooden shutters, and window boxes filled with pansies and trailing ivy. I wanted to draw it all! One small travel journal filled with simple watercolor sketches can't begin to capture the experience of being there. But pausing to look, listen, study, absorb, and record on paper what I saw and felt has made Italy a lasting part of me.

Redbud Sketch

The two redbud trees on the south side of our house have been blooming for weeks, and they give my heart a little lift every time I glance out the window and see them. The colors change depending on what time of day it is, and I can never decide if I like the rich, deep colors of early morning better or the light, cotton-candy color they take on at noon. I feel a compulsion to check out the redbuds anytime I'm near a window on that side of the house, just to see how they look now.

Watercolor with ink & pencil, 9" x 12" American Journey watercolor sketchbook

Even though I've been busy with a hundred different things this week, I couldn't resist taking time out to attempt a sketch of the redbud blossoms before they're all gone. I did a quick ink drawing of a flowering branch, then decided to lightly indicate the entire tree in pencil on the left side of the page.

The initial wet-in-wet washes of watercolor helped to suggest the masses of tiny blossoms along the branches. After they dried, I went back in and added touches of more saturated color to pick out individual petals.

Using only light pencil lines to draw the tree gave it a softer look and helped to differentiate it from the branch, making the page less confusing.

For the lettering, I painted a dusky purple color at the top and red-violet at the bottom of each letter, letting them meet and blend in the middle.

The blossoms on the redbud trees in my yard are beginning to fade and soon leaves will take their place for the summer. I'm so glad I stopped and spent some time with them one sunny afternoon while they were fresh and beautiful. Isn't the fleeting nature of spring beauty one of the reasons we love it so much?

The Realities of a Sketching Vacation

Italy was wonderful, beautiful, art-filled, exciting, and endlessly interesting. There's so much to tell, and it's difficult to even know where to start. I'll be posting lots of photos and notes about the trip over the coming weeks, but I'm guessing a lot of you are wondering if I actually did any sketching while I was over there.

Since the purpose of this trip was to see Italy at a slower pace and have time to do lots of sketching, I had high hopes of coming home with a sketchbook brimming with beautiful finished pages filled with watercolor sketches and travel journaling.

Can you guess what really happened? I have seventy pages in my sketchbook with 'something' on them. I drew sixty-four individual sketches, but only one 10" x 7" sketchbook page (yes, one!) is actually complete! Here it is...

I started off with a bang on Day 1. After tasting our first Italian cappuccino at a coffee shop in town, we sat outside and sketched the gelateria across the street. It was a lot of fun painting on site, and I worked quickly to splash on the watercolor after doing my drawing with a brown watercolor pencil. The text was added later, and the page was complete!

In the hours and days that followed, I found myself wanting to get more and more of my experiences down on paper, but there simply wasn't enough time to paint it all. Around every corner there was an ancient building with weathered shutters just begging to be drawn, or a beautiful wrought iron balcony with trailing vines against warm golden stucco walls. There were castles and vineyards and olive groves everywhere we turned - so much to draw in a limited amount of time!

It really was this green!

Rather than become frustrated with the overwhelming amount of subject matter, I decided that whatever I managed to accomplish was enough. I wanted it to be a fun vacation, not a race to the finish. So most of my pages look something like this, with partially painted sketches and blank spots which I plan to fill in later...

Often I would be forced to leave a painting half finished when we had to catch a train, check out of a hotel, or head to our next stop...
.

There are pages like this next  one, where I was having so much fun painting that I totally neglected to finish the right side of the lower sketch. See the area where the distant mountain is missing?

I generally had a loose idea of a plan for the page layout in my head when I began sketching on a page. Other times, I slapped something down in the excitement of the moment, then later tried to figure out how to bring the page together with a title, text, borders, or bands of color which could be added later.

 

 A few of my sketchbook pages even look something like this:

That's reality. Sometimes I chose to simply relax and enjoy the short time I had in a place rather than feeling obligated to fill a page in my sketchbook. It would have been great to sketch in Lucca, but there just wasn't time. We arrived in the late afternoon and strolled around the historic town center, then rented bikes for an hour to ride on the old town walls surrounding the town before the sun went down. Better to experience the bike ride myself than to sit and sketch all the other people riding by. I can add a drawing later on this page using the reference photos I took that day. (I took over 1200 photos in fourteen days! That might be a tad excessive, but there was so much to take pictures of!)

I journaled every evening, writing about all the interesting places we'd seen and people we met. I worked on inking the penciled-in text on the flight home when I had eight hours with nothing to do. Reading over all of our adventures was a great way to end the trip.

I'll be working on finishing up my Italy sketchbook as time allows this spring and summer, and I'll be sure to share it with you. I'd love to be in my studio working on it all day every day, but spring is a busy time of year, with planting and mulching and mowing to tend to, plus my sewing business. I know it might take awhile to complete all seventy journal pages, but that's okay. I'm looking forward to reliving those good times and wonderful places as I draw and paint my way from Venice to Tuscany to Cinque Terre on the pages of my sketchbook.

My Travel Sketching Supplies

In my last post I showed you the fabric organizer that I made to take along on my upcoming trip to Italy. I thought you might like more specifics about what's going in the kit.

If I had to, I could get by with nothing more than a pencil, a Pitt pen and my sketchbook. Sometimes that's all I take when I go out to sketch, but for this trip, I want options. I'd like a good selection of watercolors and brushes, and a few choices when it comes to tools. It may look like a lot when it's all laid out here in the photos, but everything will fit into my compact kit and be easily stashed in my backpack.

First and foremost is the sketchbook. I've decided to take two10" x 7" Stillman & Birn Beta Series sketchbooks. (Info about where to buy Stillman and Birn sketchbooks can be found here.) The Beta Series contains white 180 lb. cold-pressed paper which doesn't warp when it gets wet or allow ink lines to show through to the reverse side. It should be perfect for my watercolor travel journal. The Beta doesn't usually come in a 10x7 landscape format but when I called Stillman and Birn a few months ago to inquire as to whether they had any plans to offer that size, the wonderful folks there said they'd be happy to make a few for me, just to take on this trip. Can you see why I love this company? Great products and nice people - the perfect combination!

My palette will be a Heritage Folding Palette with 18 wells. It has a leakproof seal and a nice roomy mixing area. I set this one up a few months ago with Brenda Swenson's recommended color selections, and have enjoyed playing around it. I'll have a chance to really get comfortable with some of these new-to-me colors on this trip. The 18 colors in the wells are (from upper left):
Lunar Black
Burnt Sienna
Quinacridone Sienna
Viridian Hue
Cobalt Teal Blue
Cerulean Blue
Marine Blue
Cobalt Blue
Ultramarine Blue Light
Cobalt Violet Light
Rose Violet
Permanent Alizarin Crimson
Scarlet Lake
Winsor Orange
Quinacridone Gold
Raw Sienna
Hansa Yellow Medium
Leaf Green

I added a few convenience colors in the upper mixing area:
Sap Green
Olive Green
Payne's Gray
Yellow Ochre (I couldn't bear to leave it behind, even though it's very similar to Raw Sienna)

These paints are a mix of tube colors from Winsor & Newton, Daniel Smith, American Journey, and Holbein. When filling the wells with paint, I make sure it's level, not mounded, and allow it to dry overnight. When I'm ready to paint, I'll spritz the dry paint with water and allow it to soften a bit.

The brushes below are what I normally use for plein air painting. The rounds are sables from Cheap Joe's, and the flat is Cheap Joe's Golden Fleece. (I usually include a #8 round, also.)  #6 and #8 rounds are what I tend to use the most when I'm sketching outdoors. The tiny #0 is mostly for lettering text and drawing electrical wires or fencing. I sometimes take a rigger brush, too, for painting tree branches.

I have a love/hate relationship with water brushes. The biggest drawback to them is how difficult it is to control the water flow. I also don't care for the quality of the bristles. They may come in handy though, when it's not convenient to set up a water container, so I'll take them along.

Check out my new water container ...

It's a collapsible silicone mug that only weighs 2.1 oz. and collapses down to just 1/2" thick. It will slide right into one of the outside pockets of my sketch kit. It can be expanded to hold just a small amount of water or opened up all the way to hold 16 oz.

Okay, I know you're going to think I'm going overboard with the number of drawing tools I'm packing, but here's the justification for what I'm taking: I usually do a quick preliminary sketch with a mechanical pencil to get the proportions and perspective right, then use my fountain pen to do the actual drawing. But this vacation is primarily a sketching trip, and I think it would be a great time to try doing some sketches with a heavier pencil line like the 4B, and watercolor, but no ink. I'd also like to do a few sketches with the blue-grey and chocolate Derwent watercolor pencils. We'll see if it actually happens.

I only own one type of fountain pen - the Noodler's Nib Creaper Flex pen. That's what I do most of my sketching with here at home and what I plan to use on the trip. But sometimes pens clog or nibs get scratchy or a hundred other things can happen that might make me wish I had brought an alternate means of sketching, so I'm taking a few felt tip pens along, too. Workhorses like the Pigma Micron pens and Faber-Castell Pitt Artist's pens are great for sketching and I'm comfortable using them. I'm sure they will be put to good use.

The white gel pen is for adding highlights that may have been lost in the painting process. I don't use it too often, but sometimes a white accent is just what's needed.

Here are a few odds and ends that I'll throw in the bag...

• The metal spatter screen is fun and easy to use to add a fine spray of texture to a sketch.
• The piece of vinyl screening can be loaded with paint and pressed onto the page to add a pattern or texture.
• The rubber band will hold down the pages of my sketchbook on a windy day.
• The red acetate value finder is something I should use but rarely do. It simplifies a scene into values of light and dark, eliminating the distraction of color. On this trip, I want to pay more attention to value in my sketches, and this simple tool might help (if I remember to get it out of my bag and use it!)
• The Noodler's Lexington Gray ink is my favorite for sketching as it's waterproof and fast-drying. I also like that the color is just a tad softer than full-on black. I'll be using this ink to refill my fountain pens.
• The small sprayer is for rewetting the paints on my palette prior to painting. I also use it to wet the sky area on my paper for wet-in-wet painting.
  
• The small tube of white gouache is for adding highlights. I rarely use it, but may take it along.
  
• A small piece of old credit card comes in handy to scrape away wet paint for various effects.
  
• A 6" plastic ruler helps me lay out pages for a gridded composition.

As if all that weren't enough, I've decided to take along a folding three-legged stool. My painting buddy, Suzie, and I figured we're going to be spending a lot of hours sketching and we might as well be semi-comfortable. It's springtime, and the ground may be wet - best not to be sitting down there with the worms and slugs.

Buddy the cat thinks he might like to come along :)

And the last art supply I'm taking is my cute new hat. It's packable, and has enough of a brim to keep the sun out of my eyes, but doesn't look like beach wear. I think it will be just perfect.

I've been planning for months, now let the fun begin!