My Artist Date - Pen sketch and article!

How to Draw a Cat Nose didn't result in a salable ACEO or anything -- but it did fill another page in my 4" x 6" ProArt sketchbook with cute cat nose drawings and I like this third step one best -- the face of a half-grown tabby done in grayscale with his nose in color to demonstrate where the fur on top of the nose changes direction.

I miss doing the eHow articles and am going to try to do a new one every day this week, also to do at least one illustration for each article. If it's not on an art topic I'll do a cartoon about the topic. For a while back in October I was drawing every day and most of the time also writing eHow articles. It was great. Now that spring is getting on farther and I get sunny days like today, even my worse days I'm so restless that I want to do something real.

Maybe by May, I can get back into daily drawing without too much trouble. At least the good days are getting better all the time. I can't wait till summer.

I've got some alkyd paints in new colors on my next Blick order, which is currently small enough I can buy it even after paying the balance of what I owe John Houle for my full page Smilodon pencil piece "The Kill" and Archaeopteryx oil painting. I've made enough small payments out of impulse money to bring it down to less than a full check, so next check will finish paying for them entirely and he'll send the art from Canada. That will be so great. I may take photos and post them when it comes. John is an inspiration to me. He is one of the greatest nature artists I've ever seen, and he's alive and a friend who also sometimes mentors me. I learned how to do my hawks and raptors from studying his eagles and other raptors.

With warmer weather coming, I keep wishing I could go outside to draw and paint. I gave my son in law my Winton Oils set for his birthday, which he loves, with all the added colors I put in with it. I use the Griffin Alkyds a lot more and there are plenty of mediums around the house for us to share from walnut oil to Liquin. I gave him the table easel too since where he sits to paint in the craft room or dining room, there's an actual table -- it's been useless to me in most of the places I've lived because of not having table space to put it, but it's a very nice sketchbox table easel to keep the art stuff in.

I realized what I needed to do oil painting outdoors is a standing easel that would be light enough for me to carry out there. I was drooling at French easels for years, about since I first got a Blick catalog again since they had the Juillian one on sale. They're so glamorous and exciting, they look a little out of time and nineteenth-century elegant. They're also compact and real wood which is always satisfying. However, from the weight of that table easel, I know it might not be practical for me to use a wooden French easel, especially a full box one. That's 20lb or more, especially when the supplies get packed into it.

So instead, I put an Alvin "Heritage" metal travel easel into my cart for use in the yard and the park -- it's sturdy and strong, with telescoping legs that would let me use it as a table easel when I have a table handy, or standing when I don't have a table. It only weighs two and a half pounds. Putting all my paints into a plastic Sterilite shoebox may not be as glamorous as a French easel with a sketchbox, but it'll weigh less, and some other time I'll pick up a good tacklebox for them when I finally settle on a full palette -- the thing is, I keep adding colors. Even in painting, I like having a broad palette. Different pigments of similar hues have different properties.

I bought Edward Aldrich's How to Draw and Paint Animals last year, and looking at his palette, a couple of colors that I hadn't really even thought of getting before are extremely useful for the effects he's used them for. I didn't think Cadmium Orange was important -- but he's right, it is brighter than mixed oranges and good for a lot of things even if it is toxic. Naples Yellow seemed redundant with Yellow Ochre, but not the way he uses it, and I may go through it pretty fast on animal painting.

Then there are the colors I need all the time that he doesn't think of as important, because he usually mixes greens -- he only keeps one green or so around and uses it with the mixed greens to brighten them, but I like having several real greens to use in the mixtures. They are much stronger and I'm always doing green summer vegetation or tropical scenes. There are the blues that I'd use doing reef scenes. There are the brights like magenta and dioxazine violet, that don't come up at all unless you like doing florals... and I wind up needing a broad palette because unlike Edward Aldrich, I don't always do the same sort of painting all the time.

As I get more used to color mixing, I could see throwing only some of the paints into a bag to go out to the park because I wouldn't necessarily need them all for a particular subject. But then, if I brought the whole kit, it wouldn't matter if I got distracted by brilliant tulips when I set out to do a landscape. Better to just enjoy my broad palette and sometimes let a new color inspire me to do a subject in that color than to not only do limited palette, but always stick to the same one.

Another of my amateur attitudes -- this rambling all over in subject matter and mediums, constantly learning and never settling down isn't very professional. But what I do is write professionally and paint as a serious hobbyist. I'm not sure that has as much to do with skill as it does with one's goals in life. I'm enjoying it though.

Egad, I have become an older gentleman who paints now that he's retired, isn't that quaint? LOL! Even though retirement is early in terms of age and way late in terms of disability and the need for it, I think I'm enjoying the idea sometimes.

And I can't wait till summer weather lets me do that outdoors. Every time it's sunny I get so restless!