It Don't Take Much

It don't take much more to get started than a piece of something to draw on and something to do the drawing. However, when those two things aren't quite enough I head for a local coffee shop.

It helps if the place has recent copies of The New Yorker. Even sitting in Stillwater, MN I can read a few pages and recall Manhattan in October..... two years ago when my good hubby "forced" me to finally hit the big city. We in turn tortured daughter Tara - at the time busy in Chicago earning her degree in Fashion Design. Project Runway? Haha - we're in Bryant Park. Haha - we're standing on the sidewalk outside Parsons. Walked through wonderful notions shops - tiny rooms filled to the rafters with buttons, zippers, and trims galore. Fashionable kilts for guys filled the windows - I wonder what the in mens-wear item is for Fall 2010.

We did bring sketchbooks on the trip, but my odd bit of souvenir is a collection of photo images done in restrooms. The curved wall in the Guggenheim, the OCC logo at Orange County Choppers in Montgomery, NY, my "new" vintage bomber jacket hanging on hooks in various resting places out East.

Can you tell that I'm ranging far from drawing. We will simply blame the power and the glory that is NY. Now back to basics:
Although I don't save them all, those lovely Altoid tins are a great size for traveling colored pencils. Favorite Prismacolor beauties get worn down to nubby-sized things. But MANY drawings can be done with a half-inch-long lead - especially when out-fitted with a holder for such tiny bits - (check your fav art-supply store - our choice in the Twin Cities is usually West Paint on St. Paul's Grand Avenue). Not wanting to break pencils to fit I make do with an odd assortment of hues and look upon the mix as a sort of discipline. I also try to fit a single-edged razor blade in the box - for sharpening pencils or adding in some way to the day's adventure..... The above drawings were messing-around-with-possible-ideas. How many piles of those do YOU have? Nothing finished, but brain cells firing.

But The New Yorker was lying there.... with a marvelous poem and a couple of solid quotes that might help one get through a day some day. Whipping out the small spiral notebook I copied a bunch of words dealing with Dizzy Gillespie and Rudolph Nureyev. And thanks to poet E. J. Thribb "cheeks" will never be thought of the same way again.

So, no excuses. Grab something to write/draw with and something to write/draw on. Be cheeky.

Later a clerk came by with a sample chocolate truffle. Trying to build a bit of coffee-shop loyalty? Works for me. Coffee and chocolate and paper - oh my.

On to the grand adventure!

- Sue