Feels Like Spring

Dog life has me on the go these days leaving little time to sit around dreaming up topics that might make an interesting blog post. All the corralling, trips to the vet or Pet Supermarket and filling in holes dug in the driveway tend to take the mind far from blogspot.com. I mean, concentration is a touch-and-go kind of thing when a thirty-six pound puppy is dragging twenty-five feet of hose-pipe around the yard or chewing on old asbestos shingles she found in the shed. If I’m completely honest though, all of it—excepting the asbestos shingles—is a daily joy.

Moving on from dogs, I was looking back at an old Japan blog post this morning, one showing a sketch and a journal excerpt, and I got the idea to re-post the sketch from a different angle. That part of the earlier post which caught my attention was not so much the sketch of tomatoes and a can of sardines as the thoughts about that particular March day written in the margins around the sketch. 

The sketch and the words surrounding it are in my journal of the time, a Life Noble Note Plain notebook with cream paper. The sketch was done first in a 2B Mitsubishi pencil and then colored with Mitsubishi Uni Watercolor Pencils. The journal notes, as far as pen and ink go, are a little harder to discern because earlier and later pages in the journal leave no hint. Looking at it closely I am fairly certain that the ink is an old De Atramentis color called Jules Verne Deep Sea Blue and the pen used, a Sailor Profit with a 21k Naginata medium nib. As the handwriting might cause a problem for some, a cleaner version is below:

Friday, 5 March 2010 — Thinking of tomatoes and sardines for some reason. I have neither in my kitchen but wish I did. That and some saltine crackers. Feels like spring today, a change from the cold rain of yesterday, a day that typified everything about winter, the wet and the cold. Plum blossoms are in bloom in the garden below me, and the Japanese magnolia is full of buds.

Searching through my photographs of Kugayama I can find none of the ‘garden below me’ showing both the plum blossoms and the budding Japanese magnolia, but the one below is fairly close. At least the magnolia (tree with leaves of the lightest green) is budding though the plum tree is out of the picture. The red blooms at the far left are on a giant azalea at least ten feet in height. I was standing on my third-floor veranda when I took the picture; the house and garden belong to my landlord.

Imagining a Snack

shouldn’t be the case, but again today I had to push myself to take out the color pencils and spend some time sketching. Practice is surely the key, and even though I look for, hope for improvement, many times getting myself to do it takes hard effort. A little difficult to get my head around that attitude, since the desire to draw better should be encouragement enough. But the feeling is a little like what comes with stretching exercises, which is hard for me. Similar to touching the floor without bending the knees and half a dozen other floor exercises, the first ten minutes of sketching make me feel the same, though the stiffness is confined to hand and fingers. Should anyone ever ask me to make a couple of quick sketches of something and try to finish within ten minutes, I might be defeated in the first five minutes. It’s an unfortunate condition for one who enjoys drawing and takes satisfaction from it.

Today I started out a little hungry, with an idea in my head that some sliced tomato, sardines and saltine crackers would really hit the spot. Since I had none of the three in my kitchen or pantry, I teased myself with a picture.

Now I'm on my way to the grocery store looking for tomatoes, sardines and…

Showing Off

Rummaging through a tattered and dusty cardboard box of books for sale outside a used bookstore, I came upon a well-used book called Learn to Draw in a Weekend. Quite a boast, I thought. I’ve always envied those with a skill for drawing, always wishing I could snatch up a pencil and dash off a sketch of the man on a bench, or the puppy chewing a shoe. Even a credible drawing of a bowl of apples would make me happy. Years too late, but I bought the dog-eared copy of Learning to Draw in a Weekend.

I think the assumption of the book is that your weekend of learning to draw must revolve around non-stop practice from morning to night, forsaking all else. Even then, it’s highly improbable that anyone but a born Wyeth would come near the promised goal in two days time. But only the very naive need to be told that fact, and I had no notion of one day or one month in learning the basics of drawing.

Journal keeping has been a longtime habit of mine, and the book on drawing might help me to add pictures to my journal pages. At least that was my idea in buying the old one dollar book. And so, I used the book for that purpose, with no time limits or expectation.

At the risk of appearing to show off, I have added to these lines some clips of sketches I did with guidance from my one dollar investment. There is no connection between the surrounding journal notes and the drawings. All are random and unattached, and all were done over a period stretching well beyond a single weekend. The example at the bottom of an outstretched arm and cloth is something copied from Fumiyo Kouno’s graphic novel, Town of Evening Calm.