Portraits of Amanda

 I did a few portraits of Amanda while on our trip to Europe, when we had idle moments... which were... few... 

The first was at the Saskatoon Airport before our journey had really even begun!

We were at the airport hours early, so I thought I might as well get started on the drawing! 

The next wasn't until our third or fourth day in Amsterdam, when we stopped to have a meal at the Vegan Temple Bar - I pulled out my small sketchbook - which I carried with me EVERY DAY of the vacation... JUST IN CASE!!

The next was waiting at Amsterdam Centraal station

While we were waiting for our train to France! 

A few days later when we were in Boulogne-sur-Mer, Amanda actually joined a work meeting via her computer. 

The meeting was so long, not only did I DRAW a picture of her... 

I also managed to COLOUR it!? 

finally, on our first morning in Paris, I woke up STUPID early and could not get back to sleep. Amanda was still sleeping, so I drew the apartment from the little table I ate breakfast at. 

The temperature on the afternoon when we arrived was +38°C and stayed around there for most of our stay... it dropped to 31°C in the middle of the night... 

The apartment we rented was NOT air-conditioned, however... Nor did it have screens on the windows... So I didn't feel really confident about leaving the windows open all night and not having bats or rats or mosquitoes or any other number of pests joining us! We got enough flies and mosquitoes in during the hours we were there and awake and had the windows open! 

I still have three or four pictures (or maybe five..?) that I started while I was in Europe, but need to finish up (mostly colouring... and touching up here and there...?). And then the plan was to finish filling up the sketchbooks I'd taken on the trip with drawings done from the thousands of photos I took while there! 

More Sketching in May

(Whoopsie! I was just starting on uploading drawings I did on the Euro trip and realized THIS post about drawings I did back in MAY was still sitting in Drafts!)

I kind of stopped drawing for about a year! 

(Though I did still carry around a sketchbook WITH me everywhere I went!? I literally never leave the house without one!? I just fell out of the habit of getting it out and actually DRAWING anything in it!?) 

So, I have been trying to get back into a regular practice of drawing... and... not doing... GREAT... but... I have been doing SOMETHING... sometimes...  

I drew the set of the last play we went to at the Persephone Theatre for the season. The set was pretty amazing - and the play was okay too! 

This was done in the same sketchbook I was using in Moose Jaw. 

I did try adding colour at home... and... kind of ruined it... Ah, well... 

Amanda watching Death of a Unicorn

This was done in a little 5"x5" I started in 2021 which contains only little sketches of Amanda. 

Waiting at the doctor's office a week or so ago. I was trying out a NEW sketchbook... Art Placement, where I buy almost all of my art supplies, no longer stocks the Handbook watercolour journals by Speedball... so I have been on a hunt for a NEW sketchbook. The have the 100% cotton fibres, 250gsm Hahnemüehle Watercolor Journals, which do look VERY nice... but they only have the landscape format (or squares) which I don't love... I found Opus had some of the 200gsm Hahnemüehle Watercolor Books (and some of them were half price!?) so I ordered a few of those to try out! I do like it much better than the one I'd been using - as it lays open much flatter!!

I hate it when I find a thing I like... and then the next time I go to get one, they've been discontinued or the place I get them from doesn't carry them any more... 

I rode the tandem over to the Royal University Hospital last week to pick up Amanda who'd been there all day with Morgan (who was in for "day surgery"... but ended up staying overnight...?). Amanda needed a lift to the school that she teaches yoga at on Thursday for one of the community associations. I thought I'd see if I could knock out a quick sketch by the bike racks where I was waiting for her... I was waiting and awfully long time and was going to text and see where she was at and realized I had missed nine phone calls!? Apparently where she was was at CITY HOSPITAL!? 

Whoopsie!! 

So I sprinted away and made my way through the labyrinthine maze of detours around all the roadwork going on around RUH and the University Bridge and met Amanda walking up the University Bridge (luckily the cycling and pedestrian pathway on ONE side of the bridge is still open!) and got her to her yoga class on time! Thank goodness it was City Hospital and not St. Pauls!! 

In my defence, NO ONE TOLD ME it was at City Hospital!? Most of our visits to the hospital have been to RUH and I HAD thought about confirming, but Amanda had texted earlier in the day and had mentioned using the uSask wifi... why would they have uSask wifi at any hospital other than the UNIVERSITY hospital!? 

So this got finished up at home later on... 

There has been a lot of TV watching over the last few days while Morgan is at home recovering and I did a couple sketches on Sunday while Amanda was watching with us... 

One in the new sketchbook... 

and one in the small sketchbook of just Amanda... (Although Morgan does appear in the background of a few of the drawings!) 

I've been messing around with using a combination of markers and watercolours to colour some of these... 

Sketches from Carcassonne

Amanda and I were in Europe for a good chunk of June and the first bit of July. 

I had hoped to do a lot of drawing there. I did some. Not as much as I'd hoped...

I took a lot of pictures and will probably do more drawing from those pictures now that we are home. Eventually I'll get around to sharing them here. Maybe. 

These are a few sketches I did in Carcassonne. 

(There are others I did in the castle I'll share at some point!) 

Both of these were on Pont Neuf where we were waiting for the Tour de France riders to roll by at the beginning of Stage Four of the 2026 Tour de France. We were there really early, as I had expected a lot of people might want to hang out here to take pictures.. so I had a lot of time to draw - while standing around in the +38°C heat!! 

THIS is the reason why - from Pont Neuf there was a pretty great view of the castle of Carcassonne! 

So I could end up with shots like...

This is one of my favourites. In that line in the foreground, on the left in yellow is the current race leader #1 Tadej Pogačar, who had won the tour the previous year and won it again this year! On the other end of the line is #32 Derek Gee-West - the sole Canadian riding in the Tour this year! 

If they look like they're out for a chill, casual ride... it's because they are. This was part of the Depart Fictif - where they rolled through town past all the crowds and sites... the ACTUAL start of the stage was a few kilometres outside of town. it was already +38°C when they rolled by and expected to be +40°C as the day went on, so there was no need to do more than what was necessary to get them to the start! 

This veiw is looking the other way down the street, where we would first see the cyclists approaching from. 

Like so...

Both of the sketches were drawn on location, but the colouring with watercolours was done later. 

At some point I'll post some more pics of drawings I've done (and will do...).

AND at some point, I'll probably do a post on the Bike Blog about the carnival that was the depart for the fourth stage of the 2026 Tour de France! (and maybe something about bicycles in Amsterdam and Paris...?). We shall see... 

Sketching in Moose Jaw

I came here to post some more recent doodles and realized I somehow completely forgot to post my pics from Moose Jaw!? At the end of April, Amanda had a chance to travel to Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, for a work-related conference at the Temple Gardens Hotel and Spa. She's always wanted to go there and jumped at the opportunity, and I got to tag along. It was a VERY busy conference that kept her busy from 7am to 7pm most days - and all her meals were provided, so I was pretty much left to my own devices. 

When we originally planned the trip, I was figuring it would be warm out, being the END OF APRIL... I had planned on wandering around the town and sitting and drawing things... but then at the beginning of EVERY WEEKEND IN APRIL we had a snow storm!? And the last weekend, just before we travelled, was no different! The snow had melted enough that the travel wasn't terrible on the Sunday, but it was still quite COLD!! 

In the end the first few days I just ventured out for walks, it was too cold to sit too long! 

Tuesday it was above freezing long enough that, in the afternoon, after a long walk, I did sit and try doing one little drawing... 

The Moose Jaw Public Library - which was located in the park across from the hotel - Also, many of the session Amanda was attending were held at the Library. 

I didn't do the colouring until I got back to the hotel... 

The next day it was a degree or two warmer so I got out and did a couple more drawings. 

The first was St. Andrews church, which was part of the United Church of Canada for decades, but apparently was sold to a new congregation (Victory Church?) last summer. it was located across the street from the Public Library. 

This one I also waited to colour back at the hotel... 

The other one was Zion United Church, just a few blocks away... 

This one I didn't get around to colouring until I got home on Thursday... 

All of these drawing were in a smaller (5'x8') Strathmore 500 Series Mixed Media Art Journal that I started four years ago and then abandoned (or... misplaced...?) I stumbled across it recently and thought I'd try using a smaller sketchbook that I usually use. It doesn't lay as flat as I prefer - like the Handbook watercolour journals made by Speedball that I had been using a few years back - for the Birds of Saskatchetoon). I like the size... but I'd like something that lays flatter and is easier to draw across the two-page spread like I was doing in these pics). 

There were a lot of interesting old buildings in the town that I might have liked to have sat and drawn... 

City Hall. 

Catholic Church. 

Some warehouse with faded advertising on the side. 

Another building downtown.

Some were shut down or empty and boarded up, like this motel

and then there were some odd-looking bodged together atrocities...

like, whatever the fuck is going on here... 

but visually interesting... at least to me!?

I spotted a pair of Northern Flickers in the park on one of my walks... at first I thought it might be a territorial dispute... but after watching them carry on a bit, I think it might have been mating behaviour?!

On the last day, after Amanda was done with her conference, we had a few hours before we had to head home, so we stopped by a few galleries - starting with the Moose Jaw Museum and Art Gallery. 

(Which is also part of the library...)

I liked the show in the gallery. 

The museum was interesting too... 

But this seemed a dubious claim... I mean, the casualty rates in the Great War were very high. I think one in ten of the 600,000 or so Canadians that served, died. To suggest that more than THREE QUARTERS of those that marched away from Moose Jaw never returned, seems a bit off... unless the soldiers of Moose Jaw were the unluckiest bastards that ever lived... or the stupidest...? OR, what seems more likely, many of those that served, survived, but never returned because, having seen OTHER PLACES for the first time in their lives, decided they'd rather stay there than return to Moose Jaw!? 

We also visited a commercial gallery That had a lot of different art from a variety of different artists. I though these were really fun... but I forgot to make note of who the artist was...

They'd made this really cool dice tower out of clay! 

Amanda had suggested getting it... but I've been wanting to make my own for sometime... and I'd still like to do that... (and ideally out of something that wouldn't be so LOUD!)

This was also very cool and, again, Amanda and I pondered it for a moment before realizing we didn't really have any place we could PUT it in our house... 

Anyway. That was Moose Jaw. 

We also soaked in the mineral water pool a few of the evenings we were there. Amanda liked it. I'm not a fan of pools, or being in water in general... but I went along anyway and it wasn't the worst. 

Oh, and there was a fun little game and comic store I went in that just opened last fall. I didn't take any pictures or draw it... or... even buy anything there... but I thought it was a rad little thing to just exist in Moose Jaw! I hope they make a go of it and are there next time, should we ever go again! 

Old Peugeot

 I've been telling myself I need to get out and do more drawing/painting. I told myself, starting in June, I'd get out EVERY DAY and go for a walk or a bike ride and stop and draw something I saw... That didn't happen. (Well I did get out and do that a couple of times... but nothing I felt like sharing here...)

So I told myself I'd do it through July. I did get out for a bike ride on the first of July... but it was SO HOT... and there were SO MANY PEOPLE all over the place - at least where I was riding (for Canada Day!) I didn't end up stopping and doing anything. 

Yesterday, the second of July, I did go for a bike ride AND I did stop and draw an old Peugeot bicycle that I spotted locked up by the arts building on campus. 

Old Peugeot in my sketchbook! 

Of course I've been carrying around pens and small watercolour kits everywhere for the last month... actually I've generally carried a sketchbook and pens everywhere I've gone for DECADES... I just haven't made much use of them for the last few years... So when I sat down to draw, I found that all of my rapidographs were either empty or clogged and the first few staedler pens I tried were dried up... nevertheless... I found ONE that still had ink and I drew a quick sketch with that. 

I had neither pencils nor a thin liner pen that I might use to sketch out the general shape first... so I just started with the brake levers and went from there... things got a little screwy out towards the wheels - especially the rear one... but I did the thing. 

I didn't end up adding the colour until the next day (today), at home...

Will I get out for a walk or ride today and do another drawing...? I don't know. It's more of an intention than a MUST DO RULE. The kind of black and white thinking which says I MUST DO THIS EVERYDAY is the sort of thinking that leads to deciding I've failed if I don't do it one day, and just give up on the whole idea... and I'm trying to NOT do that!

Hopefully there will be more stuff posted here over the next few weeks...?

Vacation in Ontario

 I went on vacation in Ontario and all I drew was a few lousy sketches... 

Seriously, I went there thinking that's all I'd do - sit around and draw stuff all day. There wasn't much of a plan and I'm not super into doing all the regular touristy things... and I hauled SO MUCH ART SUPPLIES....

The trip came about because Amanda had a conference to go to in Niagara Falls - the 12th World Congress on Alternatives and Animal Use in the Life Sciences - in Niagara Falls, Canada! She's been to a few - they've generally held them every 3 years and alternate between somewhere in North America, and... somewhere else - Usually Europe. 

Amanda's often met up with her mom when she's travelled to these (or other conferences) and I've stayed home with the kids... It's been a while since she last went to one (the last one was cancelled due to the pandemic - and then they held one online...). Our kids are older now, though... One of them is technically an ADULT (I know, WTF!?), so... I asked if maybe I could tag along... 

Short version of what ended up being a long and ridiculous story, It was decided that I'd go along, and we'd tack on a few days in Toronto on either side. 

I took lots of pictures... but I'm only sharing this one... at least in this post. (maybe I'll do another one with more pictures). These are the newish shoes I had that I wore on vacation, along with the two bags I took. the more colourful one was brand new and my "carry on" that had clothes and stuff. The purple and black Timbuk2 bag (with the fancy new patch from Spencer Hawkes/Nomad Patches)had all my art supplies.... and a few other things... 

Our flight to Toronto left at 6AM!? So we had to be there at 5AM... and up even earlier than that to get a cab to the airport... and then wait... Amanda, being Amanda, decided it was "technically" a "work day" (ie she was getting paid to travel) so she opened up the laptop and started doing work emails for an hour while we waited. 

And I drew a picture... 

I'm not a fan of flying. So I tried to busy myself with drawing while flying there. 

I was so crazy tired... but once I'm up, I just can't go back to sleep... so... drawing... 

And that was it... until we got to Niagara. 

We stayed two nights in Toronto and had a full day and a half of wandering around...

I brought my Rapidograph pens to use, as they are my favourites to draw with. But the ink kind of exploded out of them and all over the case I'd put them in... I cleaned them all out, but didn't have extra ink. I knew there was an art supply store in Toronto that had rapidograph ink, but I forgot to write down which one, and we didn't end up going to any those first days there and so all the drawing I did was with Staedler and Sakura pigment liners (my "back up" drawing utensils). 

(As it turns out, the are supply store that had the ink was the closest one - like, two blocks from our hotel... but in the end we didn't go there until the second last day of our vacation... and... by that point I'd kind of given up on the idea...) 

Again, the trip to Niagara meant getting up in darkness and walking back down to Union Station to catch an early morning train to Niagara Falls. I was too damed tired to do any drawing on the train... When we got there we were able to drop our bags off at the hotel and then wandered down to look at the falls... and took a circuitous path back up towards the convention centre to get Amanda registered. During our wanderings, we found a place to sit down and eat and, while we waited for our food, I drew another picture of Amanda... (above) 

The view from our hotel room... 

a view OF our hotel room... 

Amanda doing MORE work emails IN our hotel room one evening after getting back from the conference... which she did EVERY evening... 

I didn't do ANY drawing in Toronto on the way back 

One final drawing on the plane ride home - which I didn't finish colouring until the next day... 

And that was it... 

The lack of drawing was a bit disappointing. I think I need to PLAN things in advance ("I will go HERE and DRAW THINGS for the afternoon"). There was no real plan most days... and while some people find that freeing, I find I fall into an indecision loop for the ENTIRE DAY and DO NOTHING?! 

I guess I did learn a few things about what to take and what not to take... and what to take it in!? Which will be handy if I ever go on another vacation!? 

One thing I definitely won't be taking again is the Timbuck2 courier bag. I use it all the time, in town. But, generally speaking, when in town, I'm riding a bike to get around. I thrown be bag into a basket and ride to where I'm going and then I just carry the bag from my bike into where ever I was going and there ususally isn't much walking around. While it id VERY handy for organizing stuff and carrying it around... it SUCKS to carry, especially when FULL of sketchbooks and art supplies and anything else I think I MIGHT need for the day, when walking around ALL DAY.... Definitely better to use a small backpack! 

Empty Rapidograph pens of ink, before getting on planes. Bring ink with me to fill up when we arrive. Teh pressure changes when taking off is what caused the inks to explode out of the pens... it was a MESS. (so, still want to bring "back up" drawing utensils for the plane!) 

I'm not sure about colouring stuff... I brought Derwent inktense watercolour pencils... and Derwent inktense watercolour pans... I did use both... I ended up using the pencils more - because I'm more used to using those and there are more colour options, and on the plane they were more convenient, sort of... but in other ways they were a little less convenient - unravelling the giant roll that I have them all in. I think I might try a book-like pencil organizer...? or just learn to USE THE PANS and paint like a regular watercolourist!?