Journalfest

Back from a lovely trip up to Port Townsend, WA for Journalfest. I had never been there in the fall before, so really enjoyed seeing it in the golden light.

Even the dorms look grand in the autumn glow:

Teesha and Tracy Moore always put on wonderful retreats, and this one was no exception. They provided beautiful gift bags full of goodies, journaling parties in the evening, even a live band. The highlight of the retreat for me was spending an evening looking through Teesha's journals.

I had pleasant classes all three days, but they could have been meatier. I was hoping to come away with a renewed zest for journaling and new ideas to improve my sketching, but that didn't happen. I did, though, pick up a few new ideas here and there.

In some ways Lisa Cheney-Jorgensen's class felt like a step backward for me. I keep trying to work looser in my sketches, and Lisa works very tightly with a small brush. Her work is beautiful, but not the direction I want to head. I did though, like her use of colored pencil to heighten her final drawing. This was done in her class, with an example of birch trees she did in the lower corner:

On Day two I took Theo Ellsworth's class. Theo creates his own imaginary worlds and does elaborately detailed drawings of them. He gave us a fun collaborative exercise to work back and forth between drawing and writing then we spent much of the day doodling from our imaginations. These are two of Theo's drawings, a bit from our collaborative exercise, and, at the bottom, a sampling of the sort of doodle drawing we did:

And the last day was with Alex Shur who scrubs on watercolors to create a dreamy background, then draws out whimsical characters and animals from them. She works with a lot of China white watercolor and white gouache, which was all new to me. This was the page I did in her class, with the inset done by Alex:

After Journalfest, Cindy, Traci and I spent a few days in Seattle. It was raining pretty hard, so we didn't get around the city as much as planned, but we still managed to hit a few art stores and two of Tom Douglas's great restaurants--Palace Kitchen and Dahlia Lounge. Those make the rain pretty easy to take!