30 Years and Still Learning
Reposted from my March 2024 newsletter, edited for this platform.
A love affair can take you by surprise. Hear me out on this.
It's break-up season in Alaska.
By that, I mean the melting process has begun.
Side streets and parking lots take longer to get free of their thick slabs of ice, first by developing "ice holes" – spots in the packed ice that open up like pot hole in pavement. It makes for a rolling, bumpy, weaving ride.
When the ice melts away, left behind are pebbles. Lots and lots of pebbles. Alaska uses pebbles to make driving a little safer on icy roads, which turn into projectiles that crack windshields and peppers pedestrians. That's fun.
All of that is to say there's not a whole lot to look at during break-up season.
Except the mountains. Mountains never disappoint. I love that they challenge me at every turn yet I never tire of them.
They gave me several new journal pages to share with you this month!
My attention has been focused on the mountains that surround Anchorage. The Chugach Range to the east, the Talkeetnas to the north, and on good days, the Alaska and Aleutians to the north and west.
It's been a study in shifting shapes created by the effect of light, and the ever-changing patterns of exposed rock subject to the whims of weather.
Flat light dominated most of March so I decided to play with a new(ish) tool... water-based, black-ink brush pens.
Hatcher Pass in the Talkeetna Mountains
A stunning landscape in the Talkeetna Mountains, Hatcher Pass is an outdoor enthusiast's playground with groomed and backcountry skiing options in winter.
My daughter had her first visit to Alaska this month. While she and her dad went out for a second ski of the day, I stole some time to capture the light hitting one of the ridges in the pass using the Pentel pen.
Mendenhall Glacier, Juneau, AK
Using the Pentel tool once again, I captured the Mendenhall Glacier during a quick trip to Juneau. This was the one day out of three that was mostly dry and had a bit of blue sky peaking through pervasive clouds.
Aleutian Mountains from the edge of Anchorage
A morning view of the Aleutian Range from the western edge of Anchorage. I developed this piece with the help of the Tombow pen, and a touch of watercolor for the morning light coming in below the clouds.
In my second-year Mindfulness course last year, I included a number of water-based pens and fell in love with two specific brands: Pentel Artist Brush Sign Pen and Tombow ABT, a dual-tipped brush pen.
The two pens have a different design. Pentel's pen has a long, thin, very flexible tip while Tombow's is thicker and slightly less flexible. They each have beautiful qualities.
My opinion? SO MUCH FUN!
There's a lot to love about each pen in the way the application of ink interacts with water and paper. They both deposit ink easily into a puddle of water, which is super fun to play with.
More intriguing is what happens when you gently
touch a mark of ink with a wet paint brush. The ink explodes into the wet stroke, moving with and into the stroke's path. It's fascinating to watch.
Just look at these results!
You can use this tool in a bit of a painterly way, too. Using a wet paint brush, you can pick up ink from marks made on the paper, and move that ink to other locations on the paper.
One last addictive element: the ink from each pen offers a hint of blue in unpredictable ways, as this magnified image shows.
I assure you, it's like a jack-in-the-box surprise every time it happens. I haven't figured out how to purposely make it happen yet; a new quest in my sketching playtime.
What's really beautiful here, though, is that after 32 years of practicing as an illustrator and then artist/instructor/writer, there's still something to learn, something that surprises me, makes me want to keep exploring possibilities.
It makes me fall in love with my work all over again.
