Walking through the woods to the lake, there is a spot where the ground is covered with a thick soft layer of pines needles from a grove of Eastern White Pines. We can not hear our footsteps and these lovely pine cones are scattered everywhere. I gathered as many as would fit in the hood of my parka.
Portrait of a friend.
Day 4 of the Every Day in May challenge. Hand crafted salt and pepper grinders filled with sea salt and fresh pepper grounds. 
My mom watching Dancing with the Stars after starting her day at the dog park, an hour at the gym, shoe shopping with me, Jeopardy, dinner and a glass or two of Charles Shaw Chardonnay with my father and I. At $1.99 a bottle it is lovingly known as Two Buck Chuck and they have cases of it stacked up like cord wood in the garage.
And speaking of the garage. There are shopping bags filled with tennis balls lined up next to the work bench. Seems as though my father takes his walks past the Swim and Tennis Club we belonged to when we were kids. He starting picking up the tennis balls along the way and took them home and tossed them in a bag. Now there are 5 bags!!! I always ask why, we then discuss as to what to do with them and then we all walk away. Must be part of my inheritence. Jerry always said I get my hoarding tendancies from my father...sounds about right.
After a long time of working through the sad days that crippled my creativity, I decided to take action to get back into doing what I used to love. Not having done much drawing and painting in almost two months, I am quite out of practice and I knew the longer time drifted the worse it was getting both in my head and what was coming out on paper. So the "Every Day in May/EDM" challenge sounded like just the kick in the butt I needed to jump start my creativity and get me sketching again. Besides, I am going to Lisbon in July for the Urban Sketchers Symposium and I need to get in sketching shape.
Now that I am no longer in tropical Bali, I am having to adjust my palette to capture the more grayish greens and blues of Maine. 
Small bouquet from the grocery store. In Bali flowers grow all over the yard, Frangipani blossoms fall off the trees and float in the pool, orchids grow on all the trees and Bougainvillea spill over the walls so I never need to buy flowers to have in the house.
This is Bobo one of my two 13 year old cats. Being senior kitties they have slowed down quite a bit, sleep a lot and are on a big diet. Still hungry for more crunchies they meow like this "meow" and then lie down on the kitchen floor staring at the empty bowls. Eventually giving up and finding a chair to fill.
Unlike my big old American cats, my little Bali cat, Howard, couldn't weigh more than 4 lbs. When she wants something she meows like this "yeeeeoooooooow" along with serious ankle biting. She always gets what she wants!
Back to doing portraits for Julia Kay's Portrait Party but now I am at my desk as opposed to an airline seat. I am slowly adjusting to the time change and the heat has finally subsided so it's time to get out and paint beautiful summer in Maine.
They served us dinner at 1:30 am. One of my choices was Khor Moo Yang—grilled pork neck...so I asked for soup and got the above cup of noodles which I sketched as it cooled down.
I took printouts of some of the folks involved in Julia Kay's Portrait Party to work on if I had the energy to draw. Sometimes I just read and try to sleep, but I had 11 hours to kill . So, somewhere between Singapore and Frankfurt I did some portraits.
By this time I had put the watercolors away and just sketched.
This one was done on the Frankfurt to JFK leg.
Some of us took a thee day tour with our friend Astika, a Balinese manku (priest) who knows all the ins and outs of Bali. 
Sketching the local villagers when we stopped along the way.
We spent a night at a sweet hotel in the tiny seaside town Amed on the east coast of the island. These two Running Ducks, Ollie and Punky are clearly in charge. They run around the open-air dining room quacking for food, then run over to the infinity pool for a drink or a swim. Quack.
View overlooking Lake Buyan at the top of the mountains. As we climbed the steep winding roads newly harvested cloves and coffee were drying on large mats in front of all the houses. The cool dry air was thick with the wonderful smell of cloves.
Astika is a manku (priest) for the beautiful scared temple Tanah Lot on the west coast of Bali. The little temple sits a top an outcrop of rock in the surf that can only be accessed at low tide. It is supposedly guarded by sea snakes and thankfully I did not see any when we crossed through the water in our sarongs and flip-flops. Because we were Astika and his family we were allowed to have our ceremony at the top which is not open to the public.
Sketching the temple from the land while waiting for low tide. I had a pretty good audience while I did this little drawing.
Our friends Ben and Sarah after the ceremony which involves meditative prayer, holy water, incense, rice and offerings of flowers. After each prayer a flower is tossed to the alter and one goes in your hair. 
Astika, his wife Made, an elder manku, Ben, Sarah and I after the ceremony. That's me second from the left.
EDM #11—Draw your sunglasses. This is a quick sketch I did to make up for the crazy oil painting I did below for the day #11 challenge.
There was leftover oil paint on the palette and I never want to waste any paint. Painted from a photo of a cow that munches grass in a filed near our villa in Bali. 
EDM #10—Draw your hand. I loved Nina Johansson's wonderful post "Think outside the box". Colored cubes she made to find new color combinations for her palette. She added a PDF of her cube template for us to download. I knew someday I would make one. So here it is for this EDM challenge—a 3" square cube of drawings of my left hand. 
Kind of looks like a damn box of kleenex...
Experimenting with some different media along my usual ink and watercolor by adding watercolor mask and Neocolor ll. This Every Day in May/EDM challenge is quite a challenge... 
Another one of my bizarre purchases from my old shopping days. It's for sale...
EDM # 6 a favorite well-loved object— I thought long and hard about what was my well-loved object and all I could come up with was Sophie. I guess, for me at this stage in my life, things aren't as important a family, friends and animals. Funny, because I used to have a lot of things. Now I am trying to get rid of many of those things. So Sophie it is! Here she is sniffing the flowers I put on the floor to paint.
A few of my latest portraits for Julia Kay's Portrait Party. It continues to be a great challenge. I really enjoy seeing everyone else's interpretations of the rest of the members. It's a kick! Check it out.
I usually use ink and watercolor, but these two are pencil and watercolor. I actually have gotten the oil paints out...well the box is out...
We will be going back to Bali soon, so I am getting into my Bali mind set. This is a portrait of my friend Yanti.
And then I did beautiful Yanti again, mixing it up a bit with more dramatic color and pencils.
A quick watercolor of the Easter tulips before they got tossed. I added some digital lines using Corel Painter. Digital art is a total unknown area for me, but I am curious about it. It is quite awkward for me to make my hand move the cursor to do the work or go the direction I want. It is not like moving a pen around on a piece of paper, but you can hit the "undo" button. I do worry about the work looking too "digital" but I must keep learning.
The temperature shot up to 55° this weekend, so I couldn't face the gym. Sophie and I walked 8 miles on the beach with a good friend on Saturday and on Sunday we ran five miles. It was great to get outside.
Sophie likes to stop a lot. There are things a dog just has to do. Then there are the times she doesn't want to go any further. We have learned to compromise. When she stops I will do lunges and when she won't go any further I pick her up and do walking lunges. You do what you got to do. We must be quite a sight!
Cold again and it was early so I was back at the gym. As I was lifting weights, a man came up to me and asked what I was training for? I looked at him and said "life, I guess". Yes, that's it, for my life. Sometimes I just don't want to do it (and sometimes I don't), but usually I do something everyday, because it is for life.
This morning, I was admiring the talented Rick Tulka's wonderful images on Flickr. I saw that Giorgio Bordin had done a sketch of him from his posted photograph in front of the White House. Giorgio had added a sketch to his comment. Several other talented artists had done the same and with such a great face, I couldn't resist joining in. It was the first thing I did this morning while catching up on the news, so it was quick and sloppy. He noticed that he was dripping...
Since the paints were wet, I decided to finish this sketch I started weeks ago on my trip to Paris. These wonderfully dressed older Parisian women waited outside the cafe where we were siting late one afternoon. I was able to get the basic outline of their poses only to abandon them for a Kir Royale. Would't you?
The brilliant colors of fall foliage have finally come to us in Southern Maine. The mountains are past peak and the leaves are probably off the trees. Around Portland about 50% of the leaves have turned. Fall foliage is one of those things in nature that is so beautiful, but so fleeting. One minute the leaves are just turning and then they are gone—it makes me sad. I sometimes have to remind myself to stop and look, so I will really see.
