Pencil Reminiscing, Part Five

In 1993, Trail Guy went from being seasonal Maintenance Guy to Road Guy, a fulltime job with Sequoia National Park. This meant I could really focus on my art, since he had a better income. A friend invited me to move my studio into her gift shop in Exeter, and I was ON MY WAY!!! To where?? I didn’t know, but I was going, so there.

The friend was instrumental in teaching me about selling, marketing, display, professionalism, and even how to dress better. I will be eternally grateful to her for her tutelage.

My next notecard set was Backcountry Structures in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. I had been to most of the cabins but didn’t have photos of them all. The Park’s “History Boys” were helpful in providing pictures and information about these charming little cabins in remote locations, and excited that I had chosen this subject for drawings and cards.

You can see that my focus remained on architectural subjects, and the textures and shapes of nature were just too hard. I did my best, but yikes. To save some pride, here are my recent drawings of two of these cabins. They were on the blog in December, but here they are again.

More next week on pencil reminiscing. . .

Pencil Reminiscing, Part Four

After my booming (in my own little mind) success with the original set of notecards for Tulare County, Mineral King, and Visalia landmarks, I moved on. My memory is fuzzy about which card sets came next, and at what point I quit my job in the print shop. I worked from our little house in Lemon Cove and supplemented my income with a summer job baking at the Silver City Store, helping out at a friend’s Exeter gift shop for Christmas, and filling in at the printer when they had need. 

The ideas continued to flow. Now it was time for Tulare County Landmarks II, which moved into other towns of the county.

 Since this set included Lindsay, Tulare, Porterville, and Exeter, I found stores in all those little towns to sell the cards. I may have spent as much in gas expenses to drive around calling on the stores as my profits.

(The little circles are holes; these cards were samples for customers to see what was in the variety packages.)

To be continued. . .

Pencil Reminiscing, Part Three

It was thrilling to see my art come off a printing press as notecards. It was exciting to sell them to stores, and the ideas started piling in.

After Tulare County Landmarks and Mineral King Scenes, it was time to move to the city:  Visalia Landmarks was hugely popular in the stores, which are now all closed.

I just trotted all over Visalia with my camera, taking photos without giving it a second thought, never asking permission, just excited to be out gathering new material for pencil drawings to be turned into little packages of notecards. It was fun to think of what to draw, fun to photograph it, fun to learn about and write up a description for the back, fun to be on my own figuring out how to do these things.

This was all done in the days of film cameras with its accompanying wait for the pictures to be developed. During that era, the magical and mysterious fax machine appeared, and we had no idea of email, cell phones, digital photography, the internet with all its huge changes to our lives. Pencils (and erasers) were all I needed.

Pencil Reminiscing, Part Two

After the notecard set of Tulare County Landmarks began selling, the ideas began flowing. Mineral King was the next logical set, especially since I already had two drawings finished. Reruns, but I didn’t care and didn’t think anyone else did either.

This was the first time I drew the Oak Grove Bridge; this view is now too overgrown to photograph the bridge clearly.

All of these were from my own photos with the exception of the Mineral King Store. I don’t remember my family going to Mineral King until after the store had disappeared, so I used an old postcard without any regard or concern for copyright laws.

This is also the first time I drew the scene of Farewell Gap with the Crowley cabin. I had no idea how popular that would become or that I would draw and paint it so many more times (or any idea that I would become a painter).

Stay tuned. . . many more notecards ahead in this series!

Pencil Reminiscing, Part One

This could also be called “Notecard Reminiscing” or even “Back in the Olden Days”. 

Back in the olden days, I worked in a print shop and drew in pencil. Pencil drawings of Tulare County landmarks printed on notecards were my “side hustle”, now the cool way to refer to a second job. It was a hobby to make money, a business that I hoped would outpace my real job. 

Because I have always been a note and letter writer, finding stationery and cards with local art was what I looked for any time I traveled. It came to my attention that there weren’t any for Tulare County in spite of the fact that we have Sequoia National Park, and that we feed the world. From my viewpoint in Ivanhoe, then Visalia, and eventually Lemon Cove, it seemed that we had subjects that were good enough to be proud of and drawn. At that time I was only capable of drawing architectural subjects, so that is all I thought of. (Looking back at my work, I’d now say I was barely capable of such things, but growth is good, unless you are a tumor.)

 

In the past year or so, I pulled the original drawing of the Lemon Cove Women’s Club out of its frame to touch it up. It isn’t too embarrassing, but it did benefit from some tightening up. This was a drawing I just didn’t want to let go of, so it hangs in my dining room.
The original of the Silver City Store also hangs in my dining room.
This one I now use as an example for my drawing students so they can feel better about their own beginning work.

This was back in 1987, and I knew nothing about branding oneself (yikes, as if we are cattle?) or marketing. I loved to draw, and felt lucky to be able to work in a print shop and know people who helped me figure out how to make my idea happen, along with people who owned shops that wanted to sell my merchandise.

There was a distant foggy hope that someday I could be self-employed as an artist, but that was far off in the future, along with having a real studio, owning a home, and being old like a real grown up.

To be continued. . .

Because She Asked

A former drawing student, now a long time friend who lives far away, ordered many notecard packages from my website (you can do that too – this is The Notecard Page.)

She asked if I had anything of Kings Canyon, or perhaps Hume Lake. Nothing. I’ve got nothing. Even the General Grant Tree has finally sold out.

This sent me to my photographs, in search of something to redraw, or maybe even something new. It also caused me to dig around to find the old drawings of Kings Canyon.

Kings Canyon Overlook, drawn in 2001 for one of the last variety set of notecards. It’s not embarrassing, even 19 years later.
This is a small part of a larger collage drawing, and I like the addition of the yucca in bloom.
The collage was a commissioned drawing of highlights from both Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. 

The overlook is the winner for a Kings Canyon drawing to be made into notecards. It isn’t part of Kings Canyon National Park, just part of the geographical area called Kings Canyon. But since I am not doing this for The Park, it doesn’t matter. 

Beginnings, looking at a mess of photos and a messed up print of the yucca version.

This is going quite fast, helped along by experience, combined with listening to Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House, read by Tom Hanks. (I love our county library system.)

And if you are interested in buying notecards with this drawing on it, please let me know. If enough folks want them, I’ll order some. They’ll be the same as most of my cards – 4-1/2 x 5-1/2″, 4 to a package for $8.

Pencil Reminiscing, Part Two

Because I already had 2 of these scenes drawn and the first set of Tulare County Landmarks notecards sold well, the natural second choice was Mineral King. (Big surprise, eh?)

This was the first time I drew my favorite bridge, and it is from a viewpoint that is now overgrown and no longer so clear.

I worked from my own photos with the exception of the old Mineral King Store; by the time my family went to Mineral King, it was gone.

Stay tuned – there are many more notecards to show you!

Hockett Meadow, Two Pencil Drawings

The customer allowed me to put color in the flag, a technique that I am very partial to. I added smoke, scanned it, and did the Photoshop clean-up.

As I was adding the grassy meadow to the foreground, I was thinking about the first time I drew the Hockett Meadow Ranger Station. It was part of a notecard set called “Backcountry Structures”.

Back in the olden days (in the 1980s), people used pens to handwrite notes in cursive, put them in envelopes, address them, LICK a stamp to put on the envelope, and then place into a real mailbox for people in other parts of the country to receive. 

How quaint. Those were definitely kinder, gentler, slower, more personal times.

Now, hold onto your hats, Dear Blog Readers, because I am going to show you something frightening. 

Your Central California artist needs to keep reminding herself that it is good to be humble.

Growth is good.

People were very kind in the olden days and hadn’t learned all that anonymous internet rude behavior yet.

If you bought art from me back then, THANK YOU!!

Another Secret Cabin Drawing

How “secret” is something on the World Wide Web? 

The one who isn’t supposed to see the drawing doesn’t know about my blog, so we’re safe. (also true for the drawing shown on this post)

Working from photos I took before my customer was even born showed me the upper window with the shutter opened.
On the table: I worked on this all day on First Saturday December in between visitors to the studio.
Almost finished, except for all that grassy foreground to figure out first.

I put in the grass, thought it was finished, scanned it, did the Photoshop clean-up, emailed it to the customer, and then I remembered that he asked me to have smoke coming out of the chimney. 

Well, oops. 

Tomorrow I’ll show you the finished drawing, along with something that might drop your jaw.

Loves Pencil, Loves to Draw

This is my most recent pencil drawing commission. A group of friends are getting this for another friend. That’s all I’m allowed to say, not knowing the the scope of readership of this blog or degree of silence required for this gift.

Beginning stages
First scanned

This is the scanned, cleaned up version using Photoshop Junior, which is actually Photoshop Elements. It is converted to grayscale mode and anything that is paper color on the drawing gets “erased”  so it looks almost as clean here as it does in person.