Mademoiselle Patisserie

 There is a lovely French bakery, Mademoiselle Patisserie, in Patchogue. I try to avoid going there because things are just too delicious. I think it is better for me just to sketch the building. lol

No Parking Any Time

Sometimes it gets a little frustrating here on Long Island. There are so many beautiful areas where you can't park or you have to be a resident to park. Luckily many of those places you can visit in the off season. I also do a lot of sketching from my "mobile studio" and figure I'm safe as long as I am sitting in my car and not leaving it "parked." This was down one of the streets leading to the bay in Sayville. You were actually allowed to park on the street, but not in the space right by the opening at the end of the beach. I was a quite a few feet back. 

Sewing Notions

The Patchogue Sketch Club met recently to sketch sewing notions. I've collected a lot of spools of thread over the years, and can actually remember which sewing projects I used them for. Most of these items were in a sewing box given to me by my parents. It came in handy, but seems to be bursting at the seams. 

Blue Island Oyster Company

Down near the town dock in West Sayville is Blue Island Oyster Company. I love the assortment of buildings, cars, covered boats, and foliage around the area. It was a fun sketch to do. I've never been inside the building, but I googled it for info. This is their distribution center and corporate office. I do believe they are also open to the public for sales. Before the pandemic a friend invited a few sketchers to visit and sketch at her husband's oyster farm. It turns out this is the same company that Chuck Westfall is part of. He was a great host the day we visited and drove us back and forth to sketching locations where the farm is located. It is a small world.

 

Panera Sketch

 On one of our recent cold days I wanted to sketch indoors, not from my mobile studio. I headed over to the Panera in Bohemia. It is set up so that I can get a view of the counter and the people ordering. Of course I got there and nobody was at the counter, so I started with the people sitting at the table on the left and made sure to leave space for people when they went to the counter to order. It worked. There was a bigger pillar with stones and a coffee bar set up there, but I used artistic license to move that because it would take up too much space. All of this was done directly in ink.

Collage Joy Taster

 I've been participating in a 10 day online collage class given by Catherine Rains (catherinerains.com). I took a shorter collage class with her before and really enjoyed it. She gives this class once a year and it includes recorded lessons as well as live Q&A sessions. She is very good.

We started off making an assortment of different kinds of collage papers made from different types of papers and different weights. I used copy paper, tissue paper, deli paper, watercolor paper, and rice paper. She taught us various methods to turn them into colored collage papers. We used crayon resists, bubbles, marbles, scraping, and water resists to design our papers. Some were more successful than others. Here are some of the papers I made.  We worked with 2 primary colored paints plus black and white paint. The last time I used blue and yellow, so this time I tried red and yellow. The colors are not ones I would normally pick, but I wanted to challenge myself.

These are mostly crayon resists.

Here are my water resist papers.

Our first collages were made with geometric pieces in assorted sizes and shapes.

The following day we did two collages. The assignment was to pick our favorite paper and use a piece of it in each collage. It needed to be a different size and orientation on each collage base. These are 3 x 3 inches. As you can see I used the same papers in both collages.

I was happy with both collages. I am planning to do a few more collages in this color scheme and will post them when they are done.

My thanks to Cat for a really good collage class!

                             

Tartinery at Grand Central

 My second sketch at Grand Central was at the food court area downstairs. Tartinery is one of the few food stalls that has actual seating. If you get food from most of the stalls there are standing tables only. It isn't very condusive to eating. I think they did that because previously there were too many homeless people that would come in and sleep in the seats at the tables and the customers had nowhere to eat.