Recently a friend and I took a ride to Sea Cliff which is on the north side of Long Island. It is a lovely town overlooking the water with lots of interesting old homes like this pink one. A number of them were small like this one, but with a lot of charm.
Last week I headed over to Northport to paint. There are some really lovely houses and buildings there. This one was up along the Bayview Street and overlooks the park by the harbor. I sat in the park looking back at the town.
Why sketch one house if I can do two and 2 halves? This was sketched in Oyster Bay. I liked the row of houses and couldn't decide which one to sketch. I started sketching the yellow one and I slowly added a second and they looked like they needed a bit more company on the sides.
I headed out on the north fork this weekend and added some sketches to my concertina sketchbook. This sketch filled the last segment on the front. There are some really nice houses with beautiful colors like this one in Southold.
I decided I'd never get to all the projects in Sketchbook Revival. My plan is to watch the videos and pick the ones that interest me. This lesson was by Tiffany Sharpe called "Watercolor Collage Fodder." I used a bit of stamped paper, a gelli print, tissue paper and watercolors.
I like sketching in Port Jefferson but finding a good view of something isn't easy. A lot of the streets are steep and parking is limited. Recently I realized that there is a parking lot that faces some houses across Main Street. If I'm lucky I can get a parking spot facing the houses straight on and even though I'm across the street they are visible above the traffic because they are partway up the hill. The other day I was lucky because the spot gave me a view of more than one house. What interested me wasn't the houses right on the street, but the ones that were tucked behind them up the driveways. With them side by side I thought it was a bonus to sketch across the view.
The NYC Urban Sketchers met on Sunday this weekend because it was supposed to be very hot on Saturday and storms were forecast. I'm glad we changed the day because Sunday the weather was perfect for outdoor sketching in Oyster Bay. We have sketched in Oyster Bay several times before and it is a town on Long Island Sound with some old homes, a few lovely churches, a motorcycle shop that houses Billy Joel's motorcycle collection, several restaurants, and views of boats and water. It was another location that I could go to easily and know that I could handle the walking.
My friend, Susan drove and we did a little tour of the town looking for sketching spots. For my first sketch I spotted this small yellow house right nearby our meeting spot. The house was in itself a very basic, sort of simple structure but had a wonderful, wild garden in front of it behind a fence. It was also on a side street and there were no cars parked in front. In fact I had a spot to sit directly across the street that was marked "no parking here to the corner."
I sat down and a little while later my friend, Andrew came along and asked if I minded if he sat next to me. It was fine with me. The homeowner, who was a fairly elderly woman, came out a few times to work with the plants and flowers and must have noticed that Andrew and I were staring at her house...so she came over to see what we were doing. She was thrilled to see us painting it. Andrew is deaf so he wasn't able to hear what she said about how she works on the garden every year and how much it means to her. He showed her a card that said he had a hearing problem so she wouldn't think he was being rude and ignoring her. Andrew can read lips but I don't think he could understand much of what she was saying so I filled him in later. It was a nice location to sketch!
