the portable city

by definition, not static

reprioritizing / replanning / restructuring

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small posts to be enjoyed en masse

  • Yellow grasses added

    The texture on the paper in this MUJI sketchbook is so pleasing!

  • Added another blueberry bush!

    I love how they start to go red in the end of summer, they are underrated ornamental beauties!

  • Added a blueberry bush

    This palette really holds you accountable to relative colour! But also: you can use every pencil crayon in your possession and it will still feel perfectly harmonious.

  • Willow Tree WIP cont.

  • Willow tree drawing WIP

    Taking this limited palette on the road!

  • playing around with a beautiful limited palette

    these are the Derwent Drawing line of pencil crayons, and I’m having a lot of fun with them in my cheap MUJI sketchbooks!

  • Neocolor carnation

    Drawn without water, on a 6 x 9″ grey blue cardstock, I think Strathmore brand. Drawn from life, from a lovely birthday bouquet.

  • Skeletons (2010)

    Shoutout to Jurie and Andy for sharing this gem with me; deeply british, dry, spooky, sweet, and shows you the tip of the iceberg of a larger occult understanding that is revealed further through rewatchings and the subsequent mulling over you might do at the pub after with a friend.

  • Shing Yin Khor’s “Make Little Guys”

    We’re all getting bombarded, and the fight, flight, freeze response is probably flooding your brain, and I too am feeling paralyzed by the constant internal question “what can I even do about ~everything~?!” —

    — and this piece – manifesto, poem, performance – from Shing Yin Khor’s patreon popped up in my bookmarks-to-revisit and reminded me that zooming in on something like a Little Guy can be a wonderful empowering connecting experience.

    So here, go, enjoy, hold on, challenge the aggressive flood of learned helplessness the world is throwing at us all right now:

  • Aquarium Gouache Study

    4 x 6″ gouache prawn. I decided to try using some drying time extenders – glycerine, watercolour blending medium – to try for more of a wet in wet blend approach, but honestly it was hard to keep the paint thick enough that it wasn’t just running all over the page. Something to retry in future on either more absorbent paper or with more viscous, fresh gouache.

  • Purple Bellflower Study in Oil Pastel

    Drawn on very, very smooth paper, a mistake I will not make again. Photo ref taken from my database of plants that I have grown (intentionally or not!) in my garden over the years.

  • Fountain Pen Sketching

    Drawn from pinterest ref with my FPR ultraflex nib over an undersketch done with a long blade nib and washed into the page with a waterbrush.

  • Sketchbook barbarian

    Haven’t drawn a Conan in a while, so, tried my hand at it. Fountain pen is such a delight to sketch with! This was drawn with an FPR Ultraflex nib, tho I dunno if I was really pushing it to its limits with this one.

  • Neocolor II Boat Sketch

    Painted in my sketchbook with neocolor iis over a fountain pen sketch. Reffed from pinterest. After having my ass kicked learning to draw boats for a game in 2021, I can’t stop thinking about them! Little boats especially I find so incredibly cute.

  • Streetcar Crystal Island Sketch

    Sketchbook page, fountain pen and neocolor iis and a waterbrush, layered and layered and layered.

    I think there’s something here but it’ll take a fair bit more reworking to really see it. An idea for later.

  • Wizard Puberty Zine

    I started thumbnailing out my wizard puberty zine! I think there’s another edit pass on the text ahead of me though; I’m gonna do the first ten or twelve pages, maybe all the way to finish, so I know sort of what my visual language IS, and then go back to the text one more time.

  • Gouache Spaceship Sketch

    Berkey-inspired, done in one of muji’s very cheap and much-nicer-than-expected sketchbooks.

  • Dragon WIP Gouache Painting

    I loved the sketch for this and the painting isn’t quite capturing it, so I’m wondering if, at this WIP stage, it might make sense to go in next with pencil crayons and see if i can’t capture more of what I’m looking for gesturally.

  • Toronto scene in Gouache

    A lovely array of flowers i used to walk by every day after work.

  • gouache portrait study of a singer

    heck, i love gouache, I’ve missed gouache

  • little crystal island with a little wizard

    click here to buy a print of this piece

    watercolour and fountain pen, in my sketchbook.

    I’ve been drawing modern wizards for my wizard puberty zine and what if they hung out on crystals islands.

  • oil pastel mini portrait study

    Browsed through Earth’s World for some great natural light portraits to practice with. This was made in a new little 5 x 7ish sketchbook I picked up that’s filled with recycled cotton rag paper. I’d been noticing that rag papers have taken my softest oil pastels the best – you can see one pushed to its limit here – and finding a rag paper sketchbook seemed lucky! So my plan is to fill it up with small tests and just work on my technique.

  • while i am gardening this website i realize the weeding process is maybe invisible

    As I edit posts for spelling and grammar and tagging and layout and all these little invisible things I do to try and learn how to wrangle my website and all its content, I realize that a) this seems to kick them back into RSS “unread” status, which must be annoying..? and b) most folks will not be able to discern any difference in the post itself in most cases.

    So what if each post had a potential little changelog on it for stuff like that? so when I modify it I can add a reason why? is that … interesting to anyone else? I’m likely to do it just for myself but let me know. Also, are there folks doing this in a fun way? Curious website owners want t ofind out.

  • Gouache hawk study

    got the gouache out again for the first time in months; arm recovery really took the fun out of it for me for a while there! but I’m feeling more myself when it comes to holding the brush again, and it was lovely to sit and do a study of the hawk I watched kill and eat a squirrel at my friend’s park birthday celebration earlier this year.

  • Oil pastel robin

    I’ve been doing studies in the Robert Bateman brand sketchbooks, which are a pretty smooth vellum surface; the oil pastel slides around wildly on them but gosh it’s fun! This drawing is maybe 7 x 7″ or so in size. Reffed my own photo.

    Again I did an underdrawing with the cray-pas expressionist oil pastels – they hold a decent point and are very easy to layer over with softer brands like mungyo, haiya, or god help me sennellier.