Sketchercizing My Errands

I combined walking, errands and sketching this morning, and really enjoyed all three, especially using my new sepia Copic Multiliner to draw these sketches. The pen is made of aluminum, is refillable with a replaceable tip. It’s very comfortable in the hand with a wider barrel than my usual Micron Pigmas, and the pen just glides across the page.

First stop was my little local library where I returned “Chasing Matisse”, a lackluster memoir about a guy who gets a book deal to go visit all of the places where Matisse lived. He fancies himself an artist as well as a journalist, but I didn’t think he was much of either. He basically read Hilary Spurling’s excellent two-part biography of Matisse and repeats stuff from her book in between his boring descriptions of his own  experiences seeing what Matisse had seen and sometimes even trying to sketch or paint it.

Next was another return of an Amazon purchase to the El Cerrito Post Office. I asked the clerk if she’d stamp my sketchbook with her round postmark stamp, just for fun but she said no and gave me some “airmail” stickers to use instead which I didn’t.

When I was a kid my grandfather had a bunch of rubber stamps and pads of old deposit slips from when he’d been a banker before the bank closed during the depression (but why did he still have them?). I used to love going to his house and playing with the rubber stamps.

I’d planned to add sepia ink washes to these sketches at home tonight because I’d ordered a bottle of that ink, but when I looked at the items that arrived in my order I discovered they’d made a mistake and sent me black ink instead. Rats. One more thing to return.