Lake Tahoe Sketches

It's an annual tradition for my family to spend Thanksgiving week at The Ridge in South Lake Tahoe. We usually hunker down and knit, watch tv, play board games, and just spend time together within two suites within the same building. This year, I spent a lot of time drawing and painting rather than knitting, with a little embroidery thrown in for good measure.

We were lucky enough to get a room on the 8th floor of The Plaza building with a light view of the lake. Instead of braving the snow and cold, I decided to sketch the view almost every day. Here are my sketches of our view of Lake Tahoe.

Paris Terrace View

Here is the view from one of our terraces at our Paris apartment.

Finished Travel Sketchbook!

I finally completed the travel sketchbook I made for my trip to Paris, London & Barcelona. I really enjoyed sketching on the trip and even drawing from my photos once I got home. It really let me relive my trip again!

Here is a quick tour of my sketchbook and a more leisurely one below that.

A slower sketchbook tour.

Final Pages of my Travel Sketchbook

This summer, my 9 year old is attending "Camp Mom" - which means I am entertaining her most days while Chloe completes a year's worth of math with her teacher's tutoring. After math today, we worked on using Marc Taro Holmes's continuous single line sketching for some of our urban travel sketches.

We used a timer and drew all 4 of these sketches within 20 minutes. We added brush pen and watercolors afterwards.

Chloe did great with her own sketches but soon got tired. I finished my travel sketchbook with this last view out of the airplane before landing at SFO.

I'm a little sad to be done with this travel sketchbook. But on to the next!

Barcelona Travel Sketches

We were only in Barcelona for 4 days - and there was so much to draw. I did my best in completing sketches while there, but there was not enough time to draw all that I wanted. So, I took lots of photos.

Here are some sketches I recently completed and added to my travel sketchbook.

Él Born Cultural Center - about a block from our apartment

Sketching with Miguel Herranz and Lapin near the Cultural Center

Stay tuned for more!

Devour Barcelona Food Tour

On our recent trip to Europe, we took two lovely food tours. One in Paris's Latin Quarter with Sidewalk Tours and one in Él Born in Barcelona and Barceloneta with Devour Barcelona Food Tours. They were both wonderful!

Here are the pages from my travel sketchbook detailing our Devour Barcelona Food Tour.

Casa Gispert, Pasteleria Hofmann & Bodega Fermin

Have you taken any food tours while on vacation?

Urban Sketching Commissions

Before my trip to Europe, I was lucky enough to get a commission for four art pieces of my choosing from an art lover on Instagram. Although I completed these two pieces while on my trip - stupid me left them on our plane from Barcelona to Paris! 😩

So, armed with my many photos from the trip, I put these four pieces together since coming home.

I'm so happy that my client loves them.

Illustrated Travel Journaling

In an attempt to document and remember our European trip, I put together these illustrated journal pages in my travel sketchbook. In this first page, I added in illustrations of our special pastries from the Balthazar x Bobbi Brown afternoon tea in London.

Afternoon tea at Balthazar in collaboration with Bobbi Brown.

These next three pages document the excellent Sidewalk Food Tour we took in Paris in the Latin Quarter.

And this page documents Day 1 of our trip.