Still Sketchin' Daily

I am still sketching daily in my 75-Day Sketch Challenge. This is one page I feel good about, a sketch of an ametrine crystal I bought a couple years ago at the Tucson Gem Show. There is truly some fascinating colors in this rock, mostly an amethyst shade but with yellow and gold glowing from within.

This morning I spent quite a bit of time looking at handwritten font styles, as well as ways to portray dates in your journal. One of the biggest take-away's from my info-gathering this morning is to SLOW DOWN when writing letters in a journal. I used to have good penmanship and I remember clearly in elementary school working hard on it and trying to decide on my own personal style. I had a few weeks of drafting in middle school and that further motivated me to write neatly. But ever since the Computer Age dawned for me in the early-1980's, my penmanship and lettering has gotten progressively sloppy and hurried. I've felt vaguely ashamed about it, but would just shrug it off as a sign of the times. Now it seems an old artform is resurging into my awareness, the lost artform of hand lettering and neat penmanship. And another thing I discovered this morning? It's almost impossible to find information on just how to do this on the Web. It's all about digitized fonts, baby.

One thing I want to mention is that the palette you see contains Winsor and Newton Cotman paints that have been removed from the original lumbering plastic container into this nice streamlined Altoids tin (sprayed inside with black enamel gloss paint since I did not have white). I like it!