a change of scenery

I’ve been walking and drawing and googling “nature preserves near me”, “best beaches in Minneapolis,” “mpls bird sanctuaries,” “Minnehaha Creek access,” and then walking and drawing and googling some more.

My art is inextricably tied to my experience outside. The places, landscapes, birds, critters, feelings are directly translated from existing in the world, noticing the beauty, sometimes gasping, photographing, and then creating from photo and feeling about the beauty that was found.

Life joyously moved from the mountains and deserts of Utah, to the lakes and woods of Minnesota a few months ago, but I continue to seek out beauty, it just takes on different forms and colors and sizes now that my scenery has changed.

See for yourself (ft. my golden puppy baby Bagel),

notes:

• nature is everywhere.

• my green markers are drying up.

• go outside bb.

sketchbook flip thru

💫 I’m celebrating finishing a sketchbook and you’re invited to the party, enjoy :)

My sketchbook functions as part journal, part test site for new supplies and rough drafts, part space to play while trying to keep the pressure dial low. Most of these spreads were drawn while sat at my kitchen table using reference photos I took on far away adventures and walks around the block. I also checked out a couple of wildlife photography books from the library to draw from. Really enjoyable, would recommend. I sometimes take my sketchbook out into the world to draw while sat somewhere beautiful, but rarely does this vision come to fruition.

It feels special to have 11 months of work bound together. So many precious landscapes, birds, and flowers happily nestled in the pages. All in all a 10/10 time. Pleased :)

returning to midwestern goodness

I spent the first twenty ish years of my life in Illinois and then developed a habit of making cross country moves every few years. A summer internship in Minneapolis. Another internship that turned into two years with a cute boy in Boise. Grad school in South Carolina. A long and short four years in Salt Lake. And then a month ago we put everything we owned in a shipping container, brought home a puppy we named Bagel, and retuned to an old flame named Minneapolis.

Meeting the twin cities nine years ago feels like a different lifetime. I came to town for an outdoor rec internship, filled with an eager energy that quickly soured. Thankfully Minnesota’s water, old trees, blue skies, local establishments, a best friend serendipitously in town for a journalism gig, and ice cream buoyed me through the summer of a difficult work life.

Photos from that summer hold heaps of pleasant nostalgia for little ol me,

So we’ve been back in the midwest for a whole month now. Happily scrounging together new furniture pieces from facebook marketplace to replace all we sold off in Salt Lake. Finding an old dish set at the vintage shop because we have a dishwasher for the first time and owning three plates doesn’t jive with such a luxury. Soaking in seas of green foliage and blooming orange poppies. Sitting beside lakes in the city and joining my cousins to open their cabin in rural Wisconsin where I spent a weekend each fall as a kid making winterberry forest soup and playing hide and seek in the loft. Delighting in long hugs with old friends, good ice cream with Josh, and long front stoop sits with our puppy. She chews on sticks, we play Stop or Go. A thrilling game of predicting if cars cruising by will stop at the four-way stop or not. I’ll tell you now it’s a neighborhood of go-ers.

While these past couple of months were a season for puppy and moving and settling in, my hope is for summer to be a season of substantial ice cream consumption, play, and drawing. The link from my camera roll to my sketchbook isn’t long, so if I were you I’d anticipate lush midwestern landscapes and creatures of the region to be showing up in the pages of my sketchbooks shortly. I’ll share those with you on instagram as I draw. But I’m also roughly 3 pages away from finishing my current sketchbook so maybe my next ,:`***blog <3 ***‘:, will be a tour of that.

It feels good to be back :)