The Quicksilver Workaholic

That Farmhouse of Vassmer's, originally uploaded by Cathy (Kate) Johnson.

Somehow I had imagined I'd have today off, after an insanely busy week and weekend; I was looking forward to doing nada, knowing this coming week will be even MORE insane.

Then I dreamed about work, all night. In full color. Including the frontmatter for the book that has to go off this week, and the article I needed to finish before Tuesday so I could mail IT. Auuuugh...I got out of bed around 6:30 and just started in on it all.

I did pretty well--and then remembered I had requested Frisket paper and hadn't yet done a demo illustration with it! YIPE. So I'd recently seen a photo of my beloved Vassmer farm taken shortly before some Orc burned it down, and decided that was the perfect example, given the dramatic lighting.

It was nowhere near THIS dramatic, but I've been drooling over a favorite old book by John Blockley, Watercolour Interpretations, and decided I could go a bit bolder.

For the first time, I noticed that many of his paintings are quite small...so I was inspired to go wild, small size. This one's about 8 x 6" on the original and wonderful Fabriano cold pressed paper, now discontinued...man, that stuff was glorious to work on!

I did the painting yesterday, and just added notes on the various techniques, if you'd like to see--they're on Flickr, here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cathy-johnson/3356116969/


Finally, finished scanning, describing, editing and tweaking both the book manuscript and the article, with Joseph's help, so ran away to sketch late this afternoon--you can see the results on the Urban Sketchers blog, here: http://www.urbansketchers.com/2009/03/mid-march-marietta-street-bridge.html

MRI early tomorrow morning for Joseph, and then get the book and article stuff off in the mail, so for tonight I'm going to go vegetate!