Artwork: Maple Leaves and One Cowboy Boot

There are tubes of watercolor paints scattered all over the dining table out here at our Arizona place. India ink markers and number ten brushes and kneaded erasers and sketchbooks and graphite pencils join the mess. I'm back at taking art classes and the house will soon turn chaotic with art supplies.

The "Pen and Ink With Watercolor" class met this week for session one and students were treated to a demonstration of watercolor washes as performed by master watercolorist, Susan Morris. Our assignment for next week's class is six sketches done in pen and ink, all of the same object, but rendered in different styles, namely, hatching, cross hatching, stippling, scumbling, contour hatching and cross contour hatching.

I, of course, got carried away in my daily art journal and did a triad of maple leaves using stipple and cross hatch. Just for good measure, I added a touch of yellow ochre watercolor wash to the drawing. The leaves are totally from memory, but I'm rather linking the sketch.

Yesterday, while playing with new tubes of watercolor, I laid washes over a few postcards. I had a cowboy boot rubber stamp (cool, something that looks like I bought it in Arizona) that I found this week (rubber stamp selections are pretty generic and aimed at the scrapbooking market, since art people are supposed to draw their own boots) so I stamped that in black ink on top of the wash.

Then I added a big rock and a cactus and some watercolor glazing. I used Pitt markers, the set that comes in shades of gray, to tone in heat lines and contour a bit. The boot was filled in using Polychromos color pencils, the set that I bought at the Bennie's store in Pigeon, Michigan. (Some of you know that shop as HarJo's Ben Franklin, but my dear mother-in-law Pauline always called it the Bennie's Store and so do I).

Then I grabbed another Pitt marker, this one black, and stippled the heck out of the base of the boot and the cactus.

I like this drawing, too, but I'm willing to shove this postcard into my mailbox and send it to the first person who sends me their snail mail address via Facebook. (And by so doing, I get to name you and where you are from in another Facebook post, okay? So if you don't want to be known, don't send me your address.)

Let's keep it in the U.S., people, since those of you who are in other places probably know enough to right click and save the image on to your computer.

So, here we go. First private message with a U.S. address gets this postcard, an original piece of mailed art. Ready, set, GO!