I did this watercolor sketch on a balmy December day. I just noticed I had not posted it yet, and it made me realize I haven't done any watercolor sketches in the month of February. It's weird how your focus can change from material to material, from subject to subject. It's been too cold here to sketch outside, but now it's warm again, but it's about to be rainy. Hopefully more outdoor sketching will resume in March.

I'm catching up on posting sketches I haven't posted yet and luckily a lot of them fall in the same category so I can post them all together!
Here's a progression of a couple of cups of peppermint tea, sketched in ink with a little spot color.

Waiting for water to boil is always a good time to sketch. 

Mugs and cans are both fun to sketch - and so are beets! I don't like to eat beets, but I love to draw them.

More hot tea! These are a mix of a brush pen, a Mitsubishi two-sided pencil, and this last one is probably a Pigma Graphic 1 (my "fat pen"). I was probably waiting for water to boil when I sketched these vegetables I chopped.

Looks like I started this year with lots and lots of coffee! I did. 
Coffee cups, mugs, drink cans, things on my desk, and food I'm preparing are always fun and easy subjects because they're always close at hand.

Who is up for a lot of Clark Tower sketches? Here are a bunch from the last few months.
I started doing these when the pandemic first started and I began picking up my groceries right across the street, always giving myself a few minutes for a sketch.

If you're wondering what the deal is with me and this building, check out this post on my old blog.

I've been carrying minimal sketch gear when I run out for groceries or to pick up a to-go order, and just carrying one or two pens and a double-color Mitsubishi pencil works well.

I refer to the Clark Tower as "my Devils Tower" because of that scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind where Richard Dreyfuss sculpts the Devils Tower out of mashed potatoes. A friend suggested this when I made a four-foot tall painting of this building on wallpaper a few years ago. In the fall I got to see the real Devil's Tower for the first time and noticed some similarities, like the stripes made by the window arrangements are similar to the striations in the rock formation.

But I don't just sketch it! I'm making acrylic ink paintings of the Clark Tower in a sketchbook during my studio night. I've done 22 since I started almost a year ago - here are a few! It helps me to have an image I can come back to over and over again and work with in different ways.