Gate of the year

One of my New Year's goals was to take on a project of  #100daysofsketchingnaturethroughmywindow. I haven't made much progress so far, because it's been so cold. We've kept most of the curtains drawn, most of the time.

So yesterday I watched New York nature artist Kateri Ewing's demo of her daily watercolor sketching practice in a Hobonichi journal.  She lets a few watercolor pigments interact across the page, then looks for forms, similar to seeking shapes in cloud formations. She uses graphite to bring out her vision.

I let a few colors run together on a January page in my Leuchtturm 1917 bullet journal. I used a Pentel GraphGear 500 mechanical pencil to outline various shapes, moving toward a vignette. The paper is not meant for watercolor, but doesn’t bleed through to the other side, just wrinkles a bit.

The suggestion of a hand in the upper right corner reminded me of Minnie Louise Hoskins’ poem about the man standing at the gate of the year. I used it to begin a new sketchbook in January, a couple years ago. Last week, I heard it quoted in a Youtube documentary about the history of the British royal Christmas speeches. King George VI read it over the radio December 25, 1939.

I said to the man who stood at the Gate of the Year,
‘Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.’
And he replied, ‘Go out into the darkness, and put your hand into the Hand of God.
That shall be better than light, and safer than a known way.’. . . .

(Sorry this photo isn’t more clear. It was difficult to keep the graphite from reflecting as white, in a few places where it was more densely laid down.)