These little guys are all over Texas.
Fun fact: Desert cottontails hardly ever drink water. I feel like I should make a craft beer joke here, because Texas, but desert cottontails really just get all the moisture they need from the plants they eat.
My Texas Wildlife menagerie is growing!
My sketch is a day late this week, and I still didn’t manage to finish it.
The humble but vocal cicada. Its metallic buzz is the sound of a hot summer day in Texas.
This sketch is a clear failure to simplify. Apparently the more familiar I am with my subject matter, the easier it is for me to depict it with a few simple lines. If I’m drawing something I’m not super familiar with, like armadillos or cicadas, I end up with a tall pile of reference photos and a thousand unnecessary details. And in this case, an unfinished sketch. I’ll try to do better next week.
Austin is home to the world’s largest urban bat colony.
About a million and a half Mexican free-tailed bats reside under the Congress Avenue Bridge. They emerge at dusk to hunt mosquitoes and other insects, and return at dawn.
Fun fact: Bats and armadillos are both nocturnal. But armadillos sometimes venture out in daylight, especially in cool weather.
Two of my artist friends inspired my resolution for 2020. There’s this thing I do where I get a great idea for a Christmas or birthday card, but when I go to draw it I get all bogged down in details and the pursuit of hyperrealistic perfection. Then it stops being fun and I wander off and never finish it. The last card I managed to finish was this one in 2017. I spent way too much time on it, and when it was finally done I realized that I liked the cheerful storybook simplicity of this card better anyway.
So for my 2019 Christmas card I planned to keep things nice and simple. I would draw a cartoon-style armadillo next to a festive little yaupon tree full of winter berries. Easy peasy. Except I seem to have forgotten how to draw simple shapes. No matter how many times I started over, I couldn’t figure out how to depict a card-worthy armadillo without obsessing over all the little details that make armadillos so adorable.
I didn’t feel too bad about my unfinished card. Mailing out Christmas cards seems to be falling out of fashion anyway in these busy times.
But this year we received a hand-drawn card from a young family friend. And it brought me so much joy.
She made it look so effortless. And I know it wasn’t effortless at all, or if it was it’s only because she works on her art constantly, all the time.
I have another friend who challenges herself to draw something almost every single day. She shares the images online. She’s been doing this for a couple years now, and I’ve watched her artistic skills develop pretty dramatically in that time.
So on Christmas Day, as I stared enviously at the handmade card from my young artist friend, I resolved to follow the example of my other friend who draws something every day. Except not literally every day, because then I’d have to give up some other hobbies that i like. The best I can realistically commit to is one completed sketch per week. Still way better than my current average.
The goal is to learn how to quickly draw images that capture the spirit of the subject without a lot of unnecessary details. The rules are simple: I will post one sketch here on my blog every week. If my sketch isn’t finished I will post it anyway, even if all I have is a rough outline. Hopefully I will improve with practice.
For my first sketch I wanted to finish that armadillo. I grumbled to Luke and Elizabeth that it’s basically impossible to draw a cartoon armadillo, because they’re too…textury.
They both immediately drew cartoon armadillos.
Luke drew this one:
His first draft only had three vertical stripes down the middle. “This is Texas,” I said. “We have nine-banded Armadillos here.” So he added six more stripes and the ballcap, because Texas.
Elizabeth drew this one:
“It’s not nubbly,” I said. “It has no nubbles.”
“I might color it later and add nubbles,” she said. “This is a cartoon armadillo.”
I went back to my drawing board, and eventually produced this:
I like it, but it took too long to draw. Maybe a year from now I will be able to draw a simple armadillo without spending a week on it. That’s the goal, anyway.
Happy New Year! 2020 is going to be an exciting year, I can feel it!
We headed back to San Antonio over Spring Break to make a final decision on whether or not to move there, and hopefully to find a neighborhood we liked. This time the weather cooperated with our efforts – highs in the 70s and just enough clouds to keep things balmy.
We fell in love with the Riverwalk on our last visit, so that’s where we spent our first day. We left the car at the Pearl Brewery, which is as close as we could get to the Alamo from the north side without paying for parking.
Just as the City of Austin Power Plant is no longer a power plant, the Pearl Brewery is no longer a brewery. The lovely old buildings have been repurposed into shops, restaurants, hotels and apartments.
Some structures have kept their original names: the Can Plant is now resident apartments, the Bottling Department is a food hall. The stable that once housed horses to pull the beer wagons is now an upscale venue for formal events:
There are still rails in the ground in places, but they’re no longer in use.
The San Antonio river was the old brewery’s source of fresh water, so the Pearl sits right on its bank. This is where the Riverwalk begins, though the river itself continues upstream for another four miles to its spring-fed origins.
A river shuttle carries passengers back and forth between the Pearl and the downstream end of the Riverwalk, about five miles each way.
Our plan was to walk the river at least as far as Hemisfair Park and explore whatever caught our interest along the way, then catch a Rio Shuttle back to the Pearl when we were ready to call it a night.
I love the art installations along the river. The first one we came to was “The Grotto,” a cave-like formation that also serves as access to the the Riverwalk from street level via the mouth of a stone jaguar.
Next we came to the school of glass fish that hangs beneath the I-35 overpass.
At night each fish is illuminated from within. Absolutely gorgeous.
On the grounds of the Museum of Art, a mariachi band was performing for a family party.
Hispanic culture is deep in this city’s roots. San Antonio was founded in 1718 as a Spanish mission, 58 years before the American colonies drafted their Declaration of Independence and 127 years before Texas first joined the United States. This is an old, old city by American standards.
We reached the boat locks and dam just as one of the rio shuttles arrived, so we stopped to watch it go through.
In at the top, out at the bottom.
Stairway portals, architectural flourishes and lush landscaping provide visual interest along the route.
Local directories are posted at regular intervals. When we passed near the Central Library, we headed up to check it out.
San Antonio’s Central Library is an interesting mix of colorful and industrial, artistic and utilitarian.
Luke found an ample selection of books in his interest range (mostly politics and history), but he deemed the ambiance to be uninviting almost to the point of oppressiveness. I reminded him that even in Fort Worth the big central library has security guards posted on every floor, but I did see his point. This is not really a cozy library.
We returned to the Riverwalk and continued on. We had planned to tour the Alamo, but the whole area was packed with tourists visiting for Spring Break and we didn’t feel like standing in line for an hour.
We walked around the Alamo grounds for a bit and then continued on to Hemisfair Park and the Tower of the Americas.
The Tower was built for the 1968 World’s Fair. It is 750 feet high and provides a commanding 360-degree view of the city from observation decks at the top.
The views are expansive, but my emotional response bordered on claustrophobia. This city just goes on forever in all directions.
13-year-old me would have delighted in the idea of living in that close-packed warren of humanity, but 48-year-old me wants easy access to wild green spaces and a sunny yard for a kitchen garden. Even the city parks seem few and far between here.
I had to remind myself that we just need to find the right neighborhood, and then the urban sprawl won’t feel closed-in. As Fortune Red once wisely told me,”It’s the company what makes the feast.” And even from the heart of San Antonio, the wild spaces around the edges are an easy half-hour drive away.
We had timed our visit to the Tower to coincide with sunset, because I had wanted to see the city in daylight and Luke had wanted to see it at night. We got through the lines a bit earlier than we had expected, so after I got my daylight views we came back down and killed some time in the park. There is a nice play area there with lots of climby stuff.
When the sun set, we returned to the Tower for Luke’s nighttime view.
The city really does go on forever in all directions.
When we had seen our fill, we returned to the Riverwalk.
We were ready to catch a rio shuttle back to the Pearl, but alas, we just missed the last boat. We decided to walk back to the car on surface streets to shave off some distance. But we wanted to see the illuminated fish, so we cut back to the Riverwalk just before the I-35 underpass.
The fish are gorgeous at night, but challenging to photograph well. I really need to spend some time learning how to get clear, distortion-free photos of bright objects at night. These images don’t do the scene justice.
We got back to the car, checked into a nearby hotel, had a quick meal of sandwiches that we’d brought with us and then went to sleep.
Day One verdict: the Riverwalk and downtown are as beautiful as we remembered, but the idea of living in such a densely populated area is mildly intimidating. The suburbs are a strong option.
An Invincible Summer 