Face Time

You know those cross-country trips that nip from one coast to another for a day and then back? There are people who do that regularly for a living. Honestly, I don’t know how they do it. I left LA on Monday to go to a meeting in DC, and returned on Tuesday night, and while nothing unpleasant happened en route (and the meeting at the DC office of the American Physical Society was good), it is really not something I’d make a habit of. I like to add a bit of time to see the place I’m visiting, and get a bit of a feel of the pulse before flying back. But there wasn’t time. I was in DC for a day and a half last November to visit another organization, and I did manage to get two hours to wander the mall and have a sandwich in the cafe of the Smithsonian, but I’d have liked a bit more time back then too. Anyway…

I did, however, get some face time. On take off on the flight back I flipped through Hemispheres (United’s in flight magazine) to see if there were any more large faces to sketch. (You’ll recall several earlier posts about my liking to do this for practice and entertainment.) I found none that interested me, but I did find a cluster of small faces in a piece about fashion, and so I set out to do some quick pencil doodles of them. Well, the pencil doodles, rough as they were, intrigued me so I got out a micron pen I happened to have in my handbag and inked them. Then I got out a little case of watercolour pencils also I happened to have and threw on some colour, and finally I got out a water brush, filled it from my glass of water, and flowed the colors in the way they love that lifts them off the page luminously. By time I was done (with an interruption or two, for example to pick slightly at the unhappy plate of food brought by the attendants, who were quite interested in this sketching activity – I’d been randomly upgraded to business class on this leg), several hours had apparently gone by and it was almost time to land.

-cvj