Lazy Sunday Afternoon

It's been a busy week... I had a little down time on Sunday afternoon and it was such a beautiful day, I decided to lounge around at a local lake and do some sketching. Field sketching is great exercise for an artist. You have to work really fast. It forces you to be loose and capture the essence of what you see. It also takes a lot of patience and can be REALLY frustrating. People keep moving around! Sometimes you feel like yelling out, 'Hey! I'm sketching here! Hold still!" But, of course, you don't - you don't want anybody to know you're sketching them! I sometimes work on a couple of sketches at the same time. There was this man with a cigar fishing. He kept getting his line tangled up.So I started this girl sunbathing and when she kept fiddling around with her cell phone, I went back to the man. I sometimes start a number of sketches and go back and forth between them. I also like to work on crummy notebook paper. It takes the pressure off of me, since I know I might end up with nothing worthwhile. Why mess up a perfectly good sketchbook when I have tons of old spiral notebooks left over from my kid's school days? These sketches aren't really for anybody to see but me.
Trees are great because they don't move. I've always had problems drawing them, though, and I don't think I'm very good at it. All those leaves are intimidating. The tough part is figuring out what NOT to draw. I just try to get an impression.