Whaoha,

Back from my trip to D.C, expect a DOOZY of a post with photos, drawings and what nots.

I left about a week and a half ago to go stay with some relatives who live just outside of Washington D.C. I didn’t have a sketchbook with me when I first went down, never really found a good one until NOW. That baby I’m drawing in is a Moleskine Pocket Japanese Notebook, pretty much the best damn sketchbook I’ve ever had. Although it doesn’t take ink very well from a brush it works amazing with my Rotring Art Pen which I posted about how to fix a couple months back. I’m pretty fussy with papers, pens, brushes and what nots but I found that this combo works the best…ever. I would have to say it flows like hot butter in a pan. BAMN!

So here’s a small section from the sketchbook, now if you’ve ever owned this type of Moleskine you know the pages stretch out to 8 feet long. I’m working on scanning it all in and putting it on my website as one giant piece of art work, but I’ll let you know when thats done.

This sketchbook pretty much makes itself. You draw on one page, open it up and BAMN! You just keep adding to it and ADDING TO IT. Now my old teachers from college won’t believe this when I say I actually finished a sketchbook but! Clemente, Ted, James it’s true. I think it took me 5 days to fill the front and back of this entire sketchbook.

Here’s another page:

Now the art store in D.C. had a lot of these and I thought to myself, “well ALL art stores should carry these, I’ll just pick up one when I get back to Vermont.” Yeah, no. D.C IS HUGE…Vermont…is not. I’ve gone into 3 stores looking for these things and I can’t find it at all. (Keep in mind I’m talking about the area I live in without travelling to a larger part of Vermont.)

One of my favorite things about staying at my relatives house is that they have no T.V. and like all Covino’s we’re not your average bunch of people. What did we do when we weren’t walking the city? WELL he’s got this pretty nice radio that he hooks up to his Mactop and records OLD TIME RADIO SHOWS. I’m talking about shows like GUNSMOKE, The Traveler, and Dragnet.

Every sunday night from 7-11 this D.C. radio station which I think is…WAMU kicks it over old school and we just sit there and listen to the radio. I’m not going to lie when I tell you it was awesome, in fact it was so awesome that I’m going to listen tonight or just go online and find out where I can listen to them online.

Now the rest of the time that same station switches over from news to programs like “Hot Jazz” and crazy latin music.

This is one of my favorite drawings I did. Thats an old espresso coffee maker called a Neapolitan Flip Coffee Pot. How it works is like how I drew it above, coffee goes into the twisty chamber, water goes into the cup on the bottom THEN YOU BOIL IT AND FLIP IT OVER! I actually found one of these in a box of things from my Memere’s house and for all these years it was used as a powdered sugar spreader hahah. Well, The more you know eh? So I’ve tried it like this and I like the Bialetti Moka Express better.

Thats about it for the drawings I am going to show you but if you head on over to my flickr account you’ll see a smidgen of the photos I took when I went to the museums. Turns out we timed it just right and it was right in time for the Japanese Cherry Blossom Festival.

You could smell those things all across the city, couldn’t get away from the damn things. Theres something like 800 planted around there so hey, if you like flowers and trees that have flowers, and Japaneses tourists HEAD ON DOWN TO D.C.

More photos from my flickr account found here

*Side Note*

Inside the Smithsonian they have an exhibit called the “Insect Zoo.” This photo is an example of the type of things in life I find to be the most funny and it’s what I live for. SMALL MOMENTS LIKE THESE…make life great. ENJOY

Irony

*End Transmission*
Chad C.