Loomis begins with the artificial horizon and pretty soon has it filled in with trees and houses set along curvy roads, and another bikini girl posed on a set of stairs. From there the book moves indoors and explains how to lay out a room in 2D.

And that’s how I came to spend the weekend drawing the front room.

The amount of stress relief available from a black pen on smooth, heavy, finely finished paper is amazing. The Exacompta books start with the month of December of the prior year, so I’ll be switching over to 2011 tomorrow after recording notes about the “Boxing Day Blizzard of 2010″ (15″ of snow over two days here on the island) and what we had to eat on Christmas day in 2010. It’s always a wonderful feeling to start in on newly opened pages. Below is a small beastie from a short staff meeting in 2010 – Happy New Year!

This beautiful Hydranga grows in front of the office of a hotel on Rte. 3, about two feet from the busy highway on one side and the same distance from the roundabout on the other. All winter the plow trucks brush it by and dump sand and salt all over the little plot of grass it sits on. It never seems to be watered or cared for in the summer; they just mow the lawn around it and let it be.  No one prunes it or takes off the dead flower heads in the fall. Evidently hydrangaes love neglect.

I’ve admired this shrub for years and tried to draw it once or twice but I’ve failed miserably to bring across the sheer abundance of the blossoms, the fade from dark to bright on the individual flower heads as well as en masse and the strength of the branches underneath that carpet of foliage. It is now firmly in the category of “things I’m never going to paint”.