Studio Ferguson: September 2013

Summer has been a very busy time for me this year. I have been working hard on my pencil portraits and my art business.... but I have also been playing hard as well. Knowing that starting in October, I will be working around 80 hours a week at the mall, my plan was to play and have as much fun as possible this summer. We did a lot of wild camping, boating and my favorite, swimming in the lakes of Ontario. We had great bonfires and delicious food. Nothing is better than food cooked over an open fire, with little bits of ash and parts of your food undercooked...parts of it burnt....call me crazy but I think it just tastes so much better. Maybe I am just hungry after the effort it takes to cook food over an open fire. This summer I spent hours scouring the forest for fallen logs and sticks, dragging many decomposing trees to our wood pile next to the bonfire. I camped in summer rain storms and when the bugs were so bad you that couldn't escape...and of course when the sun shone down on me and turned my skin brown. I was on guard for bears, wolves, coyotes, and even moose but I only saw one black bear this summer and it was running across the road in front of our car. The lakes were cold but weren't too bad after I held my breath and just jumped in....the fastest and easiest way to swim in Canada. I jumped from the cliffs into the lake..I wasn't brave enough to jump off the high rocks, only the "kiddie rocks" but it was good enough for me. My BlackLab/Collie learned how to swim this summer....believe it or not I have a Lab that doesn't like the water, but by the end of the summer he was in the lake swimming with the rest of us. Good times and great laughs with lots of friends. The warm sweet summer is over until next year... I can feel the cold air settling in at night and know that beautiful autumn is right around the corner.

There was a regular stream of pencil portrait customers this summer. Some of them were valued repeat customers and some of them were new. Unfortunately, I didn't get photos of all of them. Here are some of the graphite portraits that I worked on this summer.