Happy summer solstice! Summer solstice officially occurs at 2:07 am Alaska Time. Where I live in McCarthy the sun will rise at 3:49 am and set at 11:17 pm for a total of 19 hours and 28 minutes of daylight. That contrasts with the winter solstice, where we have 5 hours and 22 minutes of daylight. Daylight gives us energy and makes us happy so it’s a reason to celebrate.  You can use this daylight calculator to see how much daylight there is on a certain day of the year in your location.

I’m sitting down at my computer to write in the evening. I just watered the garden, but a new rainstorm is moving up the valley from the Chugach. I hear Robins and Varied Thrushes singing outside and I found that many of the Calypso Orchids are in bloom today. Many other flowers will follow them. Summer and its’ frenetic energy seem to have arrived on the Nizina. I thought I’d sit down and give you a summary of where I’ll be and when, so you can follow along with me.

“Loneliness is like sitting in an empty room and being aware of the space around you. It is a condition of separateness. Solitude is becoming one with the space around you. It is a condition of union. Loneliness is small, solitude is large. Loneliness closes around you; solitude expands toward the infinite. Loneliness has its roots in words, in an internal conversation that nobody answers; solitude has its roots in the great silence of eternity”

-Quote by Kent Nerburn, which I found posted by @northernproject on Instagram several months ago.

This year I decided to participate in the 100 Days Project, a free, global project, hosted online where people do one creative act every day for 100 days. You can learn more about it on their website and see what other people are doing by searching under #the100dayproject.

I’m not the type of tourist who wants to see every museum that a place has to offer, but I do love to go and spend a couple of hours walking around an art or natural history museum. Often when going to a new museum there is so much to see that I get overwhelmed. One of my favorite ways to slow down and appreciate what’s in front of me (instead of worrying about trying to see everything) is to bring a sketchbook or journal and take some time for focused observation.

While I was traveling in Vietnam and Cambodia I filled an accordion sketchbook, and I had quite a bit of fun doing it. Accordion sketchbooks are relatively cheap to buy, or are easy to make; they are portable, and provide a wealth of options for how to fill them. First I am going to show you how to make your own, then I’ll write a bit about how I filled mine while traveling.

Think about using both pages of your sketchbook (the spread) to spread out and tell more of a story, adding context to your original illustration. In this post are three examples from my travel sketchbook. I love drawing and thinking about plants, so that is my focus here, but you can obviously choose whatever you like as your subject.

Creating your own field guide or collection can be a great way to organize visual information. You also can be creative with it and don’t need to take it to a Sibley-level of perfection unless you want to. Here is an example of a collection of different tropical flowers I found while walking around Hoi An, Vietnam.