This year I will be participating in the 15th Annual Artists Studio Tour. It is a free, informal event where artists from Maplewood and South Orange, NJ open their studios to the public. Each artist has a stack of flyers with maps so you can navigate your way around town to the different studios. You can see from the map that this is a very artistic area! For more information about the event and the individual artists (65 of them, of course I am #65!) go to studiotoursoma.org

Lately I have been doing some sketching and have upgraded my supplies for just a few dollars. I purchased two Caran d'Ache Pablo pencils in colors that I thought would most closely imitate the color of graphite: Sepia and black. They move nicely across the page and erase well enough, especially when the line is lightly drawn. The advantage of these pencils is that they do not smudge the way that graphite pencils tend to do. I upgraded my pencil sharpener too, to a Kum long p