New year and the Theme Continues !

Hydrangea in December from our garden watercolor by Meera Rao 

Smithsonian Engagement Calendar 2021 week1 

Happy New Year !! Wishing all a happy, healthy, creative year ahead!

I am back at it again - sketching simultaneously in my 2021(retroactive) and 2022 Smithsonian Engagement Calendar as a continuation of my 2020 theme of ‘Sketching the Pandemic Year!’  I haven’t come up with any other project to keep me ‘engaged’ and had these two beautiful books on hand. So I  continue to record something for each week while still mulling over other ideas ! This way I will have at least 106 sketches done this year :) 

“The ‘Dyber Amertrine’ photographed in the 2021 Smithsonian Engagement Calendar is a quartz variety mined in Anahi Mine, Bolivia, that is part amethyst and part citrine, accounting for the unique purple and yellow orange color combination seen in theses gems. Although faceted and carved by hand, the ‘Dyber Ametrine’ also represents the state-of-the-art cutting techniques used by gem artist Michael Dyber , including ‘Dyberotic Optic Dishes’ that create optical illusions.”

The fading, drying hydrangea is from our garden photographed last December. It mirrored the colors and beauty  of the ametrine and was the motivation for me to continue sketch-journaling in these Engagement calendars! 

Cooper’s Hawk  watercolor by Meera Rao 

Smithsonian Engagement Calendar 2022 week1 

As with the owl in the previous post, I identified Cooper’s hawk calls I heard on my daily walk last week using the Merlin Bird App from Cornell Ornithology Lab. Two days later I saw three of them again in the same area circling above.  Using bird guides and my own blurry photographs I sketched it in watercolor. 

The explanation in the 2022 Smithsonian Engagement Calendar about the dove photographed on that page : ‘Artis Pablo Cano created this card for Helen Kohen, a noted art historian and critic, to thank her for a gift she had given him and to tell her how he was using it. The front of the card features a drawing of a dove and the back includes a sketch of a design for a telephone booth shaped like a women’s head.’  I guess now that page has a dove and hawk :)