Gouache and Turtle Bay Gardens

I took an art workshop for writing and sketching which was located in the stunning Turtle Bay Gardens.  The woman who ran the workshop has a friend who lives in a garden-access house there. (!!!)

(Yes the house is amazing)

Turtle Bay Gardens is the largest private garden space in Manhattan. Think of gorgeous houses around a back courtyard, with private gardens around a central garden space. 

It has historically been home to people like Greta Garbo, Katharine Hepburn, Paul Newman, E.B. White, and Kurt Vonnegut.

(!!!)

So anyhow I got to paint there.

(!!!)

The workshop was about incorporating writing into sketching, which is up my alley as I still can easily veer back into an almost-unhealthy obsession with the Speedball Textbook.
It was a very good workshop and the main thing I got from it, aside from the astounding location, is yet another example of combining stuff that has been sitting around in my studio mostly-unused for years.

Black gesso and white gel pens.

Oh. My. Gosh.
My sketching life is forever altered.
I never thought of doing this because I assumed the gesso would be too rough but it isn't, it is a perfect gel pen surface!
Regular acrylic paint would be too slick.
It feels sooooo nice to write with the gel pen on the black gesso.

We had pre-work on which we added writing in the workshop, and we also did a full sketch in the garden and added writing from pre-selected quotes.

Here is my garden sketch, I only had about 20 mins to do it.
Gouache..

And here is my pre-work with the writing added:

*******
Here are some garden pictures.
(Lisa you would love it.)