We picked up the rental car on Friday morning at the airport. We even managed to get on and off the BART System without incident....getting the tickets to ride the BART was an entirely different matter. Let's just say it's not an intuitive process.

We figured once we had the car, we'd really start covering some ground. So what did we do? We parked the car and walked around for 5 hours!

We started off in the Japanese Tea Garden and what a treat this place is to all of your senses! There was a calmness there that made it hard to leave even though we were sharing the garden with a host of other folks.
Some much was in bloom and there were so many cool lanterns to see...it seemed there was another secret garden around every curve of the path. The koi were rather lazy with some basking in the warm sun.
In the two pages above, I chose to go with a grid pattern of small boxes on my two pages. I limited myself to 20 minutes per block. I hand-drew the blocks and then decided what to put in them. This allowed me to capture a lot of different views in a short period of time. Because of the time limit, I didn't get caught up in the details (too much).

This type of sketching is a great way to capture a day's outing when you don't have much time at each location. Do a quick sketch in either pen or pencil, snap a photo ref and add color later as time allows if you don't have time on location. Try limiting yourself to just 5 minutes and see what you get—you'll be surprised at what you can capture!

You'll note that some of the structures are cut off by the edges of the boxes. Because I chose to stick with my 20 minute time frame, I knew I wouldn't have time to erase and start over, so I left them as they were. Setting a timeframe and sticking to it (no matter what) is a great way to "train" yourself for working live on location.

From the Japanese Tea Garden we went over to Shakespeare's Garden, the Ancient Garden, Rhododendron Garden and then on to the Fragrant Garden.
We sat down on a bench for a while only to find we were annoying the squirrels as we didn't have any peanuts for them!
After all the gardens, we were a bit lost until we discovered the path to Stow Lake...up 979 steps...okay, not quite that many, but it sure felt like it! Almost immediately, we spotted an empty bench, and it didn't take us long to claim it.

We decided to do some sketching since we were too tired to keep walking, but there was a problem with this bright idea of ours...it was bright. Too bright. As in we were looking straight into the setting sun as we attempted to sketch. However, we'd decided it was just too bad because we weren't moving!
You can see from the glare in the photo this was not the best of places to be sketching, but it worked out.
As I mentioned before, the object of the trip was not to sketch but to visit as many different locations as possible. I'm thrilled that I was even able to sketch the two I did as that's two more than I did in NOLA.

After finding dinner and collapsing back at the cottage, we both discovered we had a slight sunburn for our efforts of the day!

Next up, a different kind of mission....