I am using the term "Café Sketches" rather loosely here. Café sketches are not necessarily sketched in a café - it's more about the capturing the spirit of the moment in a loose, spontaneous approach. While many of these sketches were drawn in cafés, some were drawn in parks, bus stops, doctor's offices, barber shops, even while waiting for jury duty. I don't really plan out a café sketch page, I just put pen to paper and watch what happens.

I have visited the California Automobile Museum and the California State Railroad Museum many times to sketch on location. In some cases, I took reference photos and returned to my studio afterwards to rework or polish some sketches (which is why some look much more polished than others). Nevertheless, I believe the opportunity to walk around an antique car or old steam engine, look inside it, study it from every angle, study even the smallest details, gives these sketches an authenticity which you just can't get from photographs alone.

Most of these sketches were executed at zoos or state fairs. Animals are tricky, because they rarely sit still. You get in the habit of working on multiple sketches at once, as you wait for an animal to resume something close to the pose it took moments ago. And if all else fails, you take photos and return to the studio afterwards to rework your sketches from on location (I confess, the more finished pages here were reworked from photos taken on location). But photos only do so much good if you don't have the experience of watching the animal directly from life.

As with "Café Sketches", I use the term "Location Sketches" a bit loosely: not all of these are complete environments or landscapes. Some are only portions of an envir0nment, or details within an environment, such as a study of a lamppost or traffic light, or the texture of a tree. But nearly all of these were sketched on location (very little use of reference photos here). It's not enough to capture what things look like, your sketches should conjure up the smells and sounds you experienced while sketching. Beyond just drawing what I see, I aim to capture the spirit of the place.

The previous sketchbook categories were "observational" in that I was trying to draw something I could see. By contrast, sketching from imagination is purely from images developing in my mind. I might look at things in the real world for inspiration and reference (such as a contemporary vehicle or machine that could be reimagined as a futuristic spacecraft, or details of an historical medieval castle that could be reimagined as a magical fantasy castle), but these sketches are not trying to resemble anything in the real world. The goal here is to explore ideas and just to let the imagination run wild.

My sketching media includes a variety of technical pens, brush pens, markers, and pencils. I keep these in a zippered pouch, which easily fits into a backpack or laptop carrying case.

I like the sketchbooks with toned paper, which allows me to use a white pencil, or white gouache, for highlights (a bottle of Dr. Martin's Bleed Proof White is also useful for this). Sepia, sanguine, or burnt sienna colored ink, along with colored pencils, look great on tan colored paper. I like refillable brush pens for laying in transparent tones and shadows.