All week, I’ve been bouncing back and forth between watercolors and colored pencils for my self-imposed week-long sketchbook challenge.

Yesterday I felt pretty satisfied with my colored pencil efforts and decided that I would stick with them for the rest of the week.

There are some genuine challenges to the challenge–I’m away from home this week with only a bare minimum of art supplies, I’m adjusting to new watercolor supplies (like 100% cotton cold-press, textured paper), and trying to do art at the house I’m staying at has been made even more challenging by my housemates–the 3 cats I’m cat sitting. Oh, and yesterday’s migraine.

But I figure there are always reasons why it’s hard to do creative stuff, so I decided that I’m just going to keep filling a sketchbook page every day while I’m here.

Today I drove to a nearby historic train station. Built between 1852 and 1854, it was a key hub for transportation of Union troops during the Civil War and currently houses a museum. It’s next to a walking and biking rail trail.

As I did other days, I took photos of my subject, then sketched it as I sat in my car:

(In the photo above, the thing to the left of the mechanical pencil is a kneaded eraser). When I started sketching I was in shade, but by the time I was done the shade was gone and it was too hot and too bright to try to sit there and paint.

I came back to the house and went into a room where I could close the door and keep the cats out. They’re sweet, but they’re, well,  cats. Which means that, when I’m busy and not paying attention to them, they decide it’s a great time to jump into my lap, climb onto the table, swipe pencils onto the floor, etc. The only problem with shutting them out is the plaintive meowing by the ringleader from just outside the door.

Here is a photo of the train station:

Beautiful, isn’t it?

As I said earlier, yesterday I was convinced that I was done with watercolors for now. But as I sat in front of the station and pulled my art supplies out of my bag, I suddenly decided that I wanted to give the watercolors another try.

Here’s my little watercolor painting:

Sigh. Whenever I draw a building without the assistance of a ruler my lines are always wonky. And I struggled with my limited supplies. Even so, there is something satisfying about trying to capture the scene in front of you on a canvas or page.

Whenever I look at this little painting I’ll remember sitting in my car in the blazing sun with the breeze blowing in the windows and the sound of birds in the trees.

Tomorrow will be the final day of my challenge–I drive home the next day.

Today’s takeaways? Maybe I should go back to the colored pencils. Or at the very least, add a ruler to my travel art stuff.