Category: Drawing

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Animals Bay Area Parks Drawing Ink and watercolor wash Outdoors/Landscape Places Richmond Annex Sketchbook Pages Sketchercize

Amazing Grace: “Sketchercizing” on the S.F. Bay Trail

Amazing Grace, ink and watercolor 6x9"
Amazing Grace, ink and watercolor 6x9"

The weather is gorgeous in the S.F. Bay Area today, sunny and warm with a gentle breeze. It inspired me to drag my old bike out of hiding and go for my first bike ride in two years. Of course the tires were completely flat. I got my first bit of exercise pumping up the tires (while managing to get chain grease all over myself working from the wrong side of the bike.) Finally took off down the street and 3 blocks later realized that when the front tire pointed straight ahead, the handles bars were turned to the left.

Rode back home, called bike store, got directions to fix it, used wrong little L-shaped wrench thingee which got stuck in the hole, called bike store again, found the correct metric wrench they said to use in my son’s tools he left behind in my garage, got the stuck one out, tried again, but couldn’t loosen the bolt. Looked around to see if there were any men home on the block who could strong-arm it for me. No men home.

Called sons  (both avid cyclists). Son #1 not answering. Son #2 was working from home and was  so sweet, came right over and fixed it for me.  Finally, two hours after I first planned to leave, I was on my way, down to the Bay Trail.

It was glorious! I rode through Richmond Annex, crossed over the freeway on the pedestrian bridge at Sacramento St., over to Central, down to the Bay Trail, and rode all the way to the Rosie the Riveter Monument and National Park in Richmond. I stopped to paint the ship “Amazing Grace” (above) in the Marina Bay Yacht Harbor.

Sit Stay Cafe at Pt. Isabell, ink & watercolor, 6x9"
Sit Stay Cafe at Pt. Isabell, ink & watercolor, 6x9"

My reward on the way home was lunch at the Sit Stay Cafe at Pt. Isabel. I was sitting under a bright red-orange umbrella there when I painted this and so all the colors came out really weird (that’s the bay and SF in the distance on upper right). I loved the body language of the people and the dogs.  Pt. Isabel is an enormous dog park along the bay with spectacular views. The cafe is next door to Mud Puppy’s Tub and Scrub dog bathing shop, so the patio and cafe are dog friendly.

Then I cycled home happy, if a bit sunburned. Tonight is the El Cerrito Art Association meeting, with a demo by artist and Liquitext rep Michele Theberge.

What a great day! The views of the bay, the harbors, the city, were spectacular, the sun hot and the breezes cooling. Doesn’t get much better than this! Definitely an Amazing Grace kind of day!

(Some of this also posted on Sketchercise.ning.com.)

Categories
Drawing Ink and watercolor wash Life in general Painting Plein Air Sketchbook Pages

Loster Than I’ve Ever Been

Chapel on Mare Island
St Peter's Chapel on Mare Island

What was I thinking? Somehow, despite printed instructions, my GPS unit and mapping software on my iPhone, I managed to get more lost than I’ve ever been in my life today (except for the time I was driving across country on highways and somehow ended up on a dead end street). I arrived so late at our painting site that there was no time to set up all my gear so I just did this quick, wonky sketch.

The paint-out was on Mare Island, a former naval base and shipyard with historic buildings, factories and old officers’ mansions.  First I was a little late leaving the house, and then, after going over the Vallejo-Carquinez bridge four times, and multiple wrong turns (second guessing the GPS), and driving in circles, I was REALLY late.

Part of the problem was not being able to get to sleep the night before and drinking way too much coffee to try to wake up in the morning. But the biggest problem was that I hadn’t taken the time to pinpoint where I was going and so the information I put into the GPS wasn’t accurate. And the stupidest thing was that my plein air group had provided me with perfectly simple instructions which I complicated by using my GPS incorrectly. (A perfect example of GIGO: Garbage In: Garbage Out).

By the time I got home I was tired, hungry, disappointed and frustrated so it seemed like a good day to work on the rebuild of my website. At least I made good progress on that and accomplished something today.

Categories
Definitions Drawing Flower Art Painting Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

I Found a Bee

I Found a (dead) Bee, watercolor & rubber stamps
I Found a (dead) Bee, watercolor & rubber stamps

I found this pretty bumblebee in a parking lot yesterday. It was quite dead so I picked it up and carefully brought it home in a napkin to draw.  I set it on a few hydrangea blossoms under my magnifying lamp, trying to see all the details but it was really hard to differentiate all the various black fuzzy things. I guess a larger magnifier is needed.

I was thinking about saving it to study it some more, but when I researched preserving insect specimens I got a little creeped out. First you’re supposed to put it in a “relaxing chamber” if they have rigor mortis (ick, just typing that gives me the heebie jeebies) to soften them up a bit so you can spread them out and pin them on a board and then you have to keep them warm and dry (so they don’t get moldy I suppose).

For now I’ll put him (or is it a her?) back in its little jar and think some more about whether I’m really cut out for entomology vs. etymology which I love and is much less messy and gruesome.

  • Entomology: study of insects (from Greek entomos cut up) + logia “study of’” from logos “speech, oration, discourse, word”
  • Etymology: study of the history and origins of words (from Greek etumo “true sense” + logia (see above)

Yep, I guess I’d rather “cut up” words than insects! But if you have experience or knowledge about preserving dead bugs for drawing purposes, I’d love to hear your advice.

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Albany Drawing Faces Ink and watercolor wash People Places Sketchbook Pages

Monday Night Sketchcrawl: Albany

Sketching San Pablo Ave to Peets
Sketching San Pablo Ave to Peets

Monday night Cathy and I did a little sketching around San Pablo Avenue between Albany and El Cerrito, not the most inspiring of locales it turns out. It amused me that the palm tree above had an Available for Lease sign just in front of it, though it was actually a space in the building behind it (that I didn’t draw) that was for lease. The other pics above are of the Albany bowl and inside Peets Coffee where we ended the evening.

Old West Gun Room
Old West Gun Room

We started at the Old Gun Room, a still-functioning, historic gun store that is terribly out of place and time. I was having trouble paying close attention to detail last night, and drew  the N in “Guns” on the sign backwards, as well as adding an extra wagon wheel in the fence. I think I did a better job last time I drew and painted the Gun Room when I painted it on site.

Hotsy Totsy Club, Albany
Hotsy Totsy Club, Albany

I like the way the Hotsy-Totsy sign came out, though I’m not sure what happened to the perspective: I KNOW I couldn’t have seen the top of the sign. But I was really hungry at that point and was having even more trouble paying attention to details. By the way, the Hotsy-Totsy Club is anything but! It opens around 7 a.m. (need I say more?).(UPDATE: the club has new owners and a new clientele and a fun retro vibe; see my newer post here).

Cathy likes to sketch on site in order to capture more images, and then adds paint at home.  I don’t usually do that, preferring to paint on site,  but tried it last night. After I’d done all the cross-hatching on the windows and door area, trying to shade them, I looked at what Cathy was doing and saw that she just does the outlines without any cross-hatching when she’s going to paint the images later. I think that makes more sense and allows the watercolor to do the shading rather than the incongruous scribbly ink that was too dark.

We decided that next week we’ll go somewhere pretty and away from traffic, like the Berkeley Rose Garden.

Categories
Drawing Ink and watercolor wash Painting Photos Plein Air Sketchbook Pages

Blowin’ in the Wind in Benicia

Paddlewheel Benicia, ink & watercolor 9x12
Paddlewheel Benicia, ink & watercolor 9x12

“Da Group” (Benicia Plein Air Painters) met to paint at 3:30 today at a private boatyard in Benicia. The owner of the boatyard is a professional house mover so along with the numerous old boats docked there, his property also contains two wonderful old Victorian houses that he moved by barge to his property and will eventually fix up, planning to live in one, and use the other as an office. (The office is currently home to a huge flock of pidgeons, so he has his work cut out for him.)

He generously allowed us access to his property to paint. It it was so windy that I decided to sketch instead of hauling out my oil painting gear, even though there was a plethora of tantalizing painting subjects. This old paddlewheel boat was really fun (and challenging) to draw. I had my 9×6 sketchbook, a teeny weenie watercolor set (6 colors in a miniature Altoids tin, about 1″x3″), one paper towel, a water bottle, and a water brush. It was tricky holding onto everything so it wouldn’t blow away.

The other painters were braver, found more wind-sheltered spots to set up, and then painted whatever was in their line of sight. They were still at it when I left at 6:00 p.m., my eyes and ears stinging from the wind.

Here are some of the sights around and near the boatyard (click images to enlarge):

Categories
Drawing Faces Life in general People Sketchbook Pages

Girls Just Wanna Be…. (Dredging the Past for New Series)

Finding Tina (top from memory, bottom from yearbook)
Finding Tina (top from memory, bottom from yearbook)

I was sketching and looking at my high school yearbook in preparation for a series of paintings I’m starting. I was surprised by the low expectations so many of the girls in the yearbook had for themselves compared to today’s young women. I started counting how many “hoped to eventually” to become beauticians, secretaries and airline hostesses (flight attendants). Even my high school best friend Tina’s yearbook entry said she aimed to be a beautician (not to denigrate those important jobs, but there are so many more options for women now.) Maybe it was the elaborate, sculptural hairstyles back then that made so many of us want to be hairstylists?

When I read the tender, poetic inscription Tina wrote in my annual,  I decided to try to find her again.  We’d lost touch with when I moved away a year after high school and have unsuccessfully searched for her for years. Today I found her 86-year-0ld father, just by typing his last name and the city where we lived into the people finder on YellowPages.com! He promised to give her my phone number and then filled me in on her life over the many decades since we last were together.

Jana's senior picture and yearbook entry
Jana's senior picture and yearbook entry

When I filled out the form for my blurb I was trying to be funny:  “Hopes to marry a millionaire…especially liked the people, weekends, and vacations.” But there was some truth in it too. I was so done with high school and wasn’t looking forward to having to grow up and get a job, either.

OK, so maybe I was procrastinating and avoiding the nice blank canvas waiting for me… but, (not counting the girls who said they just wanted to be happy, or didn’t mention their goals at all), here is my tally of career goals for San Diego’s Crawford High class of  ’66 (I put the odd outliers in red):

  • Teacher: 67  (90% said elementary teacher)
  • Graduate from college: 55 (and then get married: 30)
  • Secretary: 51
  • Airline hostess: 33
  • Beautician: 23
  • Nurse 21
  • Housewife: 20
  • Dental/medical assistant: 19
  • Commercial artist: 14
  • Social worker: 11
  • Psychologist or Psychoanalyst: 11
  • Travel the world: 11
  • Interior Decorator: 9
  • Dress designer: 8
  • Model: 6
  • Doctor: 6 (mostly pediatricians)
  • Scientist, mathematician, engineer: 3
  • Diplomat, linguist: 2
  • Bullfighter: 2
  • FBI/Secret Agent: 2
  • Probation officer: 2
  • Owner of Village of Pancake House: 1
  • Mortician: 1
  • Police woman: 1
  • Artist: 1 (and she is did it: Deborah Butterfield is famous for her sculptures of horses)
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Art theory Berkeley Drawing Ink and watercolor wash Outdoors/Landscape Painting Places Sketchbook Pages

Monday Night Sketchcrawl: Shattuck and Vine, Berkeley

Vine Street Pumping Station, Ink and watercolor
Vine Street Pumping Station, Ink and watercolor

Cathy and I met at Shattuck and Vine to sketch, and started with this historic building, now a wine shop called Vintage Berkeley, converted from the former utility district’s Vine Street Pumping Station. Actually we’d started a little further up the street, but my sketch was terrible so no point in posting it.

By the time we finished drawing there, I was getting hungry so we looked around for somewhere to sketch and eat but that ate up sketching time too. We ended up at Dara Thai/Lao Cusine where we sat outdoors and sketched and I ate grilled calamari on shredded lettuce with cilantro sauce. It was warm, filling and delicious.

Dara Thai/Lao Cuisine, ink 9x6
Dara Thai/Lao Cuisine, ink 9x6

I didn’t get to finish this sketch because it got dark and cold…and because I spent so much time drawing details in the fancy roof of the little shelter. Despite hearing from great art teachers, “Simplify, reduce details, draw only what you see when squinting, see how much you can leave out,” I love details. That’s just how it is.

But the funny thing is that because I got so absorbed in the details on that one roof, I didn’t have time to draw all the roofs of all the shelters behind this one, which would have filled the whole page with details.

So maybe those teachers are right….?

Categories
Animals Drawing Sketchbook Pages

Baby Bird Steps Out

Baby bird steps out and I have questions
Baby bird steps out and I have questions

The day before the baby bird in the nest outside my window left the nest for the first time, his entire extended family of California Towhees chirped loudly all day, making a metallic “chip” sound, calling to him and to each other. The next day there he was, sitting in the tree on a branch near my window, looking right at me. He was bigger than I expected and was definitely having a bad hair day.

And now, quiet. No more constant activity of  bringing food, standing guard, warning off interlopers. The nest is empty and the chirping is over.  After watching them for days raised so many questions, which I scattered in my sketchbook among my 10 attempts to sketch the baby. My favorite was #8 when he turned his head to see mom bringing food and then opened wide to eat that yummy stuff.

I’d always thought birding was for boring old folks but now that I’m a boring old folk myself, I’m finding it quite interesting. Since my knowledge of birds is pretty limited, I initially assumed these guys were robins, since they sort of looked like them but without the red breast. Then I found the Cornell Lab of Ornithology All About Birds website where you can search by many different criteria to identify a bird, including their sounds.

That’s how I learned that these guys are California Towhees which I confirmed by listening to them here. If you click the link and go listen to their sounds, you’ll understand how I came to feel that a community of chirping Towhees was as annoying as a neighbor’s constantly barking dog. I’m guessing they were all calling to the baby, “Come out, it’s safe, we’re standing guard, come out, come out, and try your new wings!”

I’m glad the incessant metallic chip, chip, chip sound only lasted one day, but I miss watching the birds being busy in the tree outside  my window and so do my cats.

Categories
Animals Drawing photoshop Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

Happy Bird-Day to Me

Happy Bird-Day to Me, pencil, ink & wc 9x12
Happy Bird-Day to Me, pencil, ink & wc 9x12

This morning I made my annual birthday pilgrimage to Fat Apples for a Baked Apple Pancake along with dear friends and family. Then I sketched this little family of California Towhees [update: not robins!] who are living in the small tree outside my bedroom window.

Mom and Pop Towhee take turns guarding the nest,  feeding the babies and shopping for groceries. When one returns with a juicy white worm to feed the babies, the other flies away to gather the next round of grub (literally?). The robins enter the tree from the house side where the branches are more open, which gives me a great view from my bedroom window (except that it’s too shadey in the tree to see their features clearly).

My cats sit on the bed and watch the constant activity all day: the best Kittie TV ever. Sometimes I join them and have been amazed how hard these little birds are working to keep their babies fed.

Fabriano Venezia Sketchbook & Photoshop CS4

This sketch is in the Fabriano 9×6  sketchbook that has been giving me such pleasure when sketching and such pain when scanning. But now I have a solution. I just got the fantastic, super fast, hugely improved new version of Photoshop CS4. After scanning each page of a spread separately, Photoshop will automatically assemble the pages perfectly together as layers/masks in one file, getting rid of the bad stuff,  while lining them up perfectly. For other adjustments, Auto Levels does a great job now, better than all the manual tweaking I’ve done in the past. And a bit of the Dodge tool cleans up any remaining shadows. The new streamlined user interface and adjustment panel are huge timesavers and make image adjustments so much easier and faster.

It was a bit of a splurge, but at $199 (after the $100 off Adobe offers on on any version of Photoshop CS through August) it was so worth it. A happy birthday to me present!

Apple Pancake
Baked Apple Pancake
Categories
Berkeley Drawing Gardening Ink and watercolor wash Sketchbook Pages

Sketching Berkeley’s Northbrae Neighborhood

Monterey Market Watermelons, ink & watercolor, 6x9"
Monterey Market Watermelons, ink & watercolor, 6x9"

Cathy and I met at Monterey Market on Hopkins Street in Berkeley’s Northbrae neighborhood for our Monday night sketchcrawl. The scent of ripe fruit was heavenly in their screened fruit patio, but the store was closing so we were soon out on the street.

Cathy sketching
Cathy sketching

I stood behind Cathy while she leaned on a bike rack to sketch the signs on the corner. Then we walked up Hopkins to the Country Cheese and Coffee Market.

Country Cheese, Sepia Micron Pigma, 9x8"
Country Cheese, Sepia Micron Pigma, 9x8"

The scents were quite different here: damp cardboard and wafts of the day’s refuse from all the now-closed food sellers on this block including Magnanis Poultry and Monterey Fish Market.  My butt fell asleep from leaning against a large metal box on the sidewalk while I was sketching. I could have sat on the chair but decided to sketch it instead. It felt good to start moving again. We walked around the block looking for inspiration at Berkeley Horticultural Nursery but since they were closed there wasn’t enough to see through the fence.

We headed up Rose Street and through the King Middle School play yard where people were throwing frisbees for their dogs in the sunshine at 8:00 at night. It was really starting to feel like summer.

Alice Waters of Chez Panisse fame, helped start an “edible garden” on the school property and that’s where we did our final sketches, surrounded by beds of vegetables, flowers and fruit.

Edible Garden "campfire", ink & watercolor, 9x12"
Edible Garden "campfire", ink & watercolor, 9x12"

We felt like we were at camp, sitting on hale bales arranged in a large circle under an arbor made of rough hewn posts and branches woven together. At the center of the circle, a huge “campfire” of flaming pink and red poppies blazed. I imagined how rewarding it must be for a class of young gardeners to gather there for lessons with their teacher, the beautiful results of their work growing all around them. What a wonderful learning environment!