Category: Gardening

Categories
Drawing Flower Art Gardening Life in general Plein Air Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

Westbrae Nursery Buddhas

Westbrae Nursery Buddha

Micron pigma ink pen, watercolor in Moleskine large watercolor notebook
(Click image, select “All Sizes” to enlarge)
(This was Monday’s post–I thought I’d clicked “Publish” but when there were no comments on it at all, I checked and discovered I had never actually put it on line….oops).

After working this morning I rode my bike into Berkeley this afternoon to do some errands. Last time I drove down Gilman I noticed that Westbrae Nursery had a bunch of Buddhas on display so after I finished my unshopping at REI (returning a clip-on umbrella that I thought would work for plein air painting but wouldn’t clip onto my easel) I rode over to the nursery.

I discovered that my new bike seat worked perfectly as a table for my teeny Winsor & Newton watercolor field kit. I stood with my bike just outside the nursery entrance to draw and paint this. One of the workers stopped by between delivery bags of manure and big plants to people’s cars. His comments: “Are you painting?” “Don’t you get tired standing?” “Wow you’re fast!”

Today was warm and sunny but by the time I started for home, the fog and wind had returned. Having not carried a jacket (a foolish mistake in the Bay Area), I had a chilly downhill ride home.

Categories
Drawing Gardening Life in general Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

Little Green Tomatoes

Tomato plant

Haiku for my little tomato plants

Poor green tomatoes
Planted too late to grow red
Reach for fading sun

I guess I planted them a little too late. Everybody else has harvested theirs and removed the plants from the garden. Mine are still striving to grow up and become nice big juicy red tomatoes but summer is over. Unless we get a month of Indian Summer (fingers crossed) they will never grow up to become edible fruit.  Just sad little green tomato babies.

I drew this as a meditation after a frustrating day (more about that in a minute). I sat down outside and started drawing the middle of the plant, looking at it like a jigsaw puzzle, where each intersecting shape was a puzzle piece. Every time I reached another intersection I followed that line to the next. Eventually the puzzle started fitting together. But the sun went away and it was getting windy so after I did about 80% trying to accurately capture each little leaf and stem (amazing variety of charming leaf shapes on tomato plants!) I quickly sketched another 20% to fill it in so I could go inside. This Jigsaw Puzzle method of drawing I came up with is really helping me to understand better what I draw–especially when there are layers and layers of shapes. (Raffine 6×9 sketchbook, Lamy Safari pen, Noodlers Ink, watercolor)

My frustrating day involved typical contractor bad behavior– not finishing a job, not calling when they said they would, leaving holes that were supposed to be patched, making me stay home all day waiting for their return to finish which never happened, leaving a mess. Drawing helped me let it go, as did this quote I found in one of my old journals:

“Cheer up! Life isn’t everything.” (Mike Nichols)

Categories
Drawing Gardening Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

Nasturtiums

Nasturtiums

(Click on image then “All Sizes” to enlarge)

I picked these for my Saturday morning watercolor class. Nobody wanted to paint them but me so I’m glad they lasted until today. I did the drawing in ink this afternoon and wish I’d paid attention to my niece’s suggestion to leave some of it unpainted as the ink drawing looked really cool. But of course when I returned to it this evening I ended up painting everything.

Today was a long one: I started work at 6:30 a.m. to help get things ready for a three-day institute for 150 teachers that started today. Then I picked up my new glasses (again) and the prescription isn’t quite right (again) so tomorrow I’ll be taking them back to the shop for another try (again). Then my sister and niece came over and we went through my house, collecting all my extra pots and pans, linens and houseware for Sophie’s 1st apartment that she’s moving into next week.

One of the nice things about living in a house with two of everything (including kitchens since it’s a former duplex, now a studio and a home)–is that there’s lots of storage space. I’m so proud of Sophie and happy to see her making a home for herself while she attends college in S.F….and sad because it means she won’t be around when I visit my sister or answering the phone when I call.

Categories
Drawing Gardening Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

1 Cactus, 2 Cacti Sketches

Cacti-small
On-site sketch in 3.5 x 5.5″ watercolor Moleskine

Cacti-big
Studio sketch from photo in Aquabee 6×9 sketchbook

It was a sunny day in the 70s today and the outdoors was calling. Instead of spending the day in the studio as planned, I took my sketchbook and little paintbox for a walk around the neighborhood, looking for something that would be fun to paint. A few blocks away I found an amazing cacti and succulent garden. I did the top sketch above while sitting on a convenient tree stump but I had problems. My pen had gone dry so I tried drawing in pencil but it just didn’t have the magic that drawing directly in ink has. I found myself repeatedly erasing and starting over which is the problem with pencils–the thrill of just going for it with ink is gone and pencils want to be ever so perfect. So I started over again, drawing directly with the watercolors and (continuing to resist stopping at 75%) added a little more paint when I got home.

I did the second sketch above in the studio tonight from the photo I took there. I think I’m going to try a larger painting also–all the overlapping shapes, shadows, and prickly things are really fun to paint.

IMGP3122 Photo of the cactus


Categories
Drawing Gardening Life in general Plein Air Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

Sunday in Barbara’s Garden

Barbara-garden-web2

Barbara and I took a great hike in the North Berkeley hills this morning near her house, and looked at people’s gardens and interesting (and bizarre) architecture. When we got back, her garden was so glorious in the noontime sun that I had to postpone lunch and sit down and draw.

It’s overflowing with beautiful flowers and healthy vegetables: spiky cucumbers, heirloom tomatoes (those funny little orange things on the left that look like pumpkins in my picture), corn (at the back), and in the foreground, a huge “volunteer” butternut squash that she didn’t plant.

The weather was perfect, with the bright sun taking breaks behind the clouds so it wasn’t too hot or cold. Compared to my house near the freeway, her garden is so quiet, with only the lovely Sunday sounds of birds, “beneficial” garden insects, breezes on the wind chimes, a neighbor playing lovely violin and her dog Gertie stretching and yawning in the sun.

With the abundance and variety of vegetation and her mosaics and ceramic sculptures, there’s another painting just waiting to be made every few steps. Drawing the amazing leaves and tendrils on the squash plant would have been enough to make me happy, but I decided to try to capture the whole garden today and then come back again and again to paint her garden over the summer.

Micron Pigma, watercolor in WC Moleskine.

Categories
Drawing Every Day Matters Gardening Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

Hydrangeas (EDM: Fresh Flowers)

Hydrangeas

This week’s Every Day Matters challenge is to sketch fresh flowers. These hydrangeas are from my hairdresser’s shop, Circle Salon in Kensington, CA. The shop is always filled with multiple bouquets of her stunning home-grown flowers–all of them more interesting than anything you’d find at the florists. Julie’s an amazing gardner and a great hairstylist too. For the series of Saturday watercolor classes I’m teaching, she’s letting me visit the shop on Fridays and take home some nice specimens for the class.

I wish my garden produced such beautiful flowers, but it takes more than wishing and I don’t seem to have the time, energy, or willingness to use chemicals required here in the fog belt of the San Francisco Bay Area, to do more than wish and water.

I drew directly from the flower with a Micron Pigma and then painted with watercolor in my large watercolor Moleskine.

Categories
Drawing Gardening Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

Wildflowers

Wildflowers

I needed to slow down a bit today so after telecommuting this morning, I took a sandwich out to my backyard, read for a while and had a lovely half hour nap in the perfect high-70s breezy sunshine. In one corner of my yard I have a small patch of pretty wildflowers that my friend Barbara gave me in May as little unidentified seedlings. I think the bell-shaped flowers with the thicker green stems in the back are penstemons, but I have no idea what the red-stemmed more delicate ones are in front.

I did the drawing with a new brown Micron Pigma in my watercolor Moleskine and then added watercolor. I really like the way the brown pen lines look. When I started drawing I saw flowers, leaves, and stems. But with each minute of drawing I started noticing more–funny little buds, squigglies, sprouties, spirals, tiny fuzzy bean-like thingees, open mouths, pointy things, rough things, shiny things.

My favorite thing about drawing is when the words go away and it’s all about shapes and colors and light. Then whole worlds of detail and specificity open up where at first there was just one named thing, like “a plant.” Here’s a little close up detail view of the same picture (click to enlarge).

Wildrlowers-detail

Categories
Drawing Every Day Matters Gardening Life in general Plein Air Watercolor

Plein Air Painting at Blake Gardens (EDM: Someplace New)

Blake Garden

Plein air painting done at Blake Gardens, the 11 acre botanical gardens and University of California President’s Residence in Kensington, CA. (Open to the public weekdays.)

The Everyday Matters challenge for this week was to go someplace new and paint it. I’d never been to Blake Gardens before and I’d never done a complete watercolor plein air painting before except little sketchbook pictures, so I went to Blake Gardens and did this painting on a 9×12 Arches watercolor block.This scan actually looks better than the original, which was a little washed out.

I’m very fond of working in my studio from my photographs, with excellent lighting, comfortable temperature, a stereo playing my favorite music or audio books, and a comfy window seat when I need to sit back with a cool drink from the nearby fridge and rest.

Plein air (outdoor) painting is different! It was very HOT out so I picked a spot in the shade, but as the sun moved it was soon shining directly in my face. My white paper was blinding me. I’d look up at the scene and could barely see it–all I could see was white. My paint kept drying too quickly and I’d brought a too-small brush which was making icky streaks. I had to give up on wet-in-wet painting entirely and had trouble mixing colors because they looked much brighter than they really were. I spent the first hour just doing thumbnails, trying to figure out which part of the scene to put in the picture. It’s much easier to compose a painting from a photo than looking at the wide world in person!

I’m glad I pushed myself to try something new and will go back again soon, with bigger brushes, an umbrella and better snacks.

Categories
Gardening Sketchbook Pages

Hydrangeas again – hello, goodbye

Hydrangeas new

Well, the hydrangeas I drew and wrote about last week sadly didn’t survive being uprooted and stuck in the ground with maybe a wee bit too much fertilizer (Marsha read the instructions too quickly and poured in about 1 cup of fertilizer but what the box really said was 1 cup for an area 3 feet by 3 feet and the hole was only 1 foot by 1 foot).

Hydrangea dead

So I tossed ’em and bought 3 shiny new ones. The garden store guy said to dig out the overly-fertilized soil and toss it too…onto some other worthy plants in the garden that could use a little fertilizer…and then add back some nice new soil. So the new hydrangeas are all tucked into their cozy beds with new soil and water and the old ones are in the green recyling bin, awaiting their next life as compost. Birth, death, dirt, birth….it’s one big circle and appropriate thoughts on this day, my BIRTHDAY!!!!

Categories
Gardening Sketchbook Pages

Marsha and Jana Plant a Hydrangea

Marsha was cleaning up her garden and had a couple hydrangeas she didn’t want anymore so she brought them over and we planted them in my barren side yard.

Hydrangea-cartoon

Once we got them planted I decided to sit and draw one even though it was very wilted and shaggy looking and the sun was setting.

Hydrangea2

Hopefully they’ll like their new home and will make pretty blue popcorn ball flowers for me. I used to think hydrangeas were plants for old ladies but now I think they’re cool!….uh oh…are they cool or am I just turning into an old lady?