Category: Outdoors/Landscape

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Outdoors/Landscape Plein Air Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

Cerrito Creek

Cerrito Creek 2

Ink & watercolor in small Moleskine watercolor notebook
To enlarge, click images, select All Sizes

Cerrito Creek 1

Today was a glorious sunny day — perfect for a mid-day walk to Peets Coffee. This is Cerrito Creek, a little urban greenway hidden away a block from Peets beside the California Orientation Center for the Blind and Albany Hill in El Cerrito. I got my coffee beans and an iced decaf latte and did these two little sketches.

It was a lovely spot except for the smell of dog pee along the fence I was using as an easel/table. This path must be a favorite dog walking spot. It’s funny how sensory experiences get embedded in a painting done outdoors — souds, wind, sun, friendly people…they’re all in there.

Tonight I tried adding a little Aquacover (a white-out designed for watercolor paper) mixed with some yellow paint to try to put back the falling water and reflections. I’m not sure it worked. Here it is before I added the splashy water.

Cerrito Creek 1

Categories
Animals Outdoors/Landscape Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

Bird Sanctuary?

Bird Sanctuary?

Ink & Watercolor in 6×9 Aquabee sketchbook
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Today after lunch I walked halfway around the lake beside my office with my boss and a work buddy. We were surprised to see a grey cat sound asleep in what looked like a cozy nest in a small tree alongside the lake. Lake Merritt is rich with avian wildlife, and is a sanctuary for migrating birds and many who live there year-round, including coots, comorants, ducks, egrets, way too many Canadian geese (constant hopscotching over big goose turds required), grebes, gulls, herons and tons of pigeons. There are also many feral cats and this one fits right in.

I thought we were going to be walking to the library on the gritty streets of downtown Oakland so didn’t carry my camera and missed getting a photo of this scene or another that would have made a great painting: a beautiful Hmong mother, grandmother and baby all dressed in bright colors sitting on a green park bench. I tried to memorize the cat in the tree scene so I could draw it when I got home, but we were walking too fast to “snap” a mental picture of the Hmong family.

Another co-worker came to work sick today with a “searing” sore throat and now I’m starting to feel like I’m catching a cold. Phooey. Actually my coughing started last night, so I guess can’t blame her germs. Time for some sleep and Vitamin C.

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Art theory Outdoors/Landscape Puerto Vallarta Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

Puerto Vallarta Aeropuerto

PV-Airport-Control-Tower

The Control Tower at the Puerto Vallarta airport. A couple of guys in t-shirts in the open air tower were moving from side to side, looking around and then looking down at their computers (I assume).

PV-Airport

The view from the waiting area of the runways surounded by grass, bushes, the mountains in the distance and some beat up police vehicles parked in the tall grass.

Ink and watercolor in small Moleskine watercolor notebook.
Click images to enlarge.

When I was leaving P.V. I was told to get to the airport 2 hours early. I got there even earlier than that and after a rudimentary search of my luggage and checking in, learned my flight was delayed an hour. The airport was hot and humid, with no air conditioning. I went upstairs and borrowed a chair from the burger joint to go sit by the window. When I tried to buy an empty cup to put water in for my paints they wanted $1.50 for the cup so I wandered over to the Starbucks and found someone with an empty coffee cup who was happy to give it to me. I washed it out in the bathroom and went back to my chair and finished the drawing.

I decided to go ahead through customs where they searched my carry-on backpack (and allowed me to take my empty cup and paints) and discovered another part of the airport that was air conditioned, modern, fancy and full of duty-free shops that might as well have been in NY or San Francisco. I found another window and drew the runway and then headed to my gate with a yummy ice cream on a stick coated with chocolate and almonds. I was both sad to be leaving and happy to be coming home.

Here’s a few more tips from the Judy Morris watercolor workshop:

Salting:

  • Morton Coarse Kosher salt works best
  • Tape paper flat to the table to avoid tilting and getting little star patterns…this technique is to get texture but not lighter starry areas.
  • Paint all of the salted areas of the painting first, finish all the salting, and then paint the rest of the painting.
  • Paint the area to be salted in little sections, areas no bigger than size of palm. The paint must be very, very wet. Pick up pinch of salt and rub between finger and thumb to drop it from about 10-12” above painting. Then paint next little area. Don’t let the shine go off the paint before salting and make sure there’s no clumps in the salt.
  • Leave little skipped white spots where you can add in a color from other areas of the painting to unify with them later when the salted areas are dry and the salt is removed.
  • Drop in darker paint along edges or between salt crystals or drop in a reflected color from adjoining areas (red into purple if neighboring area is red).
  • Blow off salt that falls into dry, non-salted areas rather than brushing it off to avoid scraping and damaging the paper.
  • Remove salt from salted areas by scraping that area firmly with a palette knife when very dry.
  • After removing salt, blot the salted area with a damp paper towel to remove any remaining salt or glaze the area with a light wash of yellow or another color to unify, soften edges and bring out a glow.
  • To glaze, use a flat 1″ brush and flick brush lightly in all directions, making x’s or asterisks.

These are her instructions…I’m just passing them along and I think this is the last of the PV drawings and notes from the workshop I’ll share.

Categories
Art theory Outdoors/Landscape Plein Air Puerto Vallarta Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

Color Chords

PV-Fountain2

Ink drawing with watercolor in Canson 7×10 watercolor sketchbook
To enlarge, click image, select All Sizes

I left the workshop to go sketch outside behind the classroom, sitting on a little brick wall along a road with trucks and taxis constantly parading past. This dry fountain was going to be torn down soon as it’s in one of the ubiquitous construction areas.

(More from my workshop with Judy Morris in Puerto Vallarta last week).

COLOR CHORDS:

This is important to me because I can get so involved in rendering exactly what I see that I forget to take artistic license to create a more pleasing color scheme rather than painting whatever colors are present. A color chord is like a chord in music–a selection of color notes that harmonize or are exciting together.

  • Most paintings accepted into the American Watercolor Society annual show have a limited palette
  • Avoid too many colors or abrasive color combinations by making a “color chord” plan before painting
  • Use a LIMITED PALETTE with any combination of the 3 primaries (a yellow including yellow ochre, a red and a blue); a complementary color scheme (2 colors opposite each other on the color wheel) or an analagous color scheme (neighboring colors on the color wheel); or· 1 color and sepia OR
  • Use a BORROWED COLOR SCHEME: Collect samples of from good photos, postcards, or other paintings color schemes you like and keep them in a folder. Select a color scheme from these samples to select a color chord for your painting.

 

Categories
Life in general Outdoors/Landscape Sketchbook Pages

You Can’t Always Get What You Want…

Puerto Vallarta 2

PV-1

Ink & watercolor in small Moleskine watercolor notebook
(To enlarge, click images, select All Sizes)

I’m back from Puerto Vallarta and trying to return to regular life. I did these little sketches at the pool and on the beach in the afternoons after the workshop. The reason for the title of this post is that while I didn’t really get what I wanted, I did learn some important things at the workshop that I needed to know. What I didn’t get was much time painting outdoors or many sketches of charming Mexican vistas and people.

I was suprised to learn that breakfast was at 7:30 a.m. each day; that the workshop was to take place inside a classroom from 9-2 every day (with no lunch break); and that we were to work on one painting the whole week, using a black and white photo of a person supplied by the teacher combined with photos we took on a trip to town after class the second day. We were suposed to use the teacher’s special techniques using salt to make texture and designing with patterned backgrounds.

The first day was all lecture and I learned some very valuable things from it. On the second day I started on the assignment. By the end of the day I realized it wasn’t what I wanted to be doing so abandoned it, spending class time alternately watching the teacher demonstrate and occasionally ditching to go outside to sketch on my own.

As a bit of a recluse, constantly being with 20-40 people was exhausting. There was another workshop going on at the same time, a Photoshop for Artists class that had even longer days inside a darkened classroom, and we ate most meals together.) Most of the participants were seasoned travelers on the “workshop circuit” that I hadn’t even known existed prior to this. They are apparently quite financial comfortable and able to go to painting workshops all over the world on a regular basis.

Puerto Vallarta was shockingly different than what I’d seen last time I was there 30 years ago, with horrible traffic, a Sam’s Club, Walmart, Starbucks, Hooters, Office Depot, Carls Junior, Hard Rock Cafe, sprawling hotels with more under construction everywhere, and giant supermarkets — everything for the huge population of gringos visiting or living there. The only thing that remained the same was the people. The Mexican people are the warmest, most beautiful, kindest people.

Two highlights of the trip were being able to speak Spanish well enough to have conversations with local people and swimming in the warm ocean on my last day–my only day without scheduled activities.

Tomorrow I’ll post some of what I learned in the workshop that was valuable to me.

Categories
Life in general Outdoors/Landscape People Watercolor

(G)OLD Teeth

(G)OLD Teeth

Watercolor on Arches 140 lb cold-pressed watercolor paper, 18×14″
(To enlarge, click images, select All Sizes)

This shop near my office in downtown Oakland makes sets of snap-on gold teeth (also known as “grills”) for people who like the idea of walking around with their teeth covered with jewelry. I loved the juxtaposition of the old guy walking by their sign with the missing “G” so I took a photo and finally got it painted.

For those of you who have never heard of people buying and wearing these things, you can see some pictures here (scroll down the page there). I don’t get it. Spending big money to get what looks like really fat shiny braces that make it hard to talk or eat and cause drooling seems like a deeply bizzare perversion. The whole culture of hip-hop/rapper/gangstah bling-bling with the prerequisite ostentatious display of wealth to me just seems like an advertisement saying, “I am an ignorant person with no class, taste, common sense or social conscious.” There are so many better things that could be done with money than wear platinum, jewel-encrusted teeth.

And the trend isn’t just for rappers; here’s an article about suburban teenage girls getting them to wear to the prom. When I was out delivering some flyers for the neighborhood association on my block last week I met a family that moved in a couple of months ago. The teenage son was extremely polite and friendly…and he was wearing a set of big gold teeth.

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Colored pencil art Monoprint Outdoors/Landscape Sketchbook Pages

Monotype – Larkspur Landing

SirFrancis-monotype

Monotype and colored pencil on Arches 88 paper 6″x8″
(To enlarge, click image, select “All Sizes”)

This is the second monotype I made of this scene  from this sketch. Monotypes are one of a kind, so if you goof it up, you start over from scratch. With this kind of “reductive” monotype, you spread the ink on the plate (a piece of plexiglass) and then using Q-tips, rags, pointy things, and/or fingers, you wipe away the ink in the places that you want to be white or where you want to apply color later. It’s sort of like carving a woodblock or linoleum block except that instead of ending up with an image you can print repeatedly, once you press the paper on the ink to make a print, you have nothing left.

The first monotype I made of the scene printed too lightly and when I tried to press it again (by hand using a flat disk called a baren), the plate slipped. So all my work creating the image was lost because it made an off-register double image that was still too light (see below). So I wiped all the ink of the plate, reapplied it, and starting over, removing the ink to create the image above. When it was theoretically dry I applied colored pencils.

Bad print - Larkspur

It’s double-vision image is sort of interesting, so I might still play with it a bit, adding some color and seeing what happens. The thing I love about monotype is that forces you to let go of control and play and experiment.

A note about inks: I used water-based Akua Intaglio ink on these, and though I like the way the one at the top turned out after being colored, I didn’t like this ink. It continues to smear and is still water-soluable weeks after it was printed. I’ve found that oil-based inks are much nicer to work with, make a darker image, don’t dissolve if you add watercolor and dry more quickly than this ink. To my surprise, they clean up with a little vegetable oil and some soap — no need for solvents.

Categories
Dreams Outdoors/Landscape People Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

Watery dream

Watery dream

Ink & watercolor in HandBook Co square sketchbook
(To enlarge, click image, select “All Sizes”)

For years I used to get up every morning and sketch my dreams before I did anything else. I have volumes of dream journals full of weird, amusing or x-rated drawings, depending on what the night had in store for me. I often painted the images too. I’m not sure when or why I stopped but I recently discovered an artist who works primarily from her dreams in monotype, Denise Kester, and got inspired to explore my dreams again.

My dreams are often humorous (to me anyway, but then I’m easily amused) or insightful — sometimes I wake up having invented something important and funny, as I illustrated here (one of my very favorite posts) or just quirky, like this one.

In the quickly sketched image above from last night, I dreamt that Sharon and I were canooeing down a pretty river when I realized that we had sunk up to our necks and that I was still wearing my fanny pack containing all my electronic gadgets (cell phone, digital camera, PDA) and they were all ruined. There was more about trying to put on ill-fitting overalls after nude sunbathing but I always hate it in novels when writers go on and on about a character’s dreams so I won’t bore you further with this one.

One last thing, this image of a river with tall banks is the same one I tried to make when I was 10 and convinced my father to let me paint with his oil paints. Unfortunately he gave me a piece of waxy palette paper to paint on and I remember it being so terribly frustrating to not be able to capture the image or anything at all, really, on that horrid paper. It kept me from trying to paint again for another 20 years.

Categories
Life in general Outdoors/Landscape Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

Cold morning

Cold morning

Watercolor, then Micron Pigma Brush Pen in Moleskine large watercolor notebook
(To enlarge, click image, select “All Sizes”)

I did this quick little painting this morning of the view out my living room window (more than slightly imaginated) (imaginate is my word for imagine and exaggerate). Even with the color in the sky, everything looked so cold, with frost on all the rooftops.

I’m counting this as yesterday’s post because last night my painting group got together for a little holiday celebration pizza dinner and I had some wine (which I usually don’t and so it tends to make me quickly tipsy) and even though we all sat around eating and talking and I could have been sketching them, it didn’t occur to me until just before everyone went home. I kept thinking we were going to get back to our original plan of taking a group photo, quickly printing and handing it out, and each of us spending an hour drawing/painting from the same photo and then seeing how different all of our paintings were. But with two pizzas, two bottles of wine, a yummy salad and lots to talk about….it just never happened.

Categories
Outdoors/Landscape Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

Cody’s Books & the Absent-Minded Artist

Cody's Books 4th Street

Micron Pigma ink & watercolor in large Moleskine watercolor notebook
(To enlarge, click image, select “All Sizes”)

After I saw Martha’s rendition of the Christmas lights on Berkeley’s 4th Street shopping area I decided to make my way there one evening to sketch. I hadn’t really planned on going there tonight though. I’d gone to the Blick Art Supplies store near there since Jackie (a knowledgeable sales clerk there) had offered to help me select some good oil painting brushes. I also gathered a number of other items I needed, even though I was annoyed that I’d left my sale coupon at home. That was the second absent minded act of the day. The first was trying to return my Masterpiece Theatre Prime Suspect DVD (EXCELLENT!) to the video store without the DVD inside. Before I left home this time I made sure I had the DVD in the box and in the car to return on the way home.

When I went to check out I discovered the Absent-Minded Artist struck again. Earlier today, in preparing to take a walk with Barbara, I’d removed my wallet from my fanny pack to lighten the load and never put it back in. Both Barbara and I were feeling like half-wits on our walk — I was recovering from yet another migraine last night and she’d been unable to sleep the night before.So there I was with all my items rung up and no money or cards to pay for them. (DUH!)

All was not lost though, since 4th Street was just around the corner. I drove down there, parked, looked for something to paint, moved a little, parked, moved some more, until I finally found a scene I wanted to paint.

Since I didn’t have much time, I drew straight away with ink, not worrying about perspective and straight lines (which is obvious). When I was ready to start painting, I put on my cool strap-on headlamp and it worked great. I tilted it to shine down on my paper and could see the colors I was mixing just fine. Unfortunately just as I started painting Cody’s turned off their interior lights so I had to paint that from memory.
When I got home I discovered Miss Absent Minded struck again. The DVDs were still on my car seat — I’d forgotten to return them again.