You might remember seeing my previous sketch of my baby fig tree here when it was just a little stick. Now it has three leaves. Yay! It was fun to sit on the sidewalk in front of my house and sketch (except for the occasional ant that tried to annoy me). That reminded me of being a little kid sitting on the sidewalk playing jacks for hours. I used to be pretty good at it. I wonder if anyone still plays jacks and if they’re still made out of metal.
Trying to sketch while recovering from a migraine and dopey from medication doesn’t always work out well. While everyone else in my plein air group painted the Berkeley Rose Garden on a sunny Saturday morning, I sat on a nearby bench and focused on drawing one tree.
I liked how it looked until I added watercolor, which I thought ruined the effect. So I stupidly added more watercolor. And more. And a bunch of lines. And then I went home and took a nap. Today I washed off as much of the paint as I could, trying to get back to the original line drawing. Then I added some muted blue and grey washes and now I like it again. Tree saved! It was actually a sunny day, just not in my head.
And now for some interesting tidbits on making choices:
Hell Yeah!
On Derek Silver’s blog he explains that as a perpetually over-committed person, if he’s not enthusiastically saying “HELL YEAH!” about something, then he’s saying “NO.”
When deciding whether to commit to something, if I feel anything less than, “Wow! That would be amazing! Absolutely! Hell yeah!” – then my answer is no.
Why the Hell Not?
Sid Salvera counters “Hell Yeah!” with the flip side on his post: Why the Hell Not? He asks:
Does this philosophy lead us to pass up opportunities we really should be saying “yes” to?
The most important thing I’ve learned about making choices is that if the word “SHOULD” appears in my decision-making thoughts (I should do that…) I need to swap it with “want to” or “don’t want to.”
Do you find it easy to make decisions? Do you get stuck in the “shoulds,” or say yes to things you don’t really want to do?
When Laura Frankstone of Laurelines was in San Francisco for a long weekend I had the great pleasure of joining her for an afternoon of sketching in Golden Gate Park. Laura and I had corresponded and participated together in many art blogging activities since 2006, but this was the first time we met in person. She is a brilliant artist, a delightful person and great fun to sketch with.
Below are our sketches of the Conservatory. I added watercolor to mine (above) in the studio later since it was windy, foggy and cold sitting on the grass and so were ready to go explore the (way too hot) conservatory.
After getting all steamy inside the Conservatory of Flowers’ jungle-like atmosphere, and touring the Wicked Plants exhibit, we came back out to sketch people on the lawn.
We agreed to paint these later too, since time was short and we wanted to keep moving. Below are our two sketches.
If you click the image above to enlarge it you can see how Laura even captured the girl on the left’s cheek bulging with her snack.
Our last stop was the Tea House in the Japanese Tea Garden. The garden is an absolutely beautiful place with incredible plantings, sculptures, buildings, ponds, trees, moon bridges and more. I wanted to live there.
While our tea was the most delicious jasmine tea we’ve ever had, our experience was not exactly the “meditative cup of tea overlooking the peaceful waters of the garden” because men were doing construction and running a small but loud and smelly bulldozer back and forth on the path behind what I sketched above. The combination of noise and exhaust were less than ideal but unlike me, Laura didn’t complain once.
Moments after we sat down in the Teahouse another woman sat down beside us and pulled out a sketchbook (before we had ours out). She was an art history student visiting from Boston and we all sketched happily together. The waitresses kept coming over to praise our drawings. I said, “You must see people sketching here all the time.” She said no, we were the first she’d seen.
I accidentally overslept so when I finally arrived at our Benicia paintout at 11:00 I was an hour late. I didn’t see any other artists around. The wind was blowing so hard that I sat in my car to sketch, listening to NPR on the radio. Everything was going great, I was drawing with my favorite Lamy Safari Extra Fine Fountain pen
I turned to draw a different view, but when I reached for my pen it was gone. I searched everywhere, inside the car, under the car, nearby on the ground. No pen. I retraced my path when I’d gotten out of the car to look around and take photos. Nothing. I asked people walking by but nobody had seen my pen. I returned to the car and searched every nook and cranny again, twice.
An hour later I gave up and used a Pitt Artist Pen to do the drawing and added watercolor. I was so sad. I’d really come to love that pen. When I finished the sketch I used my iPhone to look up and call all the stationary and art stores in the Bay Area, but nobody had a Lamy with an Extra Fine nib.
Just then fellow painters Carol and Ling drove up and I told them what happened. They insisted on helping me find the pen despite my whining, “It’s hopeless, it’s just gone.” Carol checked under the seats and in the driver’s side door pocket. She told me to check the passenger’s door pocket. It was the one place I hadn’t looked (why I hadn’t looked there I can’t explain) and there it was! Yay! Joy!
I went from a sad loser to a happy finder and now every time I use my pen I get that happy feeling again. Definitely a keeper.
Last Saturday my plein air group met at Borges Ranch in Walnut Creek’s Shell Ridge Open Space. It’s a beautiful place that feels far away out in the country, and is surrounded by strange, tall hills covered in a hundred shades of green.
While I was painting I kept hearing the strangest sounds: yips, yelps, squeals and howls. I ruled out the sheep, goats, pigs and roosters and decided it was either the world’s most annoying beagle or a coyote. Later I asked the ranger who confirmed that there were three coyote families in the three nearby hills. He said they all have pups in their dens and are very talkative now. Want to hear a coyote? Click here to go to a site with a coyote sound clip.
To see wonderful photos and stories about life with an adopted coyote who was orphaned at 10 days old when his parents were shot for killing sheep, please visit The Daily Coyote blog, “a story of love, survival and trust.”
Now back to the painting–I tried to simplify, avoid details and focus on color, light and big shapes. The sky was completely covered in a thick layer of clouds and I noticed a painting “rule” in action: cool light creates warm shadows (and vice versa). Although the heavy cloud cover meant there weren’t obvious shadows, I could see how darker areas leaned toward red while areas in light were cooler (e.g. lemon yellow, not an orange-yellow).
When I got home I broke my rule of not touching up plein air studies and fussed with it, eventually ruining it and throwing it in the trash. I’m glad I took a photo first…and that I had the joy of painting to a coyote soundtrack!
I had planned to oil paint with my plein air group at Mountain View Cemetery but there were just too many interesting sights to explore to plant myself in one spot with an easel. I switched to ink and watercolor which is so much more portable. I wonder what the statue above is supposed to be pointing towards?
The entrance and central plaza is planted with thousands (?) of tulips. I hoped they would be in bloom but I only spotted one early bird. This cemetery is such a beautiful and historic place (as you can see in this photo slide show).
This pond and little waterfall beneath a gigantic weeping willow tree (above) is one of my favorite spots in the cemetery, hidden just behind the entrance gate. I’ve tried to paint it before and have yet to get it right. Maybe next time.
After the group left I stayed behind to draw a couple more of the statues. The life-sized angel on the left was bunching up her robes, looking off into the distance. The one on the right is yet another female statue pointing at something in the distance.
I’m curious about how people chose or designed their statues in the 1800s. Were they built to order or were there standard designs they could buy? Why are they almost all women? I suppose in death, like birth, a mother watching over us is comforting, even if she’s looking or pointing at something else.
During a very rainy week it’s been wonderful to have this sunny view to paint from Google Street View for Virtual Paintout‘s March location of Cape Town, South Africa. It will be interesting to see how (and hopefully if) my winter practice with landscape painting in oil carries over to painting real landscapes outdoors. Now that the rainy season seems at last to be over I will soon find out!
A note about the color in the photo: despite my best efforts, I couldn’t get the foreground shadow on the path to perfectly match the color in the painting which is a little more purple and a little less bright.
Here’s the original Google Streetview image:
If you’re interested in the actual location, just click here for the map. And if you’d like to purchase this painting for $100, just click here.
This month’s Virtual Paintout is in Cape Town, South Africa. What a beautiful country! I needed a project I could complete in an hour or two so I chose a simple scene and a small panel to paint on (5×7″).
But I think I spent as much time tooling around South Africa on Google Streetview than I did painting. And tonight I had such a hard time getting the color right in the photo (the sky in the painting isn’t turquoise, it’s a warmer blue) that I’ve probably spent an equal amount of time trying to fix the photo and get this blog post finished!
So I will let it be. As my boss always says, “…good enough for jazz!” She knows I can be a perfectionist and has taught me that little mantra so that I don’t get stuck finessing one little thing while all the other work stacks up.
Here’s the original photo from Google Streetview:
Tonight it is thundering and lightening and pouring down buckets of rain. But there was a warm sunny day last week when I was able get out in the garden and sketch a bit. Callas are so graceful and such lovely volunteers, popping up all on their own wherever they please.
Just after my friend Barbara finished writing her book about growing fruit trees and delivered the manuscript to the publisher, she also delivered to me a baby fig tree that she couldn’t find a space for her in garden.
I was so excited to see that my new baby tree made it through the worst of the winter and was no longer just a stick. It now has actual leaves sprouting from the tip. In case you can’t tell from my sketchy drawing, those are random rocks and bricks I placed around the baby tree as a warning to the gardeners so they wouldn’t mow over it.
Another drawing opportunity while the girls play in the park. They got bored and ready to leave at just the moment I finished the sketch. I added a little color with Pitt Artist brush pens when I got home. That’s quite a fancy light fixture at this nice little park in Richmond Annex.
I have so many other pictures to post but all have stories that need writing, and after a day of unsuccessfully trying to re-paint a painting for the third time, any words I might share at the moment aren’t really fit for print!
Jana Bouc, Artist 