Category: Landscape

Categories
Gardening Outdoors/Landscape Plants Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

A Morning Walk

neighborhood 1

A neighbor’s beautiful front garden and purple house

Ink and watercolor in small Moleskine watercolor notebook
Click images, select All Sizes to enlarge

creek 2

The creek by Peets Coffee and Albany Hill

Today I woke to a beautiful spring day and went for a walk with my sketchbook and little paint set, planning to end up at the creek for another try at painting it. I find it quite challenging (impossible, really) to make something that looks like a creek amidst trees and spring greenery. But a few blocks from my house I spotted a beautifully landscaped yard in front of a tiny blue and purple house and had to stop and paint the blossoming fruit (?) tree surrounded by what I always think of as Martian plants (a little painting of one kind here). But they’re really called Euphorbia (photo of this kind), which is almost “euphoria” and always makes me wonder how it got named that.

So being a word-loving dictionary nerd I had to look it up. It wasn’t very exciting: “From Latin, euphorbea after Euphorbus, first-century Greek physician.” Also, “Euphorbiaceae: very large genus of diverse plants all having milky juice.” I think I’ll just keep calling it Martian plant since it’s so otherworldly looking.

But euphoria — what an interesting definition: ” A feeling of great happiness or well-being, commonly exaggerated and not necessarily well founded.” Hmmmmm, that makes me stop and ponder. If I’m feeling unfounded happiness or well-being, I’m not about to question it! Bring it on!

Categories
Acrylic Painting Gardening Other Art Blogs I Read Outdoors/Landscape Photos

An Artful Life

I’m doing something different today, inspired by a visit to my best friend Barbara’s house today — I’m sharing some of her wonderful artwork and photos of her garden. She truly lives an artful life and every corner of her little house and garden has something to delight the eye and spirit.

Images can be enlarged by clicking them and selecting “All Sizes”

Left: Life size ceramic woman (celebrating retirement and gardening). Right: View from the front porch. Just beyond this is the lush vegetable garden.

When Barbara retired not too long ago, she completely redesigned the tiny rental cottage beside her 3-story house in North Berkeley, sold the big house, and moved into the cottage with her husband and teenage daughter. Barbara is an amazing gardener and artist.

Above: Cottage front. Barbara created this mosaic on the foundation of the cottage using broken pottery and her handmade ceramic chickens.

Left: Barbara’s mosaic studio she built herself from recycled doors, windows and other things. Right: Path in her garden

Two pretty corners in the garden. Left: A ceramic gardening woman holding a carrot and a tall mosaic garden mirror.

Left: Whimsical ceramic whistles in Barbara’s sunny kitchen and a graceful ceramic woman in the hallway window. She started by making ceramic whistles and then learned how to make Ocarinas. I wonder if the female sculpture was inspired by our figure drawing sessions.

Two canvas painted “rugs” on the kitchen floor by the sink and fridge. I have rugs on my kitchen floor in those spots too, but they’re ugly things from the hardware store.

Above: Even the laundry room is artful. The detergent is hidden inside a tapestry cover.

Two of Barbara’s acrylic cactus paintings from back in the day (after she was a fabulous silversmith making exquisite silver jewelry when we first met, but before she became a teacher). During her years as a teacher she stopped painting and focused her art on quilting. Now she’s painting on her ceramics and plans to start painting on canvas again too.

I’m looking forward to some time painting in her garden. It’s about as close to heaven as you can get in Berkeley, especially when it comes with her homemade lemonade!

All art copyright 2007 by Barbara Edwards.

Categories
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
To enlarge, click image, select All Sizes

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.

Categories
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
Plein Air Puerto Vallarta Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

More Puerto Vallarta sketches

PV-Fountain
PV-Fountain-white background

Watercolor in Canson 7×10 watercolor book
To enlarge images, click them and select All Sizes

PV-Grocery

Ink and watercolor in small Moleskine watercolor notebook

I struggled with painting this fountain that was outside our classroom. There was no direct light because it was in a roofed courtyard and there was a bright fuschia pink wall behind it and a bright yellow-green wall on its right side. Before I painted the background, the fountain looked great. Then I painted the wall bright pink and it overpowered the fountain so then I tried painting over it which didn’t work so I washed off as much of the pink as would come off using a damp brush, and then painted over it with yellow ochre. The second version is with the background removed in Photoshop, cropped and lightened a bit to try to recreate how it looked originally. Which do you prefer?

One good thing that came of doing the drawing was that I recalled a tip I’d heard somewhere: to make a cylindrical object like a fountain or a vase appear symmetrical: draw a light vertical line down the center first and then measure each section (measuring its width on one side by sliding your thumb down the pencil to mark the size) and then comparing it to the other side or just eyeballing it.

I drew the grocery picture in the supermarket a couple doors down from my hotel. A workshop friend and I were there to get photos developed at the in-store 1-hour photo booth (thank goodness for my Spanish–without it they would have printed all 104 pictures on my SD card instead of the 10 I wanted–I had to talk them through how to do it on their machine since there was no self-serve). We stood in the produce aisle with our pens, sketchbooks and little paint kits drawing and painting as fast as we could while shoppers and employees ignored us. The worker was standing on a raised rail changing the prices. Half of the price tags listed comparisons to Walmart prices to show shoppers they were getting a good deal. It’s not the charming street market I hoped to sketch, but they did have great fresh rolls in the bakery and organic lettuce and rotisserie chickens that I used for lunch sandwiches all week.

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 Plein Air Watercolor

Hasta la vista

easel1

I’m off to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico for a week of painting, swimming, reading and siestas. I’ll be joining Judy Morris for her watercolor workshops from 9-2 in our courtyard patio “studio” and on plein air painting trips around the area. The trip is sponsored by Flying Colors Art Workshops.

The picture above is my new watercolor easel recommended by Judy. Here’s what she said about it:

“Some of you may be interested in the PERFECT plein air easel. I have one! I ABSOLUTELY LOVE IT!!! Look at Valpod Artist Easel website to see it. Norm Kramer in Idaho makes them (Valpod Artist Easels – Telephone: 208-522-8677 in Idaho). I prefer the #U8000 model. I take the tripod, shelf, plastic cups that are provided, and the small (1/4 sheet size) board. Fits in my suitcase perfectly!”

I’ll let you know how I liked it. I normally use a Winsor Newton Bristol watercolor portable easel and make a shelf by clipping a flat old palette on top of my old lady shopping cart that I drag my plein air supplies around in. I can’t bring that cart with me so will have to carry everything, which I’m not thrilled about. I may just use my watercolor sketchbook when we go off site. I’m bringing a Canson Montval Field Watercolor notebook (140 pound watercolor paper 7×10″), small Moleskine watercolor notebook and sketchbook in my backpack on the plane, and maybe a few others, depending on room.

Well, it’s already 9:30 PM and I haven’t finished packing yet and I’m leaving in the AM so I better say Adios now.

I’ll be back next weekend.

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.