Category: Landscape

Categories
Plein Air Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

Cloudy Skies – First Rain

Clouds1

Watercolor in Raffine sketchbook
(Click image, select “All Sizes” to enlarge)

It rained last night and this morning for the first time since winter. Our staff meeting ended at 4:00 and I was back to my neighborhood by 5:00 which was a treat, since I usually don’t get home from work until 7:00 and it’s almost dark by then. The bright sky was full of dramatic clouds, so instead of heading directly home I drove to the top of Albany Hill on Solano Ave. I painted these two quickies there, standing in the street behind my parked Toyota RAV4, using the painting gear I keep in the car.

Clouds2

Watercolor in Raffine sketchbook
(Click image, select “All Sizes” to enlarge)

I noticed there was a full moon when the sun went down. Maybe that’s what all the craziness was about downtown yesterday when I said I wish there was an iPod for the eyes so you could see beautiful things instead of ugly urban grit. Tami cleverly quipped that an “eye-pod” would be great. And then today I read this in David Pogue’s New York Times technology column:

“Apple’s rep gave a little talk that focused on iPod accessories. One of them looked like a pair of skinny wraparound sunglasses that displays your video iPod’s TV shows and movies on a virtual big screen that floats in the center of your vision. What’s cool is that you can still see–by looking around the TV set on either side. Hard to explain, but really neat.”

Categories
Drawing Every Day Matters Life in general Outdoors/Landscape Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

Solano Ave Storefronts (EDM #85)

Sweet Lotus Lifestyle Gifts

Please click image and select “All Sizes” to enlarge
Micron Pigma ink and watercolor in large Moleskine watercolor notebook

Today was the 11th International Sketchcrawl and I’d planned to attend. But this morning I decided I really wanted to take a bike ride instead. I believe there are no shoulds when it comes to my art life– I’m the only one I need to please. I feel so fortunate that so much of my time is my own and that, at least for today, the decisions I have to make are about such happy things. So I nixed the official sketchcrawl, packed my sketching kit in my bike bag and took off.

I rode over to Solano Avenue, planning to draw the storefront of Solano Cyclery after getting them to fix my kickstand. But their storefront was boring so I took a little stroll and saw this Chinese restaurant and it’s next-door neighbor, Sweet Lotus Lifestyle Gifts. (This week’s Everyday Matters Challenge is to draw a storefront.)

Sweet Lotus Lifestyle Gifts is crammed with Made in China chotzkes. I’m not sure what kind of Lifestyle they had in mind when they named the store but I don’t think it would be a good one if you owned all that cheap, shiny junk. The name always makes me think of Lifestyle brand condoms which makes me think the store should be selling vibrators and sex toys. I’ve never gone inside, so who knows, maybe they do, way in the back.

I sat on the ground in front of a wine shop to do the drawing. Then I noticed a conveniently placed wine barrel advertising the wine shop which was just the right height to stand beside and use as a table for my paints and notebook. While I was working several different people came over to see what I was doing and said nice things. I know many people feel uncomfortable having someone watch when they draw in public. For some reason I think it’s fun–people are always so nice and seem to be surprised and excited to see their own little world put down on paper.

When I finished after about an hour and a half, I realized I’d missed lunch. I picked up a California Roll from Kyoto To Go, the local sushi bento box store right across the street and sat in a little corner park and with my yummy lunch. Though I planned to make another stop to sketch on the way home, I decided to skip it. It was a fun bike ride home and then I had a little nap. A perfectly enjoyable day!

Categories
Outdoors/Landscape Plein Air Watercolor

Blake Gardens – Trees & Yuppies

Blake Garden Trees

Watercolor painted en plein air at Blake Gardens on Arches 9×12 watercolor block

This afternoon the weather was gorgeous and knowing that plein air painting time will soon be over (at least for wimps like me who hate being cold) I grabbed the opportunity to go paint at Blake Gardens. I love this area of the garden, with the rows of trees and reflecting pond. Unfortunately a professional photographer and a perfect little yuppie family were also using the area to take family portraits.

For the entire two hours I was there painting they were alternately posing for pictures and trying to keep their little son from falling apart as he became increasingly bored and tired of all the phoney posing together. They were all perfectly groomed, in matching blond hair, white shirts, khaki pants (father and son) and khaki skirt (mom). They enthusiastically worked on keeping little Griffin engaged (Dictionary: “Griffin: a fabulous beast with the head and wings of an eagle and the body of a lion”) in silly songs, teddy bears, slinkies, hugs and tickles, snacks, bribes of lollipops later, and discussion about his favorite tools (he’s got a hardware fixation and prefers monkey wrenches to screwdrivers). They were a really nice, loving family but I had really been hoping for serene communing with nature, not yuppies.

By the time we all left when Blake Gardens closed at 4:30, I had a headache and they were moving on to another park for more pictures. I was happy with how the painting went today–there were many moments of enjoyment as I became more closely aquainted with these grand old trees and as the paint appeared on the paper in ways I liked.

Categories
Drawing Life in general Outdoors/Landscape People Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

It’s About Time: What I learned today

Old Teeth

“Old Teeth” (study for a large painting I’m going to make, drawn today from a combination of photos I took on Broadway in Oakland). Ink, watercolor in Moleskine large watercolor notebook. If you wonder why those hip-hop people want to have gold teeth, you might also enjoy a previous post here about a new invention I came up with in a dream for those baggy-pants boys.

 * * *

I spend a lot of time being frustrated because there isn’t enough time to do all of the things I want to do. Every weekend I start off being optimistic, with exciting ideas to explore for painting, drawing, teaching, learning; things that need to be done to care for myself and others; gardening projects, housework, paperwork, etc. But weekends (and most days) always end the same way: feeling disappointed because I didn’t accomplish half of what I thought I could do.

They say (whoever “they” is) that with age comes wisdom. Well I got a huge chunk of wisdom today, and this is what I learned:

There will NEVER be enough time to do everything. Not only that, there will never be enough time to do HALF of what my busy mind comes up with on any given day, week, month, year.

So all I have to do is accept the reality that time is finite and that my little brain, full of ideas, is not. Instead of fooling myself into thinking I can do it all, I need to reassure myself that I probably can’t do half of it, and just pick what I most want to do that day, do it, and rejoice.

When I told Michael about this discovery, he asked if that meant I’d no longer be living in what we call “Jana’s World” where time is this fluffy substance that is mostly ignored until it suddenly surprises me to discover I’m late, yet again. But I like living in Jana’s World and I’m not looking to relocate; it’s (Jana’s) World peace I’m after.

Categories
Every Day Matters Outdoors/Landscape Watercolor

View from San Quentin Prison (EDM #83: Water)

Bay View from San Quentin Prison

When I was driving home from San Anselmo (Marin County) Friday I pulled into the entrance to San Quentin Prison to watch the sunset on the San Francisco Bay. I took some photos to use for this week’s Everyday Matter’s Challenge: draw a body of water.

This afternoon it was really nice to get back to watercolor after spending yesterday struggling with the Painter software. I did this on an Arches 12 x 9″ watercolor block without doing much drawing first. I’m not sure if I should have simplified more–maybe deleted the foreground fennel plants or the electrical tower (I think that’s what it is) in the background. I also discovered when I finished that the reflection in the water doesn’t line up with the sun in the sky. (Ooops!)

Here’s the reference photo and a picture of the sign in front of the prison. It’s so weird that there’s a funky old prison on some of the most beautiful and expensive land in the country, if not the world. (click photos to enlarge on Flickr).

Bay vew from San Quentin Prison San Quentin Prison

Categories
Drawing Outdoors/Landscape Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

Monastery in San Anselmo, CA

Monastery in San Anselmo

Today was a much better day. I visited a friend in San Anselmo (Marin County) and have always been intrigued by seeing the top of this castle-like building peeking out over the trees in her neighborhood. So today on the way to my next stop (the gym) I parked at the bottom of the dirt road leading up to the monastery (or so I thought). And put my quick sketching kit in my backback and started climbing the road…which ended in a hillside covered in poison oak and weeds. I spotted a tree trunk halfway up, climbed up to it, dodging the poison oak, and used it as a little table to put my paints on.

While I was doing this quick watercolor sketch, two nursery school teachers and their brood were having an adventure, walking up the dirt road (but not climbing the hill). It was fun listening to the teachers calling out “Peanut butter!” and the kids shouting “Sandwich!” along with the whines, “It’s too hard…” and demands “Put down the stick!” and questions “What do we do when we cross a street?” (“Look for cars!”). It’s funny how the music, conversation or stories that are happening while painting somehow get embedded in the painting.

If I had taken just an extra minute before I started drawing, I wouldn’t have put that one tree centered right in front of the other, even though that’s how they were in real life. Ink, watercolor in small Moleskine watercolor notebook.

Categories
Plein Air Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

View from Moeser Lane

moeser-lane-web.jpg
Click image to enlarge

I was driving down Moeser Lane on my way home from Blake Gardens and as usual was amazed by the view and had to pull over and paint it from the front seat of my car. Moeser Lane is a very steep street that heads straight uphill from my house (in the flatlands near the S.F. Bay) and ends at The Arlington in El Cerrito (which means “little hill”–hah!) . Moeser Lane has a colorful history, having once been a tramway carrying rock from a quarry located near the top of the hill.

Painted in watercolor on a Sennelier watercolor block sized 10″ by 4″ — perfect for such a widescreen landscape.

Categories
Plein Air Watercolor

Blake Gardens, Kensington, CA

Blake Gardens

Painted on site in watercolor on 9 x 12 Arches watercolor block.

I finally got back up to Blake Gardens today with two hours before closing. My plein air painting supplies live in an old lady shopping cart in my car. I dragged that thing all around the Blake Gardens estate looking for a spot to paint that wouldn’t be too cold and windy as it was a foggy day in Kensington.

A woman taking photos stopped to see what I was doing. She’s an oil painter who paints there often so I asked for her advice. Landscape and plein air painting never really interested me until this year, and I’ve only begun exploring it. While it initially feels humbling, even embarassing, to allow myself to be a beginner and ask for help, it’s also very freeing.

She saw that I was doing pencil thumbnail sketches in a sketchbook to get started and she suggested using a Sharpie instead, blocking in the main shapes on a full page instead of doing thumbnails. She was right–that helped a lot. Then I did a quick pencil sketch on my watercolor block, picked up the biggest brush I’d brought–a 1″ flat (something I rarely use) and dug in and started painting.

The funny thing is that the scan has better contrast, value range and color saturation than the original. I’m going to make a printout of the scanned image, and using that as my reference, enhance the original painting to match the scanned version. It showed me how to make the painting better–isn’t that cool?!

So my moral dilemma is this: which is cheating more, to post the scan-enhanced version before changing the painting, or to change a plein air painting by working on it in the studio? I guess then it’s not a plein air painting anymore? What do you think?

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 Life in general Plein Air Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

Busby, Fiona and the bird

Fiona-Busby-Bird

I walked into the studio to decide whether to draw something new tonight or just post the little sketches I did this morning on public transit. The kitties ran ahead, leapt onto my drawing table and chair, looked out the window and started making little chuffing noises at the birds in the tree outside my window. We all watched the birds gathering nesting materials from the ground and popping back into the foliage for a few minutes. Then I snuck away, grabbed my sketchbook and a Sharpie, and standing behind them, quickly sketched them with lots of redrawing lines and scribbles. The perspective and proportions aren’t quite right but I got the scene down before their short attention spans led them on to other mischief. With Busby (the big tabby) practically sitting on my sketchbook watching the brush as I painted (but without swatting it, like he often does), I quickly added watercolor.

Now I can get in bed and start reading the two-volume biography of Matisse that arrived from Amazon today.