Category: Plein Air

Categories
Albany Ink and watercolor wash Landscape Life in general Outdoors/Landscape Painting Places Plein Air Sketchbook Pages

Creek by 99 Ranch Market, Albany

Ranch Market Creek, ink & watercolor in Moleskine 7x5 wc sketchbook
Creek, ink & watercolor in Moleskine 7x5

I thought I was bringing my car in for an oil change, but the service manager told me it was way overdue for its 3 year/30,000 mile major maintenance (about 3 years overdue, as a matter of fact). I take public transit or walk whenever I can so my 2002 Toyota RAV 4 has less than 26,000 miles on it. I thought I could wait until 30,000 but he said no because the kind of short trips I take are harder on the car than lots of regular driving .

So I left it with him to do the full boogie on the car, feeling a bit sheepish at my car abuse. Despite the offer of a ride, I decided to walk the two miles home, hoping I’d find something fun to draw on the way. Sure enough a mile into the walk, I found this beautiful creek I never knew existed, half in the shade and half brilliantly lit with spring greenery all around.

As I was sketching and painting, an elderly Asian woman (99 Ranch Market is an Asian shopping center) showed me the bag of bread she was bringing for the resident ducks and then wandered off down the path, hoping to find them.

When I got home I realized I’d left all of my keys with the service manager. Oops…. But fortunately I have a “Plan B” for my keys, having locked myself out one too many times in the past.

And now my car seems so much perkier and happier with all new fresh fluids and the nice car wash they gave it. I’m very fond of my car, it’s always been totally reliable, and I really should treat it better.

Categories
Art theory Landscape Oil Painting Outdoors/Landscape Painting Places Plein Air

Now I Am Having Fun!

View from Old Borges Ranch; Plein air, Oil on panel, 9x12"
View from Old Borges Ranch; Plein air, Oil on panel, 9x12"

I’m celebrating a bit of progress I saw today when I painted plein air at Old Borges Ranch in Walnut Creek. I painted at this site a year ago and had a terrible time, titling the post of the awful painting I did that day, “Am I Having Fun Yet? Uh…no!”

Today was a lot more fun. I started the painting with a plan (described below) and stuck with it until I started rushing to wrap it up in time for our group critique at 1:00 when I muddied things up a bit since the light had changed in the scene from when I first started at 10:30.

When I put the painting in the line up with the other 14 paintings, I didn’t even cringe or feel embarrassed. It helped too, that I now understand that my plein air paintings are sketches, not finished works of art.

Here are the steps I took that seemed to work for me:

Continue reading “Now I Am Having Fun!”
Categories
Drawing Every Day Matters Ink and watercolor wash Life in general Painting Plein Air Sketchbook Pages Still Life Watercolor

Sketchcrawl of a Day: Racing to Complete Sketchbooks by January 1

Bedside Table Morning
Bedside Table with Coffee & "An Illustrated Life" - Morning
morning walk
DeLuxe Parked - morning walk
Midday
Poodle Waiting at Trader Joes, El Cerrito - Midday
Busby Napping After Dinner
Busby Annoyed, Trying to Nap - After Dinner
Fiona "As Seen on TV" Evening
Fiona "As Seen on TV" (literally) - Evening
Messy Desk - Evening
Messy Desk - Late Evening

I challenged myself to do a sketchcrawl of my day, making a 10 minute drawing (almost) every hour, wherever I was at the moment.  I was surprised by how many times during the day I saw things I’d like to draw. But I waited for my timer to tell me,  “Now!” and then started drawing.  If I was out and about, I added the watercolor at home in the evening.

Reading Danny Gregory’s book, An Illustrated Life,  inspired me to get back to my sketchbooks which I’d been neglecting while I focused on oil painting this past year. As a result of that neglect, I had half a dozen unfinished sketchbooks that I’ve challenged myself to complete by the end of the year. Hence the sketchcrawl above (and more to come as the year draws to a close, or should I say, “as I draw the year (and my sketchbooks) to a close!

More sketching = more fun!

Categories
Drawing Ink and watercolor wash Life in general Other Art Blogs I Read Outdoors/Landscape Painting People Photos Plein Air Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

Sketching with Martha & Shirley (St. Patrick’s San Francisco)

St. Patrick's Church, ink & watercolor 8x6"
St. Patrick's Church, San Francisco, ink & watercolor 8x6"

Shirley (Paper and Threads) was visiting San Francisco this week and Martha (Trumpetvine) and I had the pleasure of spending the afternoon sketching with her in the park. Poor St. Patrick’s Catholic Church isn’t really falling over despite the many earthquakes it has weathered over the years. It’s just my usual wonky drawing. Martha and Shirley will post their drawings on their own blogs eventually but here is a snapshot of our work lined up together.

Shirley's, Jana's and Martha's sketches
Shirley's, Jana's and Martha's sketches

And here we are lined up, with me a head taller and trying to take a photo and holding my iPhone at arm’s length.

Jana, Martha and Shirley
Jana, Martha and Shirley

We were joined virtually on our little art blogger sketchcrawl by phone  from Lisa in Texas and via Facebook (where I posted an update and photo while we were sketching) by Marta (MARTa’s Art) and EJ (Rose-Anglais) .

After sitting on cold concrete steps to sketch we were ready to warm up. We walked back to Shirley’s hotel, and she treated us to a glass of wine on the 39th floor of the Mariott Hotel (also known as the “Jukebox” building because of its unique architecture). Here’s the view from the bar just before sunset.

View from the hotel bar
View from the Marriott Hotel bar

It was such a treat to spend a Friday afternoon with these two very talented and beautiful women.  After the sun set in golds and pinks, and the lights of the city came on, I had to leave while they went off in search of dinner.  I BARTed to Oakland for the monthly Friday night “Art Murmur” gallery walk where my sister and niece had pieces in a show. Walking from BART I passed the grand old Paramount Theatre and set my camera to “burst” mode so I could capture the changing lights of the neon marquis.

Paramount 5
Paramount 1
Paramount 4
Paramount 2
Paramount 3
Paramount 3
Paramount 2
Paramount 4
Categories
Ink and watercolor wash Painting Plein Air Still Life Watercolor

Bananas in a Debbie Meyer Green Bag

Bananas in a Bag, Watercolor & acrylic on hot press paper, 6x8
Bananas in a Bag, Watercolor & acrylic on hot press paper, 6x8"

I’m usually skeptical of anything that says “As Seen on TV” on the label, but I heard someone raving about how “Debbie Meyer Green Bags” keep fruit fresh longer and decided to give them a try. They actually do work. I used them during the summer with tomatoes from my garden and very few of them went rotten. They seemed to last for weeks without putting them in the refrigerator. I used the bags successfully with bananas and peaches too.

They supposedly can be reused 8 to 10 times but I’ve found that each time you reuse the bags they seem to have less potency.  The package says they are “made with a “a natural mineral ‘Oya’ that absorbs and removes the ethylene gases that cause normal deterioration.” Oya is made from zeolite, a kind of clay found in Japanese caves.

You do have to keep the contents of the bags dry and I found putting them in the refrigerator means they get moisture inside and you have to keep wiping the inside of the bag. I hope I don’t find out later

About the watercolor:

I wanted to use masking fluid to preserve the white highlights and shiny spots on the bag but when I opened my bottle of masking fluid I found it had turned into a solid lump of white rubber. So I tried using a white colored pencil as a resist on the white areas, but when I painted over it it didn’t repel the paint. I could have drawn the whole thing out really, really carefully and saved the white areas by painting around them, but I didn’t have the time tonight.

So I just painted, planning to use my white gel pen for the highlights but discovered it too had dried up.  In the end I made the highlights with liquid Golden acrylic, drawing straight from the little squirt bottle of paint, blobs and all.

Debbie Meyer Green Bags
Debbie Meyer Green Bags

P.S. WordPress rolled out it’s new version today with a beautiful, pwerful and simple new user interface that makes blogging a joy! Yay WordPress!

Categories
Art theory Landscape Oil Painting Outdoors/Landscape Painting Plein Air

Plein air painting: What’s it good for?

Lake Temescal Backlit, Oil on panel 9x12"
Lake Temescal Backlit, Oil on panel 9x12

An artist friend once said that in her opinion, the definition of ” plein air” is “bad landscape painting.” While I have seen some really great plein air landscapes, I’m finding that its challenges often lead to results that look clunky and kindergartenish. It takes a lot of practice to be able to successfully capture a scene in the two hour window you have before the light changes and everything looks completely different.

When starting a plein air painting (or any painting for that matter) it is recommended to first simplify the scene down to its most basic elements, the largest shapes of value and color. However, because I love detail so much, something inside me often rebels at simplifying and then I find myself with an incoherent mess.

I like to think of plein air painting as akin to figure drawing, rather than a way to achieve finished works of art: It’s good for you, but not an end in itself. But if I spend my painting time mostly working plein air, I end up with lots of crappy paintings and frustration from working small. And that leads to messing around with  the painting at home instead of leaving it alone.

Painting process

Below is the sketch that I painted at Lake Temescal on Sunday. It was a gorgeous day and although the lake was smooth and reflective and beautiful, the backlit trees along the lake were calling out to be painted. Below is the original version of the scene painted plein air.

Original painted plein air
Original painted plein air

When I brought it home I broke my rule (that I have yet to follow): Leave plein air paintings alone, call them sketches and move on.  Instead, after dinner I started messing with it, using a photo reference.

Today I studied the painting, still dissatisfied, trying to figure out what was wrong. I converted photos of the scene and my painting to “grayscale” in Photoshop and compared them. Immediately I could see that the photo had strong value contrast and that my painting did not. I worked on it some more, adding some dark accents. Here are the photos:

When a painting isn’t working I turn it into a little laboratory for learning, pushing it until it’s total crap or I’ve learned what I was trying to learn, or both. I think I should have just left this one as a happy color study.

Categories
Drawing Ink and watercolor wash Other Art Blogs I Read Outdoors/Landscape Painting People Plein Air Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

Sketching at Martinez Waterfront Park

Martinez Hot Dog Depot, Ink & watercolor
Martinez Waterfront Park, Ink & watercolor in watercolor Moleskine, 5x7"

I arrived late and lazy (due to my efforts to decaffeinate myself) for our paint out at Martinez Waterfront Park today and decided to sketch in ink and watercolor instead of setting up my easel and oil paints. It’s a great park, with a marina full of boats on the bay, fields, trees, ponds, an historic train station and old train (pictured above), a nearby river and marshlands and much more. It’s right on the edge of the older part of town and the Amtrak train station is just outside the entrance to the park.

I sat on a very hard stone bench at the old train station about 20 feet from the tracks.  On the sketch above, I drew without much of a plan, just picking things I saw that interested me and sticking them somewhere on the page, drawing in ink and hoping it would all fit together somehow. I added the watercolor on site.

The two artists in the sketch were standing between the west and east Amtrak tracks. Every 15 minutes a train would roar by about 2 feet of where they were standing, sounding it’s horn so loudly it was painful, but they stood their ground like the dedicated plein air painters that they are.

Martinez Hot Dog Depot, Ink & watercolor
Martinez Hot Dog Depot, Ink & watercolor in Moleskine watercolor sketchbook, 5x7"

I turneda bit to the left at the end of the day and quickly sketched this wonky old Hot Dog Depot (named because it’s adjacent to the train depot. The perspective is all wonky but so was the building. It has a weird corner section where that second smaller window is. So the building isn’t a rectangle, it’s a pentagon (5-sided). I didn’t have time to worry about perspective as the group was convening for a critique and I had to hurry to finish this at all.

Categories
Landscape Oil Painting Outdoors/Landscape Painting Photos Plein Air

Lake Anza Autumn Plein Air

Lake Anza Autumn, 9x12, Oil on panel
Lake Anza Autumn, 9x12", Oil on panel

I became the official bathroom monitor today at Lake Anza in Berkeley’s Tilden Park. Swim season is over; there are no lifeguards, entry fees, or snack bar and the lakeside entrance to the restrooms is closed for the season. The overhanging roof by the restroom entrance provided me a nice shady spot to paint but it meant that people kept walking up looking confused (and sometimes a little desperate) when they saw the locked door behind me.

I’d already found an entry to the bathrooms outside the swim area, around the back of the building so about every 15 minutes I told worried people how to find the restroom. I got to help nervous little girls, a group of German tourists, cyclists in shiny shorts, tan teenage girls in tiny bikinis, a hairy man wearing a huge gold necklace and Speedos, a picnicing Mexican family, a group of adults pushing a very ill teenage girl in a wheelchair hooked up to breathing tubes and tanks.

The latter group decided to set themselves up at a picnic table directly in front of me but when they realized they would be blocking my view, they picked up the huge table and moved it. The amazing thing about painting plein air is that people are so nice. Everybody who takes a peek always says something complimentary, even if the painting is total crap. And then they tell you about their [aunt, brother, friend, grandmother, etc.] who paints really good paintings, or how they can’t draw a straight line.

As the day grew warmer more and more people arrived, my original concept for the painting of an empty lifeguard stand on a deserted beach didn’t make much sense. So when this dad and little boy walked by I jumped at the chance to try putting people in a plein air oil painting. I also had an intention to focus on warm/cool color temperature relationships.

I struggled with the water — it kept looking like a meadow. The other painters in my group painted the water in variations of light blue-green and suggested I do the same to solve the problem. But I saw almost no blue in the water. It was gold and green and purple and orange and pink. Then every once in a while a breeze rippled the surface and a bit of sky blue reflection appeared.

After the critique I returned to my easel, painting and repainting the water for two more hours but by then the light had changed so much from when I arrived that I finally called it done and went home.

Here’s the photos of the morning and afternoon views of the same scene.

30 a.m.) photo
Lake Anza (10:30 a.m.) photo
Lake Anza (315 p.m.)
Lake Anza (3:15 p.m.)
Categories
Landscape Oil Painting Outdoors/Landscape Painting Plein Air

View from China Camp (Ick I hate this painting!)

View from China Camp, Plein Air, Oils, 12x9"
View from China Camp, Plein Air, Oils, 12x9"

The weather on Sunday was absolutely perfect and although I really wanted to stay home and start a large studio painting, I couldn’t resist the chance for another summery plein air painting opportunity before the weather changes. We met at China Camp again for an all day paintout and barbeque but I was only there for the afternoon.

[I started several times to describe the day and the scene, with children playing in the sand, catamarans being launched, the waspy buzzing thingees (yellow jackets?) that tried to share my lunch, how tired I was, etc., but decided it was too boring…]

So I’ll just say a bit about the painting and call it a night: After hunting for a painting spot I realized that what really interested me was the sky and the distant hills and the sparkle on the water. After doing a couple thumbnails to try to fit all of that into the scene, I sketched out the big shapes on the canvas.

Then I decided to just start at the top and paint my way down like I was icing a cake, trying to capture the right colors in relation to each other as I went. Here’s a picture Sue took at China Camp when I was 3/4 done:

In progress shot at China Camp
In progress at China Camp

And here’s the painting as finished plein air:

China Camp as finished on site
China Camp as finished on site

After I got home and had dinner, I looked at it again and thought the water looked more like a meadow and not like what I’d seen. Even though I was really exhausted, I decided to try to fix the water, working on it for about 2 hours, painting and scraping it off, over and over. I must have gone through the equivalent of a tube of paint! Finally I wiped the water portion off completely and went to bed (which is what I should have done in the first place, since I was too tired to think clearly about what I was doing).

Tonight, working from memory only, I tried doing the water again and am satisfied enough to move on.

Categories
Art theory Landscape Life in general Oil Painting Painting Plein Air

Confessions of a Dangerous Driver

Morning light, Petaluma, oil on panel, 12x9"
Morning light study, Petaluma, oil on panel, 12x9
Afternoon light color study, Petaluma, oil on panel, 12x9"
Afternoon light study, Petaluma, oil on panel, 12x9

I ran a red light right in front of a police car on my way to painting class on Monday. If that wasn’t bad enough, I didn’t even realize I’d done it.

I even thought to myself as I drove past the police car that was waiting for the light to change, how nice it is that police don’t look at women like me suspiciously the way they might at young men in loud cars.

Seconds later I heard the siren, saw the flashing red lights, and pulled over. The cute, young officer was shaking his head,  it was so ridiculous. He couldn’t believe what I’d done and, trying to make sense of it, asked if I was distracted, was looking at a light further ahead, etc.

I never even saw the other car he told me had had to slam on the brakes to avoid me, and who then looked at the cop as both of them shrugged and shook their heads in amazement for a moment.

I eventually figured out what happened. Because I was distracted,  the traffic signal had registered in my mind as a stop sign. So I stopped politely, feeling immune to police scrutiny, and then drove on, leaving the officer sitting behind me at the light.

Thank goodness there was no damage or injuries (other than to my pride and pocketbook—it’s going to be an expensive ticket). It was a good lesson about driving distracted.  I’d been thinking about how late I was AND (hate to admit it) I was on the phone leaving a message for someone (although using the required headset).

About the paintings

Camille offered an extra afternoon session Monday so that we could do both a morning study as usual, and a late afternoon study of approximately the same scene to capture the difference in light. I simplified the buildings, trees and landscape to abstract shapes or puzzle pieces, so that I could focus on the colors and light effects.

In the morning the foreground and midground was mostly in shadow while the distance was in open sun and the sky appeared a weak yellowish to slightly pink color.  In the afternoon everything was front lit with a very warm light.

It was a long day and after Camille made some adjustments to my afternoon study and gave suggestions for doing more,  I realized I was too tired to paint any longer. I lay down on the grass in the park and spent the last half hour of class sketching a palm tree on my back (I mean I was on my back in the grass; it’s hard enough drawing palm trees, let alone sketching one on my own back!).

It had been too long since I laid in the grass on a summer day in the shade of a tree looking up at the sky. I need to do more of that and less rushing around distracted!