Category: Other Art Blogs I Read

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Drawing Other Art Blogs I Read People Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

Sketchcrawl 15 – Berkeley’s Fourth Street

Sketchcrawl15-peets

Peet’s Coffee. Larger

All are drawn in ink and painted with watercolor in small Moleskine watercolor notebook
Yesterday was Sketchcrawl 15 and I joined a friendly, talented group of artists (including Oakland artist Carrie, Sonoma county artist Natalie, Cathy from East Bay Plein Air Painters, and fellow art-bloggers Martha, Vern and Pete) on Berkeley’s Fourth Street to sketch. We had a good time sketching in nice weather, and met up again at the end of the day at Brennan’s Pub for drinks.

Brennan’s used to be a favorite hangout in my late 20s — a place to meet friends for drinks and partying back in the day. I hadn’t been there in at least 20 years so it was fun to see it was still virtually the same and to have a yummy Irish Coffee for old times sake. I learned today that Brennan’s will be demolished in the near future to make room for a new development but they will be moving to a historic, former train depot nearby.

Sketchcrawl15-lilly

Lilly. Larger
“Good Afternoon. Could you help me please?” “Good afternoon, could you help me please?” “Good afternoon, could you help me please?” “Thank you Jesus.” “Good afternoon, could you help me please?”

Martha and I sat on a bench across the street from Hear Music so she could draw their storefront. Just to my left was this cheerful and charming (and repetitive) blind woman soliciting money from the shoppers in this upscale area. For the half hour we sat there she continued her chant, while her sweet but old, grizzled male friend gave her quiet little cues about who was walking by, what they looked like and what they were doing. She was excited we were sketching her. I gave him my card and promised to send a copy of the finished sketch, which he liked. She also allowed me to take photos and I plan to do a painting of her as she was quite beautiful (which you can’t tell from my sketch, sadly.) We put a few dollars in her begging bowl (a quart-sized yogurt container).

Sketchcrawl15-gate

Larger
The last sketch of the day in the little courtyard behind Sur la Table. Martha went inside and drew kitchen goods.

Sketchcrawl15-spengers

Spenger’s Fish Grotto
Larger

This is the first sketch of the day I did while we waited for everyone to arrive. I painted it later at home from little color notes I penciled in to the sketch. Pete did a fabulous drawing of Spenger’s using a blue Copic fine liner and watercolor, so please be sure to visit the Berkeley Sketchcrawl website to see his drawings and Martha’s, and the cool photos Martha took of everyone sketching.

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Life in general Other Art Blogs I Read People Sketchbook Pages

Yay! No School for Scoundrels Here!

School Board Meeting

Micron Pigma Ink in small Moleskine notebook
Click to see larger

I attended my first school board meeting tonight to join with about 70 people from my neighborhood association to speak out against the planned school for expelled students in a former elementary school in my neighborhood. Many residents, including several who are teachers and/or work with disturbed kids spoke passionately and persuasively. One of the five board members who’d attended our previous meeting spoke eloquently about why it was a bad location for these students (including the fact they’d be coming from the opposite end of the district and there’s no public transit within a quarter mile of the school).

When I first sat down a woman in the next seat who was there for another cause and was very experienced with the school board meetings told me it was a done deal–the school would be put there, period, the end. Fortunately she was very surprised and wrong — the board voted against putting it at this site. YAY!

Since my painting group was supposed to meet tonight, I invited them to attend the meeting and bring sketchbooks. Only my dear friend Judith (who I can always count on to be enthusiastic about joining me to do whatever kind of odd things I cook up) said yes. While I did the sketch above, Judith did the drawing below (I love her lines!):

Judith's Drawing at the meeting

Ink and watercolor pencils in large Aquabee sketchbook
Copyright Judith H.
Click to see larger

Except for my butt hurting from sitting in the metal folding chair for nearly two hours, it was a great night. It really felt like a miracle to have swayed the board and kept this scary, poorly planned school away from our humble but proud little neighborhood.

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Faces Oil Painting Other Art Blogs I Read Painting People Portrait

Francis: Work in progress, oils

Francis-Grisaille underpainting done

Grisaille underpainting, oil on canvas, 9×12 (larger)

Francis is a little boy I photographed (with his mom’s permission) in the cafe at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco. Something about his red hair and sweet, wise nature made me want to paint him. This is a second attempt–the first got tossed. I’m trying a technique I recently saw demonstrated at the California Watercolor Association meeting. The goal is to end up with strong darks, high contrast and glowing skin. The artist who demonstrated the technique started her demo by showing slides of Caravaggio‘s paintings. He is known for strong contrast of glowing light in an otherwise dark scene, known as Chiaroscuro.

Once this layer dries I will be painting over the underpainting with a thin layer of color, trying to allow the darks and lights to remain and show through.

Francis-sketch on toned canvas
(above) First I started by toning the canvas with a thin wash of acrylic burnt umber paint. Burnt sienna would have been better though–this color is too dark and not warm enough. Then I used Saral transfer paper to trace the enlarged photo onto the canvas. Portraits are the one subject that I still do that kind of transfer instead of drawing freehand when I want to be sure to get a resemblance with all the features the right size in the right place.

Francis-Getting started

(Above) Next I started blocking in the dark shapes and lines I saw using burnt sienna oil paint thinned with Gamsol Odorless Mineral Spirits.

Francis-blocking in

(Above) Once I had the shapes blocked in I was ready to start adding the black paint, trying to keep it thin so some of the burnt sienna would show through.

Francis-Grisaille underpainting started

(Above) Then I started adding white paint, trying to make smooth transitions between dark and light. And this brought me to the finished grisaille underpainting at the top. Now I just need to let it dry and then start adding the thin layer of color and see what happens.

Categories
Landscape Life in general Other Art Blogs I Read Outdoors/Landscape Painting Plein Air Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

Towata Park, Alameda

Towata Park, Alameda

Ink and watercolor in large Moleskine watercolor sketchbook
Click here to see larger

Thursday night was a 2-hour plein air paint-out on Alameda Island that was part of the Frank Bette Art Center’s annual invitational weeklong event that culminates in a show and a fund-raising auction in the park Saturday. Susie and I went there straight from work and had a very enjoyable time looking at all the accomplished plein air painters at work spread out over about a half-mile square area. It was warm, very windy and the sun was setting on the water, creating glare amidst views of a marsh, the bay, a small boat harbor, San Francisco across the bay, and a huge old concrete bridge with rush hour traffic flying across it a very short distance away. Despite all these challenges, the artists were doing some amazing work. After we’d admired all the interesting styles and techniques we found a spot where we could sit and draw too.

We’d both been attracted to the funny little boat to the left of the picture so we both drew and painted the same scene (but quite differently) in about 20 minutes. Then we took another walk around to see the finished pieces and left as the artists were setting up their paintings in a circle so that they could vote on the winning painting. While we were there, I got to see Ed Terpening, a fellow blogger, in action (the painting he was working on last night can be seen by clicking his name), and met Tom Zephyrs, a fantastic artist who is the brother-in-law of a childhood friend. Susie and my favorite was a large pastel in brilliant colors of the imposing bridge by artist and blogger Ann McMillan. She won first prize at last year’s event and that pastel is featured on the Frank Bette’s website page about the event.

Two nights in a row of painting inspiration and two nights in a row of dreaming about painting…until the earthquake hit at 4:42 this morning, putting an end to lovely dreams for the night. Fortunately it didn’t create any problems and was short enough that I didn’t even have time to do my usual earthquake reaction: panic and try to remember what it is I’m supposed to do during an earthquake. It felt like someone had taken my one-story, rectangular house that is much longer one way than the other, and picked it up at one end and snapped it, like you do with a sheet when you’re opening it and laying it on the bed.

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Art theory Landscape Life in general Other Art Blogs I Read Outdoors/Landscape Sketchbook Pages

Snow Park, Oakland

Snow Park, Oakland

Ink & colored pencil in small Moleskine notebook
Click here for larger view

I drew this sitting on a wall in front of the building where I work, waiting for a ride after I witnessed something disturbing and weird this evening that changed my plans for the evening. I left work and headed to BART to get home and meet Lea to go to the California Watercolor Association meeting where Jody Mattison was going to be demonstrating painting using a grisaille technique in black and white oil painting over an acrylic underpainting in burnt umber, and then glazing in color in oils (odd for CWA which is usually all about transparent watercolors, but serendipitous for me since I wanted to learn that technique).

I saw a boy in a small group of middle-school age skateboarders being attacked by a huge security guard half a block from my building. The security guard looked and acted just like Forrest Whitaker as Idi Amin in the Last King of Scottland. The boy couldn’t have weighed 100 pounds and the enormous guard must have been 6’4″ and 280 pounds. They were fighting like kids in a school yard shoving each other and yelling. The guard shoved the boy hard who threw his skateboard at the guard, who then pushed the kid down in a raised planting bed and began choking him. He finally let the kid up with a viscious crazy laugh and the two began yelling at each other again. People on both sides of the street and driving by in cars looked stunned. The guard kept roughing up the kid, pushing him down, strong-arming him and yelling madly. Two cars pulled over and tried to intervene but the guy ignored them, and I could see people calling 911 on their phones. Occasionally the guard would talk into a radio and then go back to acting crazy and aggressive with the kid.

I started to leave and then just couldn’t. I walked over to them and said, “Excuse me sir, do you work here? This is totally inappropriate and unprofessional behavior.” He said he worked for the security firm hired by the building. The kid was saying, “Did you see him attack me? He was harassing me…” and his buddy said “I have it all on my camera!” He showed me the film on his little digital camera and it clearly showed the guard’s aggressive behavior and the kid defending himself. I asked them if they would all follow me back to the building where I knew the building security guards who staffed the front desk would be more reasonable. Surprisingly they all agreed to follow me as did several witnesses. Inside the building the guard said the police had already been called and everyone agreed to wait for them or left their names and numbers for the police.

Meanwhile I realized I’d never get home in time to meet Lea so I phoned her. She offered to bring me dinner so that we could go directly from my office to the meeting. Finally the police came, interviewed everyone separately. From what I heard while waiting, apparently these kids regularly skateboard by the building because the boy who got attacked’s mom owns the Togos Deli in the building and the guard regularly harasses them about skateboarding, even though they stay on public property, not on the building’s grounds. And the guard claimed the kids harass him. I told him that he still had no business behaving that way and I told the boys that they were asking for trouble, knowing that this guy was wacked but still tempting him by skating nearby but that still didn’t give him the right to harm them.

Finally I left everyone in the building with the police and went out in front and did this drawing of the sunset view of the park across the street with the huge herd of geese (it’s too big to call it a flock) that hang out there, Lake Merritt in the back to the left, and a tall, glorious Art Deco apartment building behind the trees. Lea arrived with a wonderful dinner for me, and drove us to the meeting for the demonstration which was terrific!

Tomorrow when I go to work I’m going to talk to the building management to tell them that guy should NOT be working there.

Categories
Landscape Oil Painting Other Art Blogs I Read Outdoors/Landscape Painting Photos

Pt. Reyes in Oil

Pt. Reyes-Oil-IMG_0993

Oil on canvas, 16 x 20″
Click here to see enlarged view

Yippee! I finally got back to oil painting and I think that everything I’ve learned in acrylic and gouache and from reading books on landscape and seeing other people’s instructional photos and videos on the web and especially the great advice I’ve gotten from other art bloggers finally clicked. I was actually able to capture just what I wanted to in this painting, which is a rare gift!

I just wish I could tell whether the images look right on the screen. I still haven’t quite gotten my monitor calibration dialed in. In the painting the distant hills and mountains look a little misty–like there’s lots of atmosphere/fog between them and the viewer, subduing the colors. The blue peeking through the clouds is ultramarine not cyan like it appears on my monitor. But this afternoon I wanted to paint, not futz around with computers. I did enough of that last weekend!

Here are the things I’ve learned about oil painting that I applied:

  • I limited my palette
  • toned the canvas with a wash of acrylic yellow ochre
  • painted the sky white and then blended in the blues
  • blocked in the darkest darks, the mid-value big shapes, and then did the next smaller shapes and then added details.
  • I made sure to wipe my brush if it picked up some of the wrong neighboring color before applying more paint
  • I didn’t let myself get lazy about mixing colors from whatever was left on the palette instead of adding the missing color in fresh paint
  • And I stopped before I overworked it and didn’t get hung up in details

And here are the people who I pestered for oil painting advice (which they generously gave me) that finally sunk in:

I did the painting from this photo I took on a hike in Pt. Reyes to the ocean. I painted it this afternoon in about four hours (including cleaning up), trying to pretend that I was painting plein air:

Pt. Reyes original photo

Categories
Art theory Dreams Gouache Other Art Blogs I Read Painting People

Painting with Gouache

Phone dream

Gouache on hot-pressed watercolor paper, 7″x11″
Click here to enlarge

I’ve been wanting to experiment with painting in gouache (opaque watercolor) and today finally got the chance. I so adore the artwork of Maira Kalman and the painterly, juicy way she uses gouache….which reminds me a lot of the kind of oil painting I want to do–John Sonsini is one of my current favorites…and his work reminds me a lot of Alice Neel, one of my major art heroes, who, at the age of 80, did a wonderful nude self portrait of herself painting herself.

It turns out gouache, at least on the two relatively small pieces I’ve tried so far, actually combines the best of watercolor, acrylics and oils. You can blend easily, paint with bright juicy colors, it dries quickly but not too quickly, you can paint over areas, and it cleans up with water. I had some ancient tubes of Winsor Newton Designer’s Gouache and bought a few new tubes since some of mine had turned to cement. I love it!

I’ve been trying to paint in that juicy, painterly way with acrylics and oils but haven’t succeeded so far. I haven’t worked out the balance between working quickly, free and loose, and still trying to capture a likeness of my subject and getting to detailed and tight. Then there’s the problems associated with the actual media–acrylic dries too fast too do much blending and oil dries so slowly that I keep having to stop and let it dry for a week before continuing.

I’m excited about the possibilities with gouache and enjoyed this first experiment, which was inspired by a dream. I posted the original sketchbook image here.

If you want to see more of Maira Kalman’s art, she’s had a monthly art blog on the New York Times website and the work is stunning. It will be published in a book in October. The NY Times offers a free 2-week subscription, which I took in order to look at the whole year of her art blogs.

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Other Art Blogs I Read Outdoors/Landscape Painting Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

Ten Minute Trees on Memorial Day

10 Minute Tree-Memorial Day

Click here to enlarge

All images ink and watercolor in Moleskine Watercolor Notebook

I got inspired to get back to sketchbooking after looking at Pete Scully’s watercolor sketches (scroll down on his site to see entries from May 9-13) from his recent trip to Santa Monica, where I was born. They reminded me how sketches of even the most ordinary sights of daily life can make exciting sketches when seen through fresh eyes (and with some talent and skill like Pete’s). I decided to just go around my neighborhood, doing 10 minute sketches of trees, trying to capture their various personalities and gestures.

The one above is viewed past the flag on my next door neighbor’s house looking across the street to a little house and its very big tree.

10 Minute Tree-Bay Laurel

Click here to enlarge
Above is my little Bay Laurel tree in front of my house. I thought it would be nice to have bay leaves at my disposal but it’s a weird tree that stays green all year but grows sort of clumpy and doesn’t really seem that tree-like. My drawing doesn’t either–I think I made the trunk to wide for the leafy part. I guess I should have added a little background to give a sense of size but my 10 minutes was up. (I gave myself up to 10 minutes to sketch and 10 minutes to paint and used the timer on my watch.)

Tree-plum

Click here to enlarge
Above is my other next door neighbor’s tree–some sort of non-fruiting plum tree that really is this color and while it was planted a year after my Bay Laurel it’s twice as big.

I didn’t get any further than my own front yard but thoroughly enjoyed myself, listening to the birds chirping and neighbor’s music playing through their windows on this first sunny day in a week.

Categories
Other Art Blogs I Read Outdoors/Landscape Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

Worldwide Sketchcrawl 14 – San Francisco

SketchcrawlSF3

Ink and watercolor in small Moleskine watercolor notebook
To enlarge images, click picture then select All Sizes

Saturday was the 14th Worldwide Sketchcrawl and I attended the one in San Francisco. We met at the Ferry Building around elevenish (people straggled in for about an hour and then we finally left to walk up the Filbert Steps (straight up a huge hill with cute, old, little multi-million dollar cottages perched on it). This is the same area where the movie The Parrots of Telegraph Hill was filmed. The picture above is looking up at the porch on one of those cottages.

SketchcrawlSF2

Next we hiked further uphill to Coit Tower where I drew the view above, looking down at the Ferry Building (the clock tower) in the distance and the Bay Bridge behind that. I was starving–lunch had gotten pushed back a couple hours since people didn’t seem to be trying to follow the planned schedule so I bought an “Its It” ice cream sandwich in the gift shop at Coit Tower. Unfortunately a big piece of chocolate fell off and melted all over my favorite green t-shirt, which I didn’t notice until later.

SketchcrawlSF4

From there we walked to North Beach and met in Washington Square Park. I drew the bell tower on top of the cathedral across from the park (above) while laying on my back in the grass, listening to blasting 70s disco music and the generator powering the loudspeakers. A Communist Party group (mostly clean-cut college kids) were having a May Day celebration with red banners, red shirts, red cups for their drinks. On the other corner of the park a Jesus group set up their own stage and speakers and made random religious announcements.

This was a great day in San Francisco, perfect sunny weather and a festive atmosphere everywhere. One of the highlights of my day was finally meeting the wonderful Martha of Trumpetvine Travels. It was a delight seeing her drawings in person in her custom made sketchbook (that she gives directions how to make on her blog). I had so much fun hanging out, chatting, drawing and hiking with her. We had lunch in a deli near Washington Square and when we learned that people were going to stay at the noisy park another half hour, we decided to move on to Chinatown (next stop on the crawl) where I drew the building below.

SketchcrawlSF5

I know it’s wonky. I started with the part that interested me and just kept drawing with ink until I ran out of space. While I drew one corner of the building Martha drew the whole interesting street with hanging lanterns, and all the different shaped buildings. It should be interesting to compare our drawings since we did all the same subjects, but in our own styles. Chinatown was packed with amazing sights, sounds, smells, and way too many people to find a spot to sketch until we reached the outskirts and found a bench to rest on. We hiked back to the Ferry Building to do one more sketch but once we were there realized we were too tired and called it a day. A very good day!

Categories
Acrylic Painting Art theory Other Art Blogs I Read Painting

Practice with Acrylics: Blending and soft edges

Acrylic-blending Acrylic-watercolor

Acrylic on gessoed canvas and watercolor paper (R)
To enlarge, click image, select All Sizes

(I know this isn’t much to look at, but it’s what I did with my art time today — practiced making soft edges using dry brush, blending with wet-in-wet and other techniques, and painting watercolor-style washes using acrylics thinned down with water and “Acrylic Flow Release.” It’s harder (but not impossible) to make the kinds of beautiful soft edges and blends that can be done easily in oil paints (these samples are neither beautiful nor soft as I’d like, but that’s what practice is for). I was surprised how easy it was to make clean flat washes using acrylics as watercolors.

I’ve just started reading “Carlson’s Guide to Landscape Painting,” originally published in 1929. Even though he’s incredibly opinionated and assumes all artists are men, I’m finding his observations to be really interesting and often astute and applicable today. Here’s a few tidbits from the first chapter, “How to Approach Painting:”

“The art of painting, properly speaking, cannot be taught, and therefore cannot be learned. I believe about art, as I believe about music or architecture, that the only way to study is to practice; and that any good teacher can point out certain intellectual or technical “makings,” certain helps that will give a fulcrum to the lever of practice.”

“No one can teach ‘art.’ No one can give a singer a glorious voice, but granting the voice, and emotional sensibility, a teacher can teach a man to sing…”

“A snapshot is a correct rendition of physical fact…but the camera does not have an idea about the objects reflected upon its lens. It does not ‘feel’ anything, and will render one thing as well as another. This ‘idea,’ or thrill is the unteachable part of all art.”

“The beginner in painting begins by copying nature in all literalness, leaving nothing out and putting nothing in; he makes it look like the place or person or thing. By and by he will learn to omit the superfluous and to grasp the essentials and arrange them into a more power and significant whole. And it is wonderful to know that these ‘essentials’ will be essentials to him only (and herein lies the secret of orginality). Another man will choose another group of essentials out of the same fountain of inspiration.”

These hit home for me, especially the last one. Do you find them interesting? annoying? inspiring? helpful?