Category: Painting

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Drawing Flower Art Gardening Ink and watercolor wash Outdoors/Landscape Painting Plants Sketchbook Pages

A Bit of Spring Before Thunder and Lightening

Calla Lillies, ink & watercolor
Calla Lillies, ink & watercolor

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.

 

My tiny fig tree, ink & watercolor
My tiny fig tree, ink & watercolor

 

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.

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Berkeley Drawing Ink and watercolor wash Interiors Painting People Sketchbook Pages Urban Sketchers

St. Patrick’s Day Decor at Spengers

Spengers Bar, ink & watercolor
Spengers Bar, ink & watercolor

Spengers was decorated with green shamrocks when our Urban Sketchers group met there on a Tuesday before St. Patrick’s Day. Other than all the green, it was business as usual. I love the way cellphones keep people engaged and posing like this guy at the bar, even when drinking.

Sea Witch Ship Model, ink & watercolor
Sea Witch Ship Model, ink & watercolor

Spengers has a huge collection of ship models and other sea-themed objects on every wall, ceiling and in every corner. I drew this standing in front of the display case, trying to stay out of the waiters’ path. And as usual I incorrectly labeled the sketch “Brennan’s” — a nearby bar and restaurant that I always get mixed up with Spengers.

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Ink and watercolor wash Sketchbook Pages Still Life

Indian Corn

Indian Corn, ink & watercolor
Indian Corn, ink & watercolor

I bought this decorative Indian corn around Thanksgiving, planning to sketch it but it took a cold, rainy night in February to get around to it. I was tired and grumpy and needed something fairly mindless to do: drawing hundreds of little corn kernels from life was just the meditation I needed.

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Art theory Oil Painting Painting Still Life

Simplified Shadow Mass with Kwan Yin, Pepper Sauce and Camelia

Kwan Yin, Pepper Sauce, Camelia in Soap Dish, oil on 8x10" panel
Kwan Yin, Pepper Sauce, Camellia in Soap Dish, oil on 8x10" panel

In the Simplified Shadow Mass exercise you practice visualizing the darks and shadows grouped into as few shapes as possible and paint them in one dark color. Then you can vary the colors for the rest of the painting. I tried that in the two top studies.

In the bottom two I allowed myself to use two different colors for the shadows instead of just one. I like the last one best (bottom left) and the first one second best (top left). I hate the muddy second one (top right).

It was fun experimenting with massing shadows and playing with composition by sticking to two objects and changing only one at a time.

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Animals Digital art Drawing Gouache Sketchbook Pages

Herding Elephants? Rallying Rats?

Elephant & Rider, Ink & Gouache
Elephant & Rider, Ink & Gouache

I drew this elephant to illustrate an interesting blog post for my job last week. The post is about change and uses the analogy of an elephant and a rider. The “Rider” is our rational, analytical side and the “Elephant” is our emotional side and the author explains why you have to work with both to make a change.

Elephant, ink drawing painted in Photoshop
Elephant, ink drawing painted in Photoshop

I drew the elephant in my sketchbook, scanned the line drawing and painted it in Photoshop. That’s the one I used for that post. Later I painted the line drawing at top with gouache in my sketchbook. Which do you like better?

Rats Rally the Herd, Ink & Gouache
Rats Rally the Herd, Ink & Gouache

I did this illustration for the same article, but it got rejected, theoretically because two pictures were too many for the one post, but I suspect it was because rats are a little too creepy, even though it is the acronym of a group that was highlighted in the post (RATS: Reading Apprenticeship Teachers and Supporters).

RA Rats, ink drawing recomposed & painted in Photoshop
Rats Rally the Herd, ink drawing recomposed, painted in Photoshop

I used the same line drawing for the final illustration above, but cloned/altered some of the rats and painted and sketched more in Photoshop. This is the one I proposed for the post and got rejected. I didn’t mind, it was fun to do.

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Art theory Oil Painting Painting Still Life

Finding My Painting Process; 10 Minute Orange Exercise

Orange structure times 4, oil on panel
Orange structure x 4, oil on 10x8" panel

I read about the Daily Painters’ 10 minute exercise (paint the same thing four times, 10 minutes each) and thought it sounded like fun. What I learned from my attempt (below) is that I need more than ten minutes to do a painting, even if it is small. So when I finished doing the exercise below, I gave myself more time, and painted the study above, exploring a way of painting that works better for me.

Orange four times @ 10 minutes each
Orange four times @ 10 minutes each, 0il on 10x8" panel

I think I’ve found a way to approach an oil painting that works for me, and it’s sort of* illustrated in the top study above.

  1. Sketch in the big shapes and indicate the lines of the planes using *thinned paint (see diagrams in previous post here).
  2. With the same thin paint (*not thick paint as I did here), fill in the shadows to indicate darks and leave the light areas white.
  3. Use both dark/light and warm/cool variations of colors to model the form.
  4. Lastly add light highlights, dark accents, details and make any other necessary adjustments.

*Sort of because originally in the top study each square illustrated those 4 steps, but I played around with the first two, adding white paint between the plane lines, and turning the thinly blocked in value sketch into a value study with black and white paint.

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Ink and watercolor wash Sketchbook Pages

Tools of (another) Trade

Ladder, Ink & watercolor
Ladder, Ink & watercolor

As the “blog master” at my day job, I’ve been enjoying contributing illustrations for posts as well as getting them edited and published. I drew the ladder and level for a two-part post about helping English as a Second Language students improve their reading. The ladders and levels used in the posts were metaphorical. (If you’re interested here are Part 1 and Part 2).

Level, ink & watercolor
Level, ink & watercolor

The level in the picture above is a small plastic one that I have in the studio. It’s actually an offensive Day-Glo green so I used a different green for the sketch. I keep the level on my easel to make sure a canvas is straight before I start painting.

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Drawing Food sketch Ink and watercolor wash Life in general Painting People Places Sketchbook Pages

Sketchbook Ate My Sandwich

Two Good Pots, ink & watercolor
Two Good Pots, ink & watercolor

My favorite two sketches the night we met to sketch at Fat Apples Restaurant in El Cerrito were the two “pots” on the left hand page above. The guy was the first thing I drew, the coffee pot the last. I wasn’t in great shape, having had little sleep the night before.  I just couldn’t get into the drawing zone, turn off the inner critic or relax into seeing, drawing, and enjoying the adventure.

Underneath the watercolor apple above are lots of messed up lines and the word “Grrrr” written all over the things that frustrated me. The waitress on the right kept returning to her spot and standing in exactly the same position each time and the counter beside her was even more stationary but I just couldn’t draw it.

Fat Apples BLT, ink & watercolor
Fat Apples BLT, ink & watercolor

When I added m ore watercolor at home to the BLT (left page above) I must have closed the book too soon because the pages glued themselves together. When I tried to separate the pages, part of my sandwich stuck to the other side. Not only did that ruin the sandwich but also a small ink drawing I’d liked on the other page.

I’d repainted the sandwich because when we showed our sketches at the end of the evening and I said it was my dinner, one of the sketchers innocently asked “what was it?” And she was right — it was so loosely drawn and painted that it wasn’t recognizable as a sandwich.

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Berkeley Drawing Food sketch Ink and watercolor wash Interiors Painting Places Sketchbook Pages Urban Sketchers

Sketching at Saul’s Deli

Saul's Deli & their famous pickles, ink & watercolor
Saul's Deli & their famous pickles, ink & watercolor

We always enjoy a visit to Saul’s Deli in Berkeley for sketching and dinner. I got my usual grilled trout dinner but was too hungry to draw it before eating. One of the owners of Sauls, Karen Adelman does the wonderful quirky drawings on their menus and website and always makes us feel welcome to come and sketch there.

More Saul’s sketches from my pals Micaela, Sonia and Cathy on our Urban Sketchers site.

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Art supplies Art theory Oil Painting Painting

The Color Temperature of Light: Lighting Still Lifes

Cool light, warm light with blocks, oil study
Cool light on the left; warm light on the right; same objects with white background; oils

When painting outdoors, lighting is controlled by the sun, clouds, atmosphere, and time of day. But in the studio you get to choose your lighting source from window light to bulbs of all kinds. In an article about color in the March 2011 Artists Magazine, Scott Burdick suggests an experiment to compare the effect of cool and warm light sources: Set up a still life of primary-colored objects and paint it twice; once under a warm light and again under cool light. That’s what I did in the studies above.

While I’m not sure I captured every nuance (or get the drawing just right), it’s interesting to see how different the same-colored objects and white background cloth look under different “temperatures” of light.

Warm Light. Left: Stroke counting; Right: One-colored shadow
Warm Light. Left: Stroke counting; Right: One-colored shadow

I did these two studies in Peggi Kroll-Roberts‘ studio, with the subjects lit by 150 watt incandescent bulbs which have an even warmer color temperature than the bulbs I used in my two top studies. The actual goal of the study on the left was to paint the scene (cantaloupe and watermelon slices) with as few brush strokes as possible. The assignment for the one on the right was to group and paint the shadows with one color only.

Lighting technical stuff:

Continue reading “The Color Temperature of Light: Lighting Still Lifes”