This oil landscape painting started as a poorly drawn, wrongly colored plein air painting which I’ve reworked many times until I am now finally ready to call it done. The painting started on a hot September day when I dragged my painting gear up a trail and set up my easel amidst dried cow pies and weeds near the Bull Valley Staging Area above the hills of Crockett. You can see my learning process below.
First, here is the washed-out reference photo I had to work from back in the studio. It’s really not even an interesting scene and doesn’t at all capture the way the hills were glowing a brilliant end of summer California gold.
REI Berkeley was our sketching destination last week. The store sells high-tech gear for every kind of outdoor activity along with comfortable clothing and shoes. It turned out to be a fun place to sketch with an overwhelming variety of subject matter.
While drawing the fancy, complicated ski boot above, I reminisced about my attempts at skiing with some fondness and pride. Growing up in sunny San Diego I was a surfer girl, not a ski bunny. Fearless in the ocean, on my first ski trip in my 30s I found I was terrified on the slopes. I challenged myself to go on both downhill and cross-country ski trips with friends, family, and even once on my own. I never bought any fancy equipment; rentals were fine with me.
Gentlemen's Hats, ink & watercolor
It seems that hats have become quite popular again for guys, a trend that hasn’t seen a comeback (other than baseball caps) since my grandfather’s day. I remember his beige felt fedora and how, when we took my sister and I for a ride in his Buick, he would carefully put the hat on the little ledge above the back seat so “us kids” wouldn’t fool around with it (though we always did anyway). Even my two sons wear those cute pork pie hats now.
Hi-Tech Baby Buggies, Ink, WC, colored pencil
I liked the original ink sketch of these strollers, but hated the watercolor added at the store. Everything was brown or dark blue and looked ugly. At home I tried washing off the paint and applying colored pencil over the remains. I tried varying the colors. I erased and tried again. I tried and tried, but finally remembered IT’S JUST A SKETCH, and moved on.
You can see some of my sketch-buddies’ excellent REI sketches on our Urban Sketchers blog here and here.
Grey Day at Lake Anza, plein air (mostly) oil on Gessoboard, 10x8"
Only two of us showed up to paint at Lake Anza in Tilden Park on an almost-drizzly, grey Monday morning last month. The air smelled fresh and clean and it was so quiet there; a wonderful change from the noise of the city just a few miles away.
I painted most of this onsite, with some corrections and clean up later in the studio from the photo below.
Lake Anza reference photo
One of the corrections I made was to the little clumps of marsh grasses on the other side of the lake (barely visible in the revised painting). They had been my focal point but I realized when I got home and looked at the photo that I had made them three times bigger than they should have been.
Yesterday I was painting in Sonoma and saw the same problem when I got home: I painted some distant trees way bigger than they should be. It’s interesting to me how as I focus on one element of painting and begin to improve it (like composition, values, color, etc.), I discover another area needing work. Next time I’ll pay attention to measuring/comparing sizes of the things in the painting.
While I’m still miles of canvas away from mastering plein air painting, at least I am beginning to grasp the principles and see that while there are many important concepts to consider out there, the list isn’t endless (as it once seemed). Maybe eventually it will become more automatic like driving; I’ll still have to pay attention and keep my eyes on the “road,” but I won’t be driving over curbs, crashing into things, or totaling my car/canvas.
This was so much fun to draw with all the little details and decoration. I found it at a thrift shop when I was taking a long walk in El Cerrito and stopped in to browse. I expect to have more fun drawing and painting it again. It’s sitting on my drawing table enticing me to come back and draw.
Painted Pumpkin Painted, oil on Gessobord panel, 8x10"
On Halloween I got inspired to paint a pumpkin but the only pumpkins left in the grocery store were huge warty-looking ones and two smaller ones with cartoon faces painted on them. I chose one of the painted pumpkins whose paint was peeling and asked if they’d sell it at ordinary pumpkin price, which they did.
I took it home, washed off the silly face, cut it open and set it on a black plate on my drawing table to make a preliminary sketch:
Halloween Pumpkin sketch, ink on paper
Then I set it up on the table by my easel inside a box made of black foam core with a strong light shining in from one side. I sketched the composition on my Gessobord panel, mixed some colors, and began painting with the intention to work quickly and directly.
But after three hours I gave up and scraped off the panel. I just couldn’t get a clean orange and everything looked chalky, horrible and dead. I emailed my friend Kathryn Law, a brilliant painter who gave me some excellent advice about mixing colors (including that orange was tough to mix from cadmium yellow and red with oils), along with inspiration and encouragement.
The next day, unwilling to accept defeat, I attempted the painting again, this time draping an olive-green cloth over the black foam core. Everything went so much more easily; what had felt like work the day before felt like fun. At Kathryn’s suggestion I used larger brushes and was more generous with the paint. I tried to put down a stroke and leave it. I kept in mind the way I enjoy sketching, and tried to keep that sense of adventure and freedom. I finished the painting and went to bed happy.
The next day I saw a few things I wanted to fix but had to go to work. I left my pumpkin still life set up for three days while I went to work. When I came back to the pumpkin today it was smelly, collapsing, gross and growing stuff:
Gross pumpkin photo
Ewww! Tossed the pumpkin in the recycling bin and washed the plate. I guess the painting will have to be done as is, though I’m tempted to work on the plate a bit to try to make it look shiny.
Sometimes painting in a pretty park with views leads to painting surrounding suburbia (or is it “urbia”?) instead of the park. The scene I wanted to paint (a picnic area between big eucalyptus trees) was occupied by teenage boys smoking pot and I decided to leave them alone. I didn’t think they’d appreciate me setting up my easel and staring at them, and they were there first.
Fairmead Park in Richmond is a little, hidden gem of a park. It is almost at the top of a hill with interesting views, the sounds of birds and squirrels, and the wonderful scent of eucalyptus. I got a good start to the painting while I was there and took some photos so I could finish it at home. I tried to focus on values, color and getting the paint down and leaving it alone and I really like the way it turned out.
Here is the photo I used, taken from the edge of the park which goes up the hill behind where I stood:
Fairmead Park photo reference
So is this Suburbia or Urbia — it’s on the edge of a very urban area in the town of San Pablo but it looks pretty suburban, doesn’t it?
Baby Night at the Cerrito Theater, ink & watercolor
Before we met the others at Nong Thon on Tuesday night, Cathy and I sketched in the dark outside the restaurant by the Cerrito theater and El Cerrito Yoga. Tuesday night is baby night at the theatre and families lined up, loaded down with babies and baby gear, to see the Social Network. The Cerrito serves beer, wine and pizza (along with usual movie fare) while you watch the movie.
El Cerrito Yoga, ink & watercolor
We could see into the warmly lit, crowded yoga studio and did some quick gesture drawings. This is one of those Bikram yoga studios where they say they crank up the heat to “increase flexibility and flush toxins.” I’m not sure I’d enjoy spending the evening in a crowded room full of people sweating out their toxins, whatever “toxins” are.
I know some people swear by sweating, fasting, or colonics to get rid of “toxins” and I wondered if there is any scientific evidence that tells what these toxins are and why releasing body fluids would get rid of them. I found this great article that scientifically (and hilariously) debunks the whole concept, as does this one on Wikipedia.
We met to sketch at the new Vietnamese restaurant, Nong Thon, on the corner of Central and San Pablo in El Cerrito and we had a great time. The restaurant is large, open and has been completely redesigned. The food was delicious and the service was beyond fantastic.
Ox= FAIL; but some thoughts for next time
In the entry there is an elegant, life-size statue of an ox standing in real growing grass (below a skylight). My friends made beautiful renditions of the ox but I got all snarled up on its proportions. I’ve saved a page in my sketchbook to go back and give it another try. The waiter told me that in Vietnam boys ride on the ox playing a flute to pass the time, as they till the soil.
I’d called ahead to make sure it was OK for us to come sketch and they generously reserved a whole section of the restaurant for us where we’d have the best views and could move around to sketch different scenes.
Summer Squash & Tired Carrot in bright light, quick study, oil on board, 8x8"
When I was teaching my last session of watercolor classes I saw my students learning so much and was jealous. I realized that I wanted a teacher too! So I began a search for an oil painting mentor to review my work in progress, give me guidance and help me progress.
Value study 1, ink washes
First I tried advertising on Craigslist, describing what I needed. But the artists who responded weren’t a good fit. I wanted a mentor whose work excited and inspired me AND who was a good teacher. Then Rebeca Garcia Gonzalez sent me a postcard announcement for her show of portraits of undocumented immigrants and I fell in love with her paintings. I knew she also taught at a local art school so I emailed her my proposal, we met, and she agreed to mentor me.
Value Study 2, ink wash
At our first meeting she reviewed a dozen recent oil paintings and knew right away what I needed to work on. She said that I needed to focus on my values (the range and contrast of light to dark) and I knew she was exactly right.
Value study 3, ink and wash
She asked me to sketch using ink and diluted ink washes and to start paying close attention to values in everything I see, when I’m out walking, or just looking out the window.
Value study 4, ink wash
She suggested I ask myself, “Is this shape darker or lighter than that shape,” noticing the value relationships in everything I see to strengthen that ability. For example, a black object in bright sunlight might look lighter, relatively, than something white that is in shadow.
So much of learning to paint is learning to see, and so much of learning to see involves a kind of “peeling layers of the onion” off of our eyes to see the relationships, shapes, colors, and values in the current light and atmosphere, which can be shockingly different from what we think they are.
San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, 9"x12, oil on panel
It was so wonderful traveling around sunny San Miguel Allende, Mexico (virtually via Google street view and my paintbrush!) while it was cold and rainy here. I tried “driving” around to find the church at the end of the road, but just like I do with real driving, I got lost and never found it.
Once I’d adjusted the image in Photoshop to straighten the walls, crop to 9×12″ and warm the color a bit, I used the “gridding-up” method to create a drawing first. I displayed the image in Photoshop using”View/Show Grid” set to overlay a tic-tac-toe like grid). Then I drew a matching grid on my paper and started drawing, one square at a time.
Using the grid makes it easier to accurately see and draw the shapes in the image, section by section. Drawing first instead of going directly to paint helped me to understand what I was seeing and to notice interesting patterns like the pipes sticking out of the buildings and the circular motif of the windows in the building on the left as well as the church in the distance.
What a gorgeous little town! I’d love to visit there sometime!
Jana Bouc, Artist 