Cathy and I met at Shattuck and Vine to sketch, and started with this historic building, now a wine shop called Vintage Berkeley, converted from the former utility district’s Vine Street Pumping Station. Actually we’d started a little further up the street, but my sketch was terrible so no point in posting it.
By the time we finished drawing there, I was getting hungry so we looked around for somewhere to sketch and eat but that ate up sketching time too. We ended up at Dara Thai/Lao Cusine where we sat outdoors and sketched and I ate grilled calamari on shredded lettuce with cilantro sauce. It was warm, filling and delicious.
Dara Thai/Lao Cuisine, ink 9x6
I didn’t get to finish this sketch because it got dark and cold…and because I spent so much time drawing details in the fancy roof of the little shelter. Despite hearing from great art teachers, “Simplify, reduce details, draw only what you see when squinting, see how much you can leave out,” I love details. That’s just how it is.
But the funny thing is that because I got so absorbed in the details on that one roof, I didn’t have time to draw all the roofs of all the shelters behind this one, which would have filled the whole page with details.
My wonderful sister Marcy and niece Sophie gave me this little succulent garden in a bowl for my birthday, wrapped with twine with a little ticket for a card. When the plants outgrow the bowl she said I could just stick them in the ground and break off little pieces to stick back in the bowl.
They’re easy to care for: very little water and some sun. A week later they’re still alive and well; a good sign. I only have one other houseplant, an orchid I was given as a remembrance of my father’s passing. It’s been nearly 10 years and that orchid continues to thrive and bloom nearly constantly, despite my lack of a green thumb and tendencies toward plant abuse. (I tend to enjoy drawing plants more than caring for them, but I think that’s changing: I repotted my orchid last week and that was quite satisfying).
Have you had bad experiences with plein air umbrellas that were flimsy, funky, poorly designed, or just plain hazardous when it gets windy? Often when my plein air group is out painting, a gust blows over an easel or two when the umbrellas attached to them turn into sails. When I felt my old umbrella about to carry off my easel I started attaching it to the tall handles of my rolling cart (which also got pulled over once) but I had a hard time adjusting my small umbrella to be in the right place, at the right height or at the right angle.
Now I have a ShadeBuddy Umbrella and Stand and the problem is solved. In the picture above the umbrella is set up in my backyard next to my Soltek easel. (Also pictured, is my trash container (a mesh pop-up laundry basket that folds flat to a circle about 8″ in diameter) clipped to my easel, a folding brush holder, and a plastic shoe box that holds my paint palette and paints. You can see the large area of shade the umbrella provides.
The pansies and pitcher on a table I was preparing to paint are on the far right.
Cylinder that holds umbrella
The umbrella and the stand are two separate sections that fit together into the sturdy black zippered bag with a shoulder that comes with them. At the top of the stand is a white cylinder (above) into which you stick the umbrella’s wooden handle. There is a secure locking mechanism for keeping the umbrella in the cylinder and a knob that allows you adjust the angle of the umbrella and then holds it in firmly at that angle.
Foot pedal
The cylinder is attached to a metal pole that has a pedal about six inches from the bottom that you step on to push the pointed end of the pole into the ground. When I set mine up for the first time I was surprised how well it all worked and how easy it was. I tend to be spatial-relations challenged and am always prepared for difficulty when assembling things but this was a snap. I was able to adjust the tilt and direction of the umbrella as the sun moved, and the vented umbrella handled the afternoon wind gusts with without even a flutter!
The umbrella is very well made, with a 48″ diameter with “wind vented construction combined with a nonreflective black lining to keep your colors true and a reflective silver outer shell to keep you cool.” Both the closed umbrella and the pole are 48″ long and, when stashed together in the bag, weigh a little over 4 pounds.
The umbrella and pole are manufactured and sold by Judsons Art Outfitters and are also sold at several major online art supply stores. I checked prices and availability on the web and bought mine on sale from Dakota Art Pastels. It was my first purchase from Dakota (in Washington state) and they provided excellent service. My new umbrella arrived two days after I ordered it.
Having the easel made my previously posted painting, “Pansies in Pitcher Plein Air” a pleasure to paint, even under the hot sun in my windy backyard.
Because I really appreciate good tools and well-made products that just work (and that experience is so rare!), and because I know that many other plein air painters struggle with lousy umbrellas that flop or fly, I wanted to share my positive experience. I have no other connections with the manufacturer or store (except that I think highly of both). Judson Art Outfitters also manufacturers the Guerilla Painter line of plein air products and is a family-run business with very helpful and knowledgable staff who can answer most plein air outfitting questions with expertise.
The weather was too perfect to paint indoors but I didn’t feel like driving anywhere. My next door neighbor was out pruning his pansies and he’d pulled out a whole bucketful he was about to put in the compost bin. Voila! A perfect painting subject. I stuffed a big clump of the pansies into a pitcher and set them on a table in the backyard.
I’d made the pitcher as a gift for my friend Barbara in the late 70s when I was a ceramic artist and she was a silversmith. She’s now a brilliant and prolific ceramic artist herself and she recently gave me the pitcher back. She was no longer using it due to a leaky crack and a house full of her own ceramics. I’ve been enjoying using it in still life set ups while fondly remembering it being filled with Mimosas every year for the annual Easter egg hunt and brunch her family held every year while our kids were growing up.
I knew that time was very limited before the shade moved across the yard onto the table so I worked quickly and had a great time.
Figs on Photoshop Manual, Pencil and watercolor, 6x9
These organic figs were disappointingly tasteless and so they became still life subjects instead of eating objects. I’ve been using the heavy Photoshop manual (seen under the figs) as a weight on top of the the Fabriano Venezia sketchbook when I scan it. My new copy of Photoshop CS4 doesn’t come with a manual, although there is one online that can be downloaded and saved.
I’m one of those weird people who actually read manuals. When I get a new application I always read the manual first, to find out what the program can do and then I refer to it when I need to figure out how to do one of those things.
I don’t like reading on the computer but I refuse to pay another $55 for a manual that should have been included in the first place. In the meantime, the old manual makes a very nice paperweight or doorstop (or still life holder). 824 pages! And I read/skimmed the whole thing when I got it.
This morning I made my annual birthday pilgrimage to Fat Apples for a Baked Apple Pancake along with dear friends and family. Then I sketched this little family of California Towhees [update: not robins!] who are living in the small tree outside my bedroom window.
Mom and Pop Towhee take turns guarding the nest, feeding the babies and shopping for groceries. When one returns with a juicy white worm to feed the babies, the other flies away to gather the next round of grub (literally?). The robins enter the tree from the house side where the branches are more open, which gives me a great view from my bedroom window (except that it’s too shadey in the tree to see their features clearly).
My cats sit on the bed and watch the constant activity all day: the best Kittie TV ever. Sometimes I join them and have been amazed how hard these little birds are working to keep their babies fed.
Fabriano Venezia Sketchbook & Photoshop CS4
This sketch is in the Fabriano 9×6 sketchbook that has been giving me such pleasure when sketching and such pain when scanning. But now I have a solution. I just got the fantastic, super fast, hugely improved new version of Photoshop CS4. After scanning each page of a spread separately, Photoshop will automatically assemble the pages perfectly together as layers/masks in one file, getting rid of the bad stuff, while lining them up perfectly. For other adjustments, Auto Levels does a great job now, better than all the manual tweaking I’ve done in the past. And a bit of the Dodge tool cleans up any remaining shadows. The new streamlined user interface and adjustment panel are huge timesavers and make image adjustments so much easier and faster.
It was a bit of a splurge, but at $199 (after the $100 off Adobe offers on on any version of Photoshop CS through August) it was so worth it. A happy birthday to me present!
Cathy and I met at Monterey Market on Hopkins Street in Berkeley’s Northbrae neighborhood for our Monday night sketchcrawl. The scent of ripe fruit was heavenly in their screened fruit patio, but the store was closing so we were soon out on the street.
Cathy sketching
I stood behind Cathy while she leaned on a bike rack to sketch the signs on the corner. Then we walked up Hopkins to the Country Cheese and Coffee Market.
Country Cheese, Sepia Micron Pigma, 9x8"
The scents were quite different here: damp cardboard and wafts of the day’s refuse from all the now-closed food sellers on this block including Magnanis Poultry and Monterey Fish Market. My butt fell asleep from leaning against a large metal box on the sidewalk while I was sketching. I could have sat on the chair but decided to sketch it instead. It felt good to start moving again. We walked around the block looking for inspiration at Berkeley Horticultural Nursery but since they were closed there wasn’t enough to see through the fence.
We headed up Rose Street and through the King Middle School play yard where people were throwing frisbees for their dogs in the sunshine at 8:00 at night. It was really starting to feel like summer.
Alice Waters of Chez Panisse fame, helped start an “edible garden” on the school property and that’s where we did our final sketches, surrounded by beds of vegetables, flowers and fruit.
Edible Garden "campfire", ink & watercolor, 9x12"
We felt like we were at camp, sitting on hale bales arranged in a large circle under an arbor made of rough hewn posts and branches woven together. At the center of the circle, a huge “campfire” of flaming pink and red poppies blazed. I imagined how rewarding it must be for a class of young gardeners to gather there for lessons with their teacher, the beautiful results of their work growing all around them. What a wonderful learning environment!
Cloudy Bay, View from China Camp, oil on panel, 9x12"
When I first arrived at China Camp in San Rafael for our plein air paint-out, I decided to make the dramatic, dark clouds my subject. Except that once I’d completed a quick thumbnail sketch for composition, drew the main shapes on my panel, blocked in the colors of the sky, clouds, land, water… POOF! The sun came out, the clouds blew away, and the hills that were my darkest darks were now glowing with light.
Since the scene was now completely different I put the panel away and started another small study, which I might mess with a bit and post another time.
I planned to finish the first painting in the studio, from photos I took before everything changed. Of course later when I looked at the photos, they had none of the color and drama I’d seen and felt in person. So I tried to work from memory along with the photo, and eventually just let the painting tell me what it needed.
This is the original block-in with the painting barely started. I’d put the clouds in first, but after I’d blocked in the rest of the elements, realized they were way too dark.
China Camp View blocked in
And this is the photo of the scene, in which the colors are all wrong, and which mostly just confused me when trying to paint from it.
Photo of China Camp cloudy view
As a wonderful bonus to the pleasure of being out painting on a gorgeous day, my painting group had hired plein air painter Elio Camacho to lead a workshop for us that day. I used to study with Elio a couple years ago so it was great working with him again. He is such a generous teacher and brilliant artist. Everyone had rave reviews afterward and were very pleased with what they’d learned that day.
Sunday was a glorious day in the Bay Area; sunny, breezy and in the 70s. A perfect day for some “Sketchercize.” I packed up my sketching gear and hiking poles and headed on foot through my hilly neighborhood and up to the El Cerrito Memorial Grove and the Hillside Natural Area above it; nearly 80 acres of nature with spectacular views.
I intended to walk for at least 30 minutes before sketching but was stopped after 10 minutes by some seed pods hanging from a tree, glowing red and green in the sun that I had to sketch. Next stop was for some California poppies along the road. Then the view of the giant hill that I’d be climbing came into view so I added that with an “X” marks the spot where I was going, all on the same sketchbook page.
View of SF Bay and Golden Gate Bridge from hiking trail, 5.5x9"
At last I reached the top of the hill and hiked along the skyline trail until I reached a bench where I could sit and admire the 180 degree view–a great reward for the 2 mile, mostly uphill hike. I ate my apple, sketched and then began the trek back home, which just happened to pass by Payoff #2: Baskin Robbins, where I got an ice cream cone to eat on the way (a bit counterproductive, I suppose, but quite yummy). I pasted the cone wrapper in my sketchbook when I got home.
A few weeks ago my plein air group met on a blistering hot day at a little shadeless park alongside a marsh that was right next to the noisy highway and a block from an upscale shopping center (Village Shopping Center in Corte Madera). Some watercolorists in the group set up at the shopping center but were kicked out for taking up outdoor tables meant for food court customers.
Reference photo
I was tempted to leave. The scene didn’t appeal to me, I was tired, it was hot, there was no shade or other facilities and the noise of the traffic was terrible. But I decided to give it a shot, and of course, as I started drawing I got more enthusiastic (“such cute hills” I said to myself, and listening to music with headphones helped block out the highway noise.
Initial sketch on panel
I stopped taking photos after the one below because I was trying to finish quickly as the temperature kept climbing. I nearly completed the painting on site before I started feeling like I was getting sunstroke and had to pack up and head home, without even waiting for the critique.
Starting to block in color
I worked from the reference photo a bit in the studio but then just started addressing the painting’s needs instead of what was in the photo. I tried not to mess with the hills and trees that I’d painted on site because I liked the way they were loosely painted in.
Jana Bouc, Artist 