Category: Watercolor

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Faces Ink and watercolor wash Life in general Painting People Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

Sketching as an Antidote to Insanity

Marcy calling home, ink & watercolor
Marcy calling home from Mom's porch, ink & watercolor

It wasn’t an easy weekend in L.A. visiting family but sketching really helped me to avoid going completely bonkers. There were some lovely moments: walking on the beach in the misty morning with my sister Marcy, taking a tour with Mom and Marce of an historic house (now a museum) in Santa Monica where a huge retrospective of Milford Zorne‘s amazing paintings were on display (more about that in another post).

Mom cooking stinky cabbage, ink & watercolor
Mom cooking stinky cabbage, ink & watercolor

My 85 year old mother doesn’t cook much anymore, but she got inspired to make Pracas (sweet and sour meatballs in cabbage).  But despite not having some of the ingredients or being able to see the recipe in the cookbook well enough to follow it, and despite the jar of ancient fossilized onion flakes she substituted for the actual onion in the recipe (demanding that I use a sharp knife to break the clump up so it could be extracted from the jar), and the house stinking like cabbage all afternoon, dinner wasn’t that bad, really.

Guy sleeping holding his boarding pass; hanging out at Mom's
Guy sleeping holding his boarding pass at Oakland airport; hanging out at Mom's
Grateful for my pen & sketchbook
Grateful for my sketchbook

It’s amazing how sketching can calm my nerves and put the whole dysfunctional family thing at a distance while still being physically present.

Josh reading
Josh reading

It’s really good to be back home.

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
Drawing Life in general People Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

Life Without Coffee

Life Without Coffee, ink & watercolor in sketchbook
Life Without Coffee, ink & watercolor in sketchbook

This is what I look like far too often these days as I’ve gradually been reducing my caffeine intake. I’m down to one cup of 25% caf & 75% decaf in the morning and then nothing but decaf after that.

My painting ritual had been to make a cup of coffee before heading into the studio and bringing an entire vacuum pot of the stuff when I went out plein air painting. The extra energy from caffeine not only kept me painting when I should have been sleeping, but it also fueled my late night blog visiting and email answering.

It was fun having that artificial boost, but burning the candle at both ends was doing bad things to my health. While I miss the energy, I am sleeping at night now and waking up feeling alive and ready to go instead of feeling like my head is full of mashed potatoes.

It reminds me of something Maya Angelou said her grandmother told her:

“You don’t always get what you pay for, but you always pay for what you get.”

Yes I was squeezing extra hours out of the day but I was paying for them with being constantly sleep-deprived.

I asked a friend who doesn’t use caffeine what you’re supposed to do when you’re tired if you can’t drink coffee, thinking she’d have some other trick for keeping going. She looked at me perplexed at what seemed like a silly question.

“You rest!” she said. What a novel concept!

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
Sketchbook Pages Still Life Watercolor

Summer Leftovers #2: Avocado & Apricot Pits

Avocado & Apricot Pits, Watercolor on coldpress paper, 6x8
Avocado & Apricot Pits, Watercolor on coldpress paper, 6x8"

I thought that these apricot pits and this avocado pit, still in a bit of it’s outer papery sheath would be a good subject for using my set of Kremer Pigments’ pan watercolors.  The Kremer watercolors are unusual in that they’re so highly pigmented, mostly opaque and mostly sedimentary. They are quite stable when applied: the colors don’t charge or bleed much into each other, unlike the more volatile quinacridone and other synthetic pigments.

But I found that those qualities make them less suitable for glazing because their opacity and and saturation mean that one layer hides the one beneath it. Half of the colors in my 14-color palette are muted shades of red, brown, gold, green; a few are more brilliant, but so richly colored that they have to be thinned way down to appear transparent.

I guess what I’m saying is that I’m not as familiar with how these colors work together as I am my regular palette of mostly Winsor Newton tube watercolors. It takes practice to have control over one’s media and I felt pretty out of control with these but enjoyed playing with them. I’ll try them again for the next summer leftovers.

Categories
Flower Art Glass Other Art Blogs I Read Painting Sketchbook Pages Still Life Watercolor

Last Chances: October Roses in Watercolor

October Roses, Ink & Watercolor 8x6"
October Roses in Annie's Vinaigrette Bottle, Ink & Watercolor 8x6"

It seems like fall is a time of last chances. These might be my last roses of the year and the last chance to paint them so I couldn’t resist, even though they’re a bit stunted and scrawny. The lovely Indian summer we’re having in California has that feel of Last Chance too. Under the warm gusts of Santa Ana winds I can detect the hint of coming chill. Each peach I’ve eaten in the past month has come with the thought, “This is probably the last peach I’ll have this year.”

There’s a feeling of sweet longing and sadness that fall brings. Artist Dee Farnsworth painted the Last of the Summer Corn last month and I saw that same sense of loneliness and loss in her painting. I’m trying not to grasp after summer, resist fall or regret the coming winter. I know acceptance of what IS allows me to live in the present moment and enjoy it. I try to remember that each day is the last chance to experience that day. It will never come again.

Sorry to sound melancholic. I’m actually happy (despite the changing of the season, the terrible news in the world, a tweaked back, and losing every cent I’ve saved this year in the stock market) because my dear neighbor fixed the light over my easel today and now I can paint in good light again. Yippee!

About the painting:

I drew with my long neglected Lami Safari pen, forgetting that the Noodlers Ink isn’t completely waterproof. It seemed even less so on Arches hot press paper, smudging like crazy and then melting and bleeding into the watercolor. I do like the effect here though, the way it creates a softer line than my usual Micron Pigma pens.

Categories
Painting Sketchbook Pages Still Life Watercolor

Figs: the Oysters of the Fruit Family

Figs, Watercolor, 8x6"
Figs, Watercolor, 8x6"

When I was a young mother with a newborn babe, the house where we lived had a huge, old fig tree in the backyard. I didn’t know I liked figs then, butI loved the fig tree and so did all the birds and squirrels in the neighborhood.

My infant son and I spent many days that first summer after his birth resting, playing or crying (yes both of us) on the grass beside the tree. The tree’s sheltering, quiet grace and the broad reach of it’s branches lent me strength and helped me feel grounded during those very difficult sleepless weeks and months.

A few weeks ago I ate my first figs and fell in love with them. I was always a little scared to try them; something about their soft squishiness bothered me. But once I took that first delicious bite I realized what I’d been missing.

Now I think of figs as the oysters of the fruit family, just as I think of oysters as the peaches of the fish family. When I slide a succulent raw oyster into my mouth and bite into it, I’m immediately brought back to the happy days spent in the warm salty sea growing up in Southern California.

And now that I’ve painted these little beauties, I’m gonna go eat ’em!

Categories
Drawing Outdoors/Landscape Painting Plein Air Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

Pardee Home Museum Tea Party

Pardee House Water Tower, ink & watercolor 8x6"
Pardee Home Museum Out-Building, Ink & watercolor 8x6"

Driving by Preservation Park in downtown Oakland today I noticed this odd little structure on the grounds of the Pardee Home Museum and pulled over to sketch. I have no idea what this little building was for, but it’s in between the carriage house and the main building.

The museum is available for tours by appointment but had the nicest “Closed” sign I’ve ever seen. It says something like, “If you find yourself on our doorstep without an appointment, try phoning our office as we may be able to assist you with a tour on short notice.”

Their office must be located in the neighboring Preservation Park collection of Victorians, now homes to non-profit organizations. The Pardee Museum offers a full house tour for $5, a “Tour and Tea” for $10 (tea and scones), and more elaborate teas, with as many as eight dishes, can be combined with tours for $25 per person.

The tour and tea sounds like fun and I’m trying to think of an excuse to schedule one. There are four parlors, four bedrooms, the billiard room, the curio room, and the hallway lined with cabinets of Mrs. Pardee’s antiquities and the cupola, or tower, to admire the views.

Categories
Life in general Other Art Blogs I Read Painting Watercolor

Stop by the gallery opening….

I was invited to participate in a two-person show for the month of September and the reception is Friday night September 12, from 7:00 to 9:00 P.M. I love the paintings of the other artist, Lin Salamo. The opening coincides with the festive monthly “art walk” called the Stockton Stroll (the gallery is on Stockton Avenue) but the show is up for the rest of the month.

If you’re in the neighborhood stop by for a sip of wine and say Hi!

Paintings by Jana Bouc and Lin Salamo

Fingado Art Gallery
Above El Cerrito Recycling Center
El Cerrito Landscapes ~ September 4-27, 2008


Watercolors by Jana Bouc and
Acrylic paintings by Lin Salamo


RECEPTION
DATE: Friday, September 12, 2008
TIME: 7:00 – 9:00 p.m.
LOCATION: 7025 Stockton Ave., El Cerrito, CA 94530

in conjunction with the Stockton Stroll

For more information please contact Fingado Gallery (510) 593-9081

or  email Jana Bouc

Jana Bouc’s Website
Lyn Salamo’s Website