La Farine Bakery, ink & watercolor & piece of business card
Not the years 1700s-1800s, but the addresses. We started our Tuesday night sketchcrawl at La Farine Bakery (above), 1820 Solano Ave., Berkeley and two and half hours later we’d traveled only one block, ending at Kirin Restaurant, 1767 Solano Ave. Berkeley. It’s amazing how many interesting details there are to be seen and drawn on a street I’ve walked hundreds of times.
We only had 15 minutes to draw in the bakery since they were closing but the workday was just beginning for the baker who was tantalizing our noses with the mesmerizing scent of carmelizing sugar and butter. People rushed in and out, buying their bread for dinner. This lady (above) was in and out in less than two minutes.
Then we headed outside and were captivated by the art deco signage on the Powder Box Beauty Salon which will probably be gone soon since they are moving around the corner.
Powder Box Beauty Salon, ink and watercolor
The wall is maroon tile and I spent way too much time drawing all the lines to indicate tile and then goofed when I drew the car parked in front of the building. I didn’t pay attention to how things lined up and accidentally parked the car on the sidewalk, halfway into the store.
This shop reminds me of one we used to pass on the way to my grandmother’s house when I was a kid. I used to get so annoyed at that shop’s name: “Lipstick Beauty Salon,” because it didn’t make any sense, and that started my life-long pet peeve of dumb business names.
Of course this was before the internet and the REALLY stupid business names that seem to be required for the web. They all sound like baby talk to me (picture a baby prattling, “Google, twitter, hulu, lulu, vimeo, gowalla.” (All successful web-based companies.)
Sue Johnson Custom Lamps, ink & watercolor
The sun had set and all the lit lamps at Sue Johnson’s shop were glowing in the windows. I’d never noticed the wonderful Spanish tiles and other decorative elements above the store windows, including a delicate mural of ivy leaves that I forgot to draw because I got so interested in the tree.
We finished up at Kirin Restaurant when it got too cold outside. Cathy eats there regularly so felt comfortable asking the host if we could come in and sketch and he graciously agreed. (That’s my cartoony version of Cathy on a bar stool, still wearing her gigantic. arctic puffy down jacket and signature baseball cap.) The kitchen is visible behind glass walls.
The best part of sketching tonight was running into beautiful Martha, who promises to rejoin our Tuesday night sketchcrawls again in a month or so. By then it will be light and warm enough to sketch all evening in comfort. The sun was setting and it got cold while I sketched the roof of the Produce Center above. I could see a crowd lining up for pizza at the Cheeseboard Collective where a jazz band was playing. I could hear the music but wasn’t close enough to smell the pizza, just the scent from all the local dogs who’d visited the bush behind the concrete bench where I sat in front of Bank of the West.
Vegi Food Restaurant, Vine St., ink & watercolor
I wouldn’t have thought to sketch this old vegetarian Chinese restaurant (above) until Cathy suggested it as a subject. I’d never noticed the interesting second story before. It was fun to draw quickly (Cathy was nearly done with her sketch when I started) and loosely (using my Lamy Safari while wearing fuzzy gloves for warmth which kept smearing the ink and caused the pen to keep slipping).
Continental Mark V, ink & watercolor
It was nearly dark when I started the sketch above, but I couldn’t resist this wonderful old car from the time when big was better. I wish I’d drawn it across the centerfold instead of fitting it on one page because I see I’ve compressed the width, especially the front which was just as long as the back. But I feel pretty pleased, considering I drew a car (not a subject I’m “good” at), in the dark, with a fountain pen held in thick fuzzy-gloved fingers.
The tulip trees (Saucer Magnolias) and tulips were blooming when we painted at Blake Gardens on a sunny Friday a week ago. Of the multiple sketches and paintings I did of the scene, I think I’m happiest with the one above, done in my journal when I got home, from a combination of memory and photo. I clipped the text from their brochure and pasted it on the journal page.
Here is the final painting and below that are the steps in between:
Blake Tulips & Tulip Tree, Acrylic, 10x8" on Gessobord
After I picked my spot to paint and set up my easel, I did several thumbnail sketches (left below) to plan my composition. While each thumbnail improved on the one before it, none were great compositions and as a result neither was the plein air painting I did on site.
Journal Spread with thumbnails
I was working with Golden Open Acrylics, my first time trying them outdoors. A Golden expert suggested I put a drop of Golden Open Acrylic Thinner atop each blob of paint to keep them moist when painting outdoors. Instead, thinking I was so clever, I mixed about 25% thinner with 75% water in a spray bottle and misted the paints occasionally.
But I should have taken her advice as my method didn’t work. She’d warned me that adding water to the Open paints will make them dry faster, which it did, and they started getting icky-sticky about the time I needed to quit and head for the critique anyway. Indoors they stay wet all day and in a closed palette, for a week or two.
The plein air painting was so UGLY that I’m glad I only expect my plein air paintings to be learning studies. My plein air painting goal is to fully experience and participate in a scene and embed my memories of color, light, texture, sounds and scents.
Plein air study
And there were sounds and scents: not only were the many magnolias overly fragrant, but shortly after I set up, two gardeners fired up a gas-powered industrial-strength chain saw, cut down a huge tree and sawed it to pieces about 20 feet away from me. The sound was horrible and the smell was worse.
Below is a photo taken when I first arrived, cropped into a more pleasing composition. I like the diagonals and the way shapes of shadows and colors lead the eye into and around the painting.
Photo at Blake Gardens
From my watercolor sketch and the photo above, I started working on a studio version of the painting. Below is the underpainting with the main shapes and colors blocked in.
Acrylic under painting
I liked just as it was and was hesitant to paint over it so I left it for a few days before working on it again until it decided it was finished.
After waking up way too early and having loads of extra time before I needed to leave for my plain air painting session today, I somehow managed to get late anyway. When I finally got to our meeting place—Borges Ranch on the Shell Ridge Open Space in Walnut Creek—I decided to leave my easel and acrylics in the car and hike the ridge trail with my sketchbook, watercolor kit and camera.Then when I was heading back for the critique, I stopped at the barn and painted the quick sketch above.
Often when I’m plein air painting I’m jealous of all the people who are enjoying the day by hiking the hills instead of standing in one spot trying to capture all the abundant nature in two dimensions on a little piece of canvas. So this time I joined them and it was heavenly. After exploring for an hour or so I found a spot on the trail beside a large muddy pond where I sat and painted the picture below. It doesn’t make sense as a picture but when I look at it I can hear the buzzing bees (must have been a hive in a nearby tree), the birds chirping, and can feel the warm sun shining on me.
Warm sun, buzzing bees, a pond, a cyclist
This was the first sketch in my new journal with the Legion Multimedia paper. It’s a dream to sketch on; the pen slides right along. The paper is nicely sized and while it won’t take the abuse that Arches cold press will, it does hold up pretty well as long as you don’t try to do more than 2 or 3 layers. This slight limitation will hopefully me keep me moving on to the next sketch instead of overworking one to death.
After the critique (and my lunch) it was mealtime for the farm animals and I couldn’t get any of their attention. This guy looked at me like I was really annoying.
Borges sheep chowing down
Only the rooster seemed to have places to go and things to do.
After having a rough day, I met Cathy in front of the Northbrae Church at the top of Solano in Berkeley to sketch. I considered staying home, feeling crummy, but knew if I went out sketching I would start feeling better. So I sat on some steps and drew a sort of map (above) of all the nature around me to get warmed up.
Next I sketched the street signs in front of my parked car (below).
Parking and Ferrari Foods, Ink & Watercolor
Then we walked a block north to Solano and sketched the interior of Ferrari Foods (above), which was closed. One worker was inside cleaning up. When he finished and turned off the lights we walked around a bit looking for our next target, realized we were freezing and moved indoors to Cactus Taqueria.
Don't Play With the Fountain, ink and watercolor
Despite the sign on the fountain telling parents not to let their children play with the fountain, children wandering around while their parents finished dinner in the family-friendly Mexican cafeteria found it irresistable. One tot helped himself to a nice long drink of water from one of the streams while the young man sitting beside me yelled “No!” and asked around whose kid it was, dismayed to see him drinking the recycled water. Nobody responded and the kid eventually wandered back to his family, who seemed unworried.
This month’s Virtual Paint-out is taking place in Norway. When I picture Norway it’s always snowing—silly me. I was amazed to wander the roads and see the beautiful summer light and perfectly maintained buildings and fields. There was so much gorgeous scenery it was hard to pick, but I couldn’t resist all the different greens in this scene.
Here is the original scene from Google Earth. I used Windows 7 cool “Snipping Tool” that lets you select an area of the screen to copy and save:
Original Google photo
If you click to enlarge the image you will see the address of this farm in the top left. I played around in Photoshop to compose and crop the scene. Then I used the “Content Aware Scaling” feature in CS4 that allows you to compress a scene without distorting elements such as buildings or people. I wanted to fit the image on a 9×12″ canvas:
Cropped/Scaled in Photoshop
What’s really exciting to me about this painting is that I used Golden Open Acrylics to paint it. I am in love with these paints! [SEE less enthusiastic UPDATE AT BOTTOM]. They have all features that I love about oils and acrylics with none of the features I don’t like. I’ve been struggling with both those mediums for months and was going through an artistic crisis, considering giving them both up.
The problem with acrylics
I couldn’t stand working with regular acrylics because I like to layout a palette of paint and work intuitively, mixing as I go. Acrylics dry too fast to do this. (Yes I know you can mist the paint regularly and that there are special stay-wet palettes but I found they turn the paint to soup and smell bad after a couple of days). I also like to blend colors on the canvas and to be able to wipe off a passage if it’s not quite right. None of this is easy to do with regular acrylics.
The problem with oils
Because I try to use solvents as little as possible with oils due to their toxicity and smell, I can’t start with juicy washes for the first layer as I like to do when sketching out the composition with oils. And even with the minimal use of the least toxic odorless solvent (Gamsol mineral spirits) I found there was an odor (probably from linseed oil going rancid that was left in the solvent) that bothered me anyway. And then there’s the cleanup up dozens of brushes after a painting session.
Why I love[d] Golden Open Acrylics
Golden Open Acrylics do not smell, stay workable about as long as oil paints [update: they don’t really], can be diluted with medium and/or water, clean up with water, do not dry on brushes (for 24 hours at least), blend nicely and are just a dream to work with. When I quit painting last weekend I stuck a small, damp sponge on the palette, and closed my Masterson “Palette Seal” box. I opened it today, a week later, and the paint was still in perfect working condition, better than oil paint would have been.
While I admire thick, expressive, brush strokes in paintings, it’s not really my thing. I prefer working more thinly and that’s just the way Golden Open Acrylics are meant to be used: in layers less than the thickness of a penny. They can also be mixed with regular acrylics to modify the texture or the drying time. Or they can be combined in different layers, although it’s suggested to use regular acrylics as the first layer(s) before adding the Opens or waiting for the layers of Open Acrylics to thoroughly dry (2 weeks) before applying a layer of regular acrylics.
I think these paints are also going to transform my plein air painting. [update: they didn’t work for plein air; got tacky too quickly] I won’t need to bring solvent or a slew of brushes. I haven’t figured out what to carry for a water container or how much water I will need to carry for brush washing between colors.
Our first plein-air session of the new season is next Friday and I’m looking forward to playing with my new medium in a Non-Virtual paint-out too.
UPDATE June 30, 2010
After working the Golden Open Acrylics for three months I’m considerably less enthusiastic about them. The deal breaker is that the paint dries darker (about 10%, varies between colors) which requires guessing when mixing paint how much lighter to make it and makes it impossible for me to try to match colors I’m seeing . Other problems are the drying time which depends on the humidity and wind which makes painting outdoors with them next to impossible in my area. Unless there is no breeze and high humidity, even indoors, you have to work quickly before the painting starts getting tacky within an hour or so. But then it can take a really long time for the paint to dry completely. When trying to glaze on top of a seemingly dry layer, I’ve ended up lifting the previous layer instead and had to give up glazing.
I’ve now switched to Holbein Duo Aqua water soluble oils and so far and am finding them the best of all worlds. No color shift, artist quality pigments and pigment load, no toxics, no smells, easy clean up. I write about them here.
The Bread Workshop is a combination café and artisan bread bakery in Berkeley. They focus on seasonal, sustainable, organic, healthy and delicious foods served in a comfortable atmosphere. From our table we had a view of the small team of bakery workers, hustling to get hundreds of loaves of bread packaged and ready for next morning delivery to local restaurants.
Sawyer and Oven, ink & watercolor
We sat beside a table of young medical students (including the above guy named Sawyer) who were studying and discussing gastroenterology and what symptoms equaled which diseases—not the most appetizing dinner conversation, but interesting nevertheless. The back of the large “Inferno” oven faced the café and was sparkly clean and decorated with little lights beside a bulletin board.
Bread and Snacks Counter, ink & watercolor
I stood in front of the counter where you order (above) to sketch and then painted it at our table. This was really fun to draw.
Dinner at Bread Workshop, ink & watercolor
My grilled chicken breast had been marinated in a yogurt sauce first and it was spicy and delicious, the grilled veges were fresh and tasty and they even had brown rice.
It was a dark and stormy night when Cathy and I met at Au Coquelet Cafe to sketch while listening to people debate the existence of reality and/or study English in Chinese.
I started by sketching the guy in the middle with black hair and just kept on going, seeing more and more stuff to draw. At one point he walked by our table, saw what we were doing, pulled out his cellphone and took photos of our sketches of him. That was a first! But it seemed a fair trade.
A group of four (perhaps retired professors from the university) seemed to have gathered for the sole purpose of defining reality, or proving it’s existence, or both, punctuated regularly by “huh?” “what did you say?” as one of the gents was hard of hearing (but not hard of “talking” as he blathered on and on). On our other side were Chinese college students studying English, but mostly in Chinese, with the occasional English phrase thrown in such as “I am a pretty girl” and “I am eating an apple” (which she wasn’t).
Au Coquelet is a perfect place to sketch. It’s large, open very late, has a couple of rooms, and counter service only so you don’t have to worry about waiters. There’s lots of wood, bricks, brick-a-brack and plants, design left over from the hippie days.
I have fond memories of sketching there on another stormy night, New Year’s Eve 1997, when I was supposed to be in Yosemite National Park but had canceled the trip due to rain. And it was good I didn’t go: the next day Yosemite had the worst flooding in 100 years, with roads and bridges so damaged that people were stranded there for weeks without sanitary facilities or food.
So with no plans for the evening, I headed up to the café to draw people who did have plans, partygoers coming in before and after their parties. After a while, a tall, handsome artist sketching at another table came over and joined me. We sketched together and talked, and ended up dating for a few months until I decided that the tales he told were too good to be true.
Warm sun, green hills, blossoming trees and a great Peet’s cappuccino to sip at an outdoor table while sketching was made even better by a pen that actually worked in my sketchbook. After struggling to find a pen that would not skip, scratch, smear, show through or bleed on the Arches 90 lb cold press paper I’d bound in my journal, I discovered that my Lamy Safari fountain pen was just right.
Pens
All of the pens I normally use were giving me problems. The Sakura Pigma Micron skipped, scratched over the textured paper when drawing, and was even worse for writing in the journal, whether I used my favorite .01 or a fatter-tipped .05.
Pitt Artist Pen and Sharpie tests
I tried using an Ultra-Fine Point Sharpie since it would at least produce a strong line (above). But I found that the ink flowed too quickly, bleeding and spreading if held in one spot and worse, showed through to the other side. I also tried the Pitt Artist Brush Pen on this page, which worked OK but was a thicker line than I like for general sketching. The black ink in the finer-point Pitts seemed paler than the Microns, but it might also be that they resist the sizing on the paper more.
Testing Prismacolor .05 Pen
Prismacolor Illustration pens are similar to the Sakura Pigma Micron and Pitt Artist Pens and are very nice and comfortable to hold. But they too performed poorly on the Arches CP. In the sketch above I was trying to do a contour drawing of what I saw on the BART train but my lines were barely visible until I redrew them with a Sharpie.
Testing Noodlers & Carbon Platinum Ink
Then I tested my Lamy Safari F-point fountain pen and was delighted to see that it was a pleasure to write and draw with on the Arches CP paper.
Ink
I’d last filled the Safari with Noodlers Black Bulletproof ink, which is supposed to be waterproof but actually bleeds a fair amount when a wash is applied after it’s dry. I used a dip pen to test Platinum Carbon Ink and it held up better, barely bleeding at all.
So I squirted out the remaining Noodlers in my Lamy and refilled it with the Carbon Platinum ink. I’ve been a happy sketcher ever since. The ink is a rich black, doesn’t bleed, is great to write with on this bumpy paper, and is comfy to hold. Yay!
Paper
Now that I’m halfway through my journal it’s time to prepare for binding the next one. I’ve been testing papers and I think I’ve found the one. When I finish my tests I’ll post them. I have a feeling I might have found the perfect paper for ink and watercolor journaling.
Blackened Salmon at Pyramid Ale House, Ink & Watercolor
Pyramid Alehouse in Berkeley is a lively, fun place for good food, good beer and sketching too. My blackened salmon was delicious and a real challenge to wait to draw and paint before eating. After dinner we planned to sketch the brewery area visible from our table. But mid-meal they turned the lights off in the brewery so we went upstairs to check out the view.
Combined 2 partial sketches (one exterior, one interior) with a pasted in bit of event calendar
Upstairs there was a crowd of people playing Pyramid’s version of trivial pursuit “Brainstormers Pub Quiz,” with an announcer reading off the challenges that teams try to solve. The teams with the most points win more beer.
I assume there is an honor system that prevents people from getting the answers on their smartphones. I couldn’t play trivial pursuit unless answers like, “You know, it was that guy who was in that movie with that blonde…” would win a prize.
Kitchen from above & Beers on tap, pasted in stuff
While we were upstairs I (tried to) sketch the chef in his galley kitchen. The perspective was challenging. Then we went downstairs to the bar area. I loved the whimsical handles on the taps, each reflecting some feature of the specific beer. They had 17 beers on tap that night.
I just noticed my color-scheme on these pages: they’re all predominantly beer colored.
Jana Bouc, Artist 