When my plein air group at Martinez Waterfront Park last Saturday I really enjoyed the painting process despite getting a late start. Then I tinkered in the studio, never one to leave well enough alone. Above is the final version and below are the steps I took to get there, recorded just for fun. First is the thumbnail sketch/value study:
1. Thumbnail/value study
Then I blocked in the colors using really thin paint at the average color of each of the large shapes and planes or puzzle pieces as I like to think of them. I was pleased to see I did the drawing pretty well, and was able to fit everything on the square panel in about the same proportions as I saw them and as in my thumbnail sketch.
My plein air painting buddy Cathy, invited me over to sketch her wisteria which was blooming in her beautiful, backyard Zen garden.
Cathy is a graphic designer and her wonderful design sense is apparent throughout her home and garden. I loved being in the presence of the quiet empty spaces, balanced with beautifully designed sculptural installations of plantings, ceramics, orchids and bonsais; and Japanese style fences, stones used to simulate streams and landscape features.
With a fountain tinkling, bees visiting the wisteria and hummingbirds sipping from the fuchsia while we sat in the shade sketching, it was a wonderful way to end the day feeling relaxed and at peace.
Today was International Sketchcrawl 22. Martha had a morning event to attend so instead of joining the San Francisco group we met at 2:00 and sketched around the Colusa Circle in Kensington/El Cerrito. The sketch above is of my favorite grocery store, Colusa Market. Their produce is always fresh and delicious.
After a visit to pet the bunnies at Rabbit Ears, a pet store specializing in rabbits, and taking a peek into the Kensington Circus Pub (which was closed but would have been fun to sketch in) we took a hike through the nearby Sunset View Cemetery. I’ve painted there before and love the hilltop bay views and peaceful surroundings.
Sunset Cemetery, ink & watercolor
The fog rolled in and what had been a hot day turned chilly. Martha was cold and my butt fell asleep from sitting on a cement block so we headed back down to our cars. It was after 5:00 and time to say good bye. Not an all-day sketchcrawl this time but a good afternoon with excellent company on a beautiful day.
Officially they’re known as Ground Squirrels but they look more like rats wearing moth-eaten squirrel costumes. After trying to sketch them during a hike around Albany Bulb, a spit of land projecting into the SF Bay in Albany, I can say they have cute little ears and seem to be curious and playful. Their biggest selling point is that they make good snacks for the owls and other birds of prey that hunt in the area.
I’ve written about Albany Bulb before, so won’t go into details about this wonderful place where people make art from found objects washed up from the Bay or from the land’s original use as a dump. New art is created and people add to or decorate pieces already there.
One of the regular artists who create there is writer, artist, civil rights lawyer, Osha Neumann (below, building a new sculpture).
Osha Neumann at Albany Bulb, at work on new sculpture
I asked him if he documents his work and he said no, but that other people sometimes take photos. I told him I thought that his work was true art, because it was made just for the pleasure of the creating, with no concern about marketing, sales, fame or glory. He just gets out there and creates. I asked what the man he was constructing was meant to be doing and he asked what I thought. It wasn’t until I saw my photo that I realized he was holding a fishing pole (duh!).
My favorite new piece was the artist below, although Osha said that someone else added the palette and pampas grass “paintbrush,” they weren’t part of his original sculpture.
Artist at the Albany Bulb
When I saw the dog below I asked Osha where the arches with the dog atop them were that I remembered from a previous trip. He said that structure blew down over the winter and was gone.
Dog sculpture at Albany Bulb
My hiking companion, 10 year old Mariah had a great time playing in the fort someone built, complete with a spiral staircase. Next time we go there we’re going to bring supplies to make our own art.
I thought I was bringing my car in for an oil change, but the service manager told me it was way overdue for its 3 year/30,000 mile major maintenance (about 3 years overdue, as a matter of fact). I take public transit or walk whenever I can so my 2002 Toyota RAV 4 has less than 26,000 miles on it. I thought I could wait until 30,000 but he said no because the kind of short trips I take are harder on the car than lots of regular driving .
So I left it with him to do the full boogie on the car, feeling a bit sheepish at my car abuse. Despite the offer of a ride, I decided to walk the two miles home, hoping I’d find something fun to draw on the way. Sure enough a mile into the walk, I found this beautiful creek I never knew existed, half in the shade and half brilliantly lit with spring greenery all around.
As I was sketching and painting, an elderly Asian woman (99 Ranch Market is an Asian shopping center) showed me the bag of bread she was bringing for the resident ducks and then wandered off down the path, hoping to find them.
When I got home I realized I’d left all of my keys with the service manager. Oops…. But fortunately I have a “Plan B” for my keys, having locked myself out one too many times in the past.
And now my car seems so much perkier and happier with all new fresh fluids and the nice car wash they gave it. I’m very fond of my car, it’s always been totally reliable, and I really should treat it better.
View from Old Borges Ranch; Plein air, Oil on panel, 9x12"
I’m celebrating a bit of progress I saw today when I painted plein air at Old Borges Ranch in Walnut Creek. I painted at this site a year ago and had a terrible time, titling the post of the awful painting I did that day, “Am I Having Fun Yet? Uh…no!”
Today was a lot more fun. I started the painting with a plan (described below) and stuck with it until I started rushing to wrap it up in time for our group critique at 1:00 when I muddied things up a bit since the light had changed in the scene from when I first started at 10:30.
When I put the painting in the line up with the other 14 paintings, I didn’t even cringe or feel embarrassed. It helped too, that I now understand that my plein air paintings are sketches, not finished works of art.
Here are the steps I took that seemed to work for me:
My friend Gina emailed me a photo with a note saying, “I like the light in this photo– for some reason I always think of you when I look at it.” Although I rarely paint from photos, especially those taken by other people, I just had to paint this one. My computer monitor is set up so that I can paint directly from the image on the screen which is a lot better than working from the limited colors in a printed image.
I’m not sure if I’m done yet, but I couldn’t see what else was needed so I stopped. If you have any suggestions for improving the picture, I’d love to hear.
Below are some stages of the painting. I used a bit of artistic license: I gave Hannah a bit of a haircut and deleted Gina’s wonderful dog Bella because:
The dog was competing with Hannah as the focal point and was about the same size.
I couldn’t get Bella to “read” as a dog; no matter how hard I tried to draw her correctly, she just kept turning into a jackrabbit.
Hannah’s Reflection, Oil on Gessobord, 16×12
Painting phase 1
B&W value check
Painting phase 2
Painting Phase 3
Color spots
Photo, B&W w/2 values
Photo, B&W w/3 values
Original Photo
Top row: 1) the finished painting; 2) my painting start; and 3) a black and white version of the start to see if my values were on track.
Middle row: 1) & 2) the next two steps in the painting. 3) a view of a “color spot” layer that I made in Photoshop. I created a new layer, and used Photoshop’s Paintbrush tool to select (Alt-click) and paint spots of those colors because it can be easier to see the colors when they’re isolated. Even more helpful than the color spots is a color-mixing tip I learned from Dianne Mize on Empty Easel: you apply the color to the edge of a small card and compare it to the subject until you get it right.
Bottom row: three views of the original photo. 1) “Posterized” in Photoshop down to two values; 3) posterized with three values; 3) Gina’s original photo.
P.S. This park, which Hannah affectionately calls the “swamp adventure,” is part of the East Bay Regional Parks. It is a river front park next to McAvoy harbor in Bay Point. It’s a little delta oasis in the sprawl of East Contra Costa County.
Rodeo Shore, plein air oil on panel, 9x12 in. (click image to enlarge)
The little shoreline park in Rodeo where we painted Sunday is funky like the town itself, but a fun place to paint. Click here to see some of Sue Wilson’s cool photos of the area or her little video of some of us in Da Group painting there. This beach is about 40 feet from the railroad tracks where freight trains and Amtrak trains rumble by, whistles blowing, every 20 minutes or so. One train made me laugh: an engine pulling another two dozen engines which were all riding backwards. It looked so silly.
On the north end of the little beach there’s a broken down old pier and a couple of tin shacks. The shacks and pier are all that remains of the “resort” that a man with big dreams (but apparently little common sense) built there on a former industrial dump. In his later years he allowed a homeless encampment to flourish on his property. When he died his heirs had the vagrants evicted. To get even, they burned the resort down to the ground. The property is worth less than nothing because of the clean up needed due to the toxins under the ground.
Dumps to Cities
Most of the bayfront land in the San Francisco Bay Area is built on former dumps. A combination of ignorance, greed, and “out of sight, out of mind” thinking, led cities and businesses to dump everything from tires and batteries to whole cars; from industrial waste to ordinary garbage into the beautiful bay, eventually creating “landfill” upon which homes, hotels, parks and major freeways were built.
I remember going to the dump at the Berkeley waterfront where you drove up (holding your nose) and dumped your trash in a pile on the ground, seagulls flying overhead. Then the bulldozers would push it into big hills. Now that dump is hidden under Cesar Chavez Park, home of the Berkeley Kite Festival. The park has air vents to allow the methane gas to escape from the garbage dump buried underneath the grassy hills and waterfront trails. Vents won’t help buildings on landfill if there’s a big earthquake and the landfill undergoes liquefaction.
Now trash goes first to a warehouse “transfer station” where it is sorted and then piled onto trucks and hauled to a dump/landfill in another town. (And in my own bit of “out of sight, out of mind” I realized I didn’t know where it went and had to look it up). It’s trucked to Livermore, land of rolling hills and wind farms.
Dump amidst the lovely Livermore rolling hills
I’ve heard that all the Bay Area dump/landfills are all going to be full within the near future. I hope we learn to do a better job of recycling and precycling before that happens.
Trash and Art
And now to tie this digression about dumps back to art, San Francisco offers an artist in residence program at the Solid Waste Transfer and Recycling Center where San Francisco’s garbage goes before being trucked away. Artists get 24-hour access to a well-equipped studio, a monthly stipend, and an exhibit at the end of their residency.
After working at my “day job” most of Monday, a day I usually don’t work, I grabbed my painting gear and headed to this field covered in brilliant mustard grass. I’d driven by the field the day before and was desperate to paint it. By then it was about 4:30 and the sun, which had been shining brightly all day, had disappeared behind clouds on its way down. A chilly, foggy breeze blew in from the nearby Bay but the mustard grass was still glowing.
I set up in the parking lot of the Ocean View Elementary School in Albany, looking through a chainlink fence at the field. It is part of U.C. Berkeley’s Gill Tract, a 14-acre agriculture research field owned by the university. Until recently the field was a pine forest, but the university just cut down all 314 Monterey Pines because they were infected with pitch canker and were deemed hazardous.
Several children who were being picked up from after-school activities dragged their moms over to see what I was doing. One little boy told me that my trees looked “so realistic!” He made my day because I’d been thinking they were awful. Another little girl said she liked to paint too. I asked her what she liked to paint with (thinking watercolor? acrylic?) and she said, “purple….and orange….and yellow…you know, colors!” acting like I was really dumb to be asking that question.
With the light fading fast I packed up and went home after about an hour and a half. Tonight, with the workweek finally over I returned to the painting. From memory I made a few adjustments, lightening the hills a bit, adding more dimension to the field and trying to do a little something with the trees, which maybe I should have just left alone since they looked better before like the little boy said.
Ink & Watercolor in Strathmore drawing sketchbook, 6×8″ (Larger)
After my dentist appointment today I took a walk up to College Avenue in the Elmwood district of Berkeley, foraging for lunch. I chose Ferrari’s Deli where I had a delicious grilled “Perugia” sandwich (roasted pork sirloin, black truffle butter and Asiago cheese on toasted ciabatta bread). I sat a sidewalk table to eat, with a view of Mrs. Dalloway’s bookstore across the street. Then I got out my sketchbook and started drawing, sad that I’d left my watercolors in my car, half a mile away.
I took a couple photos (fearing I wouldn’t remember all the colors, like the orange reflection of Ferrari’s awning appearing in Mrs. Dalloway’s windows) and then added the watercolor at home tonight. The paper in this sketchbook is not designed for wet media but works fine if you don’t overwork it. I like it because it’s just the right size, the paper is nice, especially for drawing, and quite inexpensive.
Jana Bouc, Artist 
