Category: Plants

Sister Spa Day

Watercolor & Ink in small Moleskine watercolor notebook
To enlarge, click images

Yesterday I treated my sister Marcy to a sisters’ spa day at the wonderful Osmosis Day Spa in Freestone, CA and then dinner at the Union Hotel in Occidental.

We started with a tea ceremony in their Japanese garden and then had enzyme baths which was the most relaxing experience I’ve ever had. After putting on lovely Japanese robes, we were escorted to a private room with a glass sliding wall facing another zen garden and pond.

In the room were two large cement tubs piled with fragrent cedar sawdust, soft rice bran and enzymes imported from Japan. After climbing in, we were each buried up to our chins with this warm, heavy stuff. It was like being in the most comfortable recliner ever, and like being in a womb. Beautiful music played while we relaxed and for once my mind went completely blank. Every five minutes our beautiful attendant arrived to refresh the cool washcloth on our forehead, gently wipe our faces with a cool cloth and give us sips of water. Because of the enzymes, the sawdust gets warmer and warmer until it’s time to get out after 20 minutes.

Thoroughly baked to just the right temperature, our attendant helped us out, brushed us off and then we showered before moving on to our heavenly 75 minute massages. Speaking of baking, across the street from the spa is the Wildflour Bakery, where Marcy bought a loaf of “Sticky Bun” bread which was hot out of the oven filled with rich, melting cinnamon and nuts.

After the massages we retreated to the zen garden and sat in the open air meditation gazebo (seen in the photo above). Marcy sat on the provided meditation cushions watching the Koi and meditating until she dozed off and almost fell over. Then she joined me on my bench where I was making the sketch at the top, of the view from the gazebo (photo below).

By then it was nearly four and since we’d skipped lunch we headed a few miles west to Occidental for dinner at the Union Hotel. The second sketch at the top is what was sitting on the bar in the cafe at the hotel along with several more large clay bunny statues. Then it was a lovely 1 1/2 hour ride back home through the most brilliantly green fields covered in yellow and white wildflowers. For city girls it was fun seeing all the horses, cows, sheep, lambs, llamas, a few deer, a squashed skunk, and many hawks out in the beautiful country.

“Pull over, I have to pet those horses,” Marcy said. So we drove down someone’s dirt road to pet the horsies, who were only interested in us long enough to determine we had no food for them and then went back to eating grass. The car above is in the side garden at Osmosis–a bit incongruous but I’m sure there’s a story behind it.

Tags Pen and Ink, Photos

Acrylic Painting Flower Art Plants Still Life

Eggs and Cactus Flower in Acrylic

Post author By Jana Bouc
Post date April 3, 2007
10 Comments on Eggs and Cactus Flower in Acrylic

Acrylic on canvas board, 10 x 8″
Click image, select All Sizes to enlarge

This weekend I again tried working in acrylic and oils, doing this practice still life of brown eggs in a white bowl in each medium. I wasn’t happy with the way the acrylics weren’t letting me blend and the hard edges I ended up with. The oil painting is still drying, waiting for another layer.

But then tonight, although I thought I was too tired to do anything, I got inspired to start another painting –this cactus flower–in acrylics, with a plan to do the first loose wash to block in the painting in acylics (to avoid turpentine washes with oils) and then paint over it in oils for the final layer because I prefer the gooshy slipperiness of oils and the ability to blend and have soft edges. I started the painting with acrylics, squirting in a bunch of glazing medium and using gesso instead of white paint and lo and behold I had something very much like oils, blending beautifully. Here’s the painting in progress:

Acrylic on canvas, work in progress 12 x 15″

So now I think I’ll finish it in acrylic and see how it goes. The other thing I’ve figured out with these paintings is how differently I need to approach color mixing with watercolor vs oils or acrylics. With watercolor I tend to paint in layers, striving for getting the color right on the first try but inevitably doing many layers, building up the darks and saturated colors.

Working opaquely with oils (and to some extent acrylics), especially when trying to work alla prima (completing a painting in one session as one does painting outdoors without letting the paint dry), it’s pretty critical to mix and apply the right color the first time, not diddling around with a dab of this and a dab of that. It really forces me to accurately gauge the colors and values of the colors I see or want to use, getting the dark values right first.

One more thing I learned…I discovered I’d been saying to myself, “I’ll never learn how to mix colors in oils” so every time I caught myself thinking that I changed the thought to “I can learn this!” and now I think I’m getting there.

Tags Acrylic Painting

Animals Gardening Plants Watercolor

Hummingbird nest

Ink and watercolor on Arches paper, 10×8″ drawn from actual nest
To enlarge, click image, select All Sizes

I’ve been watching some little brown birds make a nest under my neighbor’s eaves the past few days and this morning I pointed it out to them. It was fun to see the smiles on the little kids’ faces. Then they showed me this hummingbird’s nest that they found in a tree they were trimming last week.

Yessie, their little girl, had brought it to school for sharing but since their house is very tiny, with no room for anything extra, they’d just put the nest in their recycling bin. It was nicely packaged in a thin plastic container with holes that originally held 4 pounds of red table grapes–just the right size for the little branches and nest to fit into. They were happy to give the it to me and I will treasure it.

The nest is a marvel of engineering, only 1 1/2 ” (3.5 cm) in diameter. The inside is wonderfully padded with what looks like dryer lint and a few downy feathers. The outside is made of tiny pieces of moss and lichen. I can’t tell how they attached it to the branches but it’s firmly attached. It looks so cozy I wish I had one my size to curl up in.

Here’s a photo of a similar hummingbird nest with babies in it and a link to a site about hummers.

Tags Animals, Pen and Ink

Gardening Outdoors/Landscape Plants Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

A Morning Walk

A neighbor’s beautiful front garden and purple house

Ink and watercolor in small Moleskine watercolor notebook
Click images, select All Sizes to enlarge

The creek by Peets Coffee and Albany Hill

Today I woke to a beautiful spring day and went for a walk with my sketchbook and little paint set, planning to end up at the creek for another try at painting it. I find it quite challenging (impossible, really) to make something that looks like a creek amidst trees and spring greenery. But a few blocks from my house I spotted a beautifully landscaped yard in front of a tiny blue and purple house and had to stop and paint the blossoming fruit (?) tree surrounded by what I always think of as Martian plants (a little painting of one kind here). But they’re really called Euphorbia (photo of this kind), which is almost “euphoria” and always makes me wonder how it got named that.

So being a word-loving dictionary nerd I had to look it up. It wasn’t very exciting: “From Latin, euphorbea after Euphorbus, first-century Greek physician.” Also, “Euphorbiaceae: very large genus of diverse plants all having milky juice.” I think I’ll just keep calling it Martian plant since it’s so otherworldly looking.

But euphoria — what an interesting definition: ” A feeling of great happiness or well-being, commonly exaggerated and not necessarily well founded.” Hmmmmm, that makes me stop and ponder. If I’m feeling unfounded happiness or well-being, I’m not about to question it! Bring it on!

Tags Pen and Ink

Flower Art Plants Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

Black Lilly (aka Devil’s Tongue or Snake Palm)

Post author By Jana Bouc
Post date March 17, 2007
28 Comments on Black Lilly (aka Devil’s Tongue or Snake Palm)

Ink and watercolor in large Moleskine watercolor notebook sketched on site
(Click image to enlarge, select “All Sizes”)

These are some weird plants. We spotted them yesterday on a walk and I couldn’t stop and sketch so I took some photos (see end of post). They look like calla lillies except the part that’s normally white and yellow is nearly black and velvety with bright green stalks. Last night I worked on some thumbnail sketches, trying to make sense of the jumble of leaves and flowers so that I could make a painting of the plant.

Preliminary pencil thumbnail/value study from last night

But I realized I needed more information in order to understand them well enough to paint them. So today, instead of going to the Sketchcrawl in Berkeley, I drove back up to the North Berkeley hills. I found the house and it looked like nobody was home so I set up my little stool in the driveway and started drawing. I was painting when a woman approached me and said, “May I ask what you’re doing?”

“Painting a picture,” I said, holding up the picture to show her. “Is this your house?”

“No, I live next door and I’m trying to get my house out of foreclosure. I get nervous when I see someone studying my house.” (I was sitting facing her house.) She left me alone after telling me the homeowners were away for the weekend but that she shouldn’t be telling me that.

I love the way working outdoors incorporates all the senses. There’s a park nearby and I could hear kids playing soccer and neighbors discussing plumbing and babies, and the whole time I sat there I kept smelling something like fermenting grapes. With the rich purple of the plant, I imagined it was the scent of the flowers, but probably it was coming from a hidden compost bin.

Here’s a photo of the plant. The pink color is a figment of my camera’s imagination but I like it. The flowers actually range from black cherry to black like the one in the foreground with wonderful variations in spring green foliage. I can’t wait to get started on the painting!

UPDATE: I finally found out what this plant is: Dracunculus vulgaris or dragon arum:

“The purplish-red spathe and foul-smelling stench of dragon arum (Dracunculus vulgaris) attracts flies to the base of its erect, flower-bearing spadix. Although it is colorful, this is probably NOT the flower to give to that special someone in a bouquet.”

Tags Pen and Ink

Other Art Blogs I Read Plants Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

Just a Value Sketch (Persimmon)

Post author By Jana Bouc
Post date November 3, 2006
14 Comments on Just a Value Sketch (Persimmon)

Above: Watercolor in Raffine sketchbook

Below: Original photo and grayscale version

(Click images to enlarge, select “All Sizes”)

I was inspired to focus on value studies by Katherine Tyrrell’s post about “the best ever workshop” she attended and her instructor’s “constant and particular emphasis on the huge importance of values when painting light.” For tomorrow’s watercolor class I’m going to ask my students to do some value studies and wanted to have one prepared in advance so that’s what my post is about today.

Value studies can be so helpful not just for figuring out the values that actually exist in the reference material, but also for deciding how to change the image before painting it. It gives you a chance to consider where values need to be different to help the composition and for that matter, how does the composition need to change to be more successful?

It seemed to me that my original photo, while bright and colorful didn’t have much of a range of values so I tried to increase the contrast by adding stronger darks when I did the value study. Then I converted the original photo to grayscale to compare to my 0ainted version. I think somewhere in between the two might be best. I scanned the pencil drawing before painting it, so it will be easy to print it again and paint it again, if I decide to.
I’ve found that students usually grumble about having to do value studies–it seems too much like eating enough fiber or flossing teeth. I guess value studies just don’t seem that sexy (I hate it when people use the word sexy to describe things having nothing to do with sex like cellphones, cars, and now painting…but somehow that word works here…though now I’ve probably now increased my spam by using it…) in the way bright wet-in-wet washes or painting glass or thunderclouds are. But there’s nothing that captures light in a painting more than really nailing the values and getting those darks and lights in there.

I took this picture today when I was taking a nice walk in the Berkeley hills with my sister just after it had rained. It was supposed to rain all day today and I was all set for a cozy day at home in the rain but instead it was hot and sunny….in November?

Tags Persimmons

Flower Art Life in general Plants Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

Zebra Plant

Loosely painted without drawing first using Kremer Pigments watercolors; then FW Acrylic Ink applied with Sumi brush. In 9×12 Aquabee sketchbook. (To enlarge, click image and select “All Sizes”)

At last, a day without a headache! Every time the weather changes I get migraney. It’s really frustrating here in the S.F. Bay Area because we sometimes go through three seasons in a day, especially in spring and fall. But there’s nothing like the absence of pain to brighten a day and remind me to feel grateful.
I visited my local Dick Blick (did his parents really name him that?) Art Supplies today, to pick up some ink and a sumi brush to carry on with my experiments with loose painting and adding ink. They were playing some weird music in the store that made me feel like I was getting another migraine–it had some kind of repetetive pounding sound, not a drumbeat, something chinky-chunky sounding, that was driving me nuts. I mentioned it to a fellow shopper in the ink section and she, irritated, “thanked” me for bringing it to her attention so she could be annoyed too.

I’m very sensitive to my environment, which is good for being an artist but bad for being out in the world where I easily get overstimulated when it’s busy and noisy and then need quiet downtime (preferably in the studio) to recover. Also not good for driving since I’m constantly noticing everything around me but the road. I try to make myself pay attention to driving so I’m not too much of a hazard–though I did back out of my driveway right into a parked car today (barely touched it, no harm done, but a good reminder to pay more attention!).

Tags Ink