Before & After Sketches of my computer desk, ink & watercolor, 5×16″
Back in January I got a new iMac to replace my aging PC. I hadn’t left my job yet so still needed my PC monitor and my work laptop to complete my last project. That meant I had 3 computers, a 27″ monitor and the iMac on my desk.
Computer desk: Before, ink & watercolor, 5×8″
What a mess! Along with 3 computers I also had two keyboards, a trackball, a track pad, an old Wacom tablet, telephone and router, notebook, glasses, pencil holder and a huge stack of files and file folders I was working on.
Computer Desk After, ink & watercolor, 5×8″
It felt so good to finish the work, put away the work laptop, give the PC to my son, and clear my desk. I mostly love the iMac and especially appreciate how few wires there are now.
I’m also happy to finally post these last sketches from my last journal so that I can start posting some fun stuff in my current giant Moleskine.
My friend Amy gave me the lovely gift of an Anthurium plant. I couldn’t wait to sketch its interesting shapes and colors.
Anthurium 2, ink & watercolor, 5×8″
I keep it in the studio because my cats eat house plants and then give them back partially digested. The plant held up well during the week and a half I was too sick to go out to the studio. It just wanted a little water and repotting.
Camellia in Blue Bowl, ink & watercolor, 5×8″
I can never remember the name of this large flowering bush in my yard. I have to go through the same stupid chain of thoughts to get to it, always starting with “It’s not a gardenia it’s a….” which always leads to remembering when I moved to New York City at the age of 19 with one suitcase, a few hundred dollars in savings, and lots of dreams.
When I arrived and opened my suitcase, my bottle of (cheap, intense) Jungle Gardenia perfume had spilled all over everything. I still hate the scent of gardenia. Camellias have no scent and are a wonderful vibrant pink color, but are challenging to sketch. I did this large watercolor of a camellia (below) several years ago.
Ruffled Camellia, watercolor on paper, 16×19.5″
Seeing my earlier watercolor work makes me want to go back to doing large watercolors. My process was so different when painting rather than sketching with watercolor. I worked slowly and with control, section by section, on very exact drawings or tracings from photos. You can see more of my watercolor flowers on my website JanaBouc.com here.
Crab Apple Blossoms colored pencil on tan paper in 8×11″ Moleskine Journal
Once more with the crab apple blossoms, this time on tan paper using mostly a Prismacolor black grape colored pencil and white pencil (and then pasted in my giant Moleskine).
I sketched these before I did the oil paintings posted previously below. I wanted to try the approach of sketching with only three values: the tan paper as mid-range plus highlights and shadows. But I wasn’t seeing a lot of variation in value in the subject. Everything except for the whitish pink blossoms looked like a medium dark value. So what I was trying to do didn’t really make sense. But it was fun anyway.
The Visitor 2 Million Prize on Making a Mark
Katherine Tyrrell credited me with being or generating the 2,000,000 millionth visitor to Making A Mark, my favorite blog about art on the web. We were both down with a nasty flu bug then so she missed seeing the counter tick over to 2 million. But she could tell it was either me (reading her blog from bed with box of tissues in hand) or someone referred from my blog, so she named me the prize winner. Her blog is such a gift to the artist/blogger community. I learn something new every time I read her weekly “Who’s Made A Mark” column.
Looking into the Codex Book Fair in the Craneway Pavillion, ink & watercolor, 5×8″
I attended the Codex Book Fair at Craneway Pavillion (a former car factory, now an event space) in Richmond with some friends from S.F. Sketchers on a gorgeous, sunny day. The fair is an annual event where book artists and small publishers show their work. There were huge crowds enjoying the amazing art, although a few tables were empty because the artists or publishers got stuck in an East Coast snow storm.
The Park on the Bay by Craneway Pavillion, ink & watercolor, 5×8″
After I visited the fair I sat outside on a bench and quickly sketched the view from the boardwalk by the building (above).
My favorite artist at the show was Andie Thrams. Her handmade, watercolor-illustrated, one-of-a kind books were amazing and inspiring. My favorite of hers was In Forests, which you can see page by page here. It really is a must-see for anyone interested in journaling and bookbinding, especially nature journaling in ink or watercolor.
Piled up Shoes and Slippers, ink & watercolor, 5×16″
More crazy dreams! The night after the lost keys dream, I dreamed I was at a retreat where I kept losing my shoes. So of course I had to draw them, just to be sure they were still here.
Lately my every-day sneakers have started untying themselves several times a day. So then I dreamed that Justin Bieber and Justin Timberlake were giving me hands-on shoe-tying advice.
My Every Day Sneakers
They unlaced my shoes and then snipped the laces into small pieces. They explained that you need a separate piece for each set of holes and then you knot each piece to the next. We started running out of laces. I think I’ll just start double-knotting them, thanks. Or maybe it’s time for new shoes?
Birkenstocks, Dansko Clogs and Fuzzy Slippers, ink & watercolor, 5×8″
Yes those are magenta polka dots on my ancient Birkenstocks: I painted the funky old shoes with acrylic paint dots and it worked great. I’m definitely not a high heels kind of girl as you can see.
Doing a Virtual Paintout seemed like a good warm up for the plein air painting season. March’s Virtual Paintout location is Vilnius, Lithuania. It was fun using Google Street View to cruise around Lithuania, where some of my ancestors are from.
Virtual Paintout: Lithuania, watercolor in sketchbook, 8×11″
I started with a watercolor sketch in my giant Moleskine A4 watercolor notebook (which is proving too large to be practical to carry with me all the time but is great for a studio journal). I had trouble with the sky and clouds so did some cloud studies (below). When I paint in watercolor I prefer juicy, wet washes but they don’t work well in sketchbooks; the paper buckles, the water pools, and I can’t get the results I want. I need to start working on real watercolor paper again or use much less fluid on my brush.
Cloud Study for Lithuania Virtual Paintout, watercolor, 8×10″
I used some no-longer-available, very sedimentary Manganese blue in the top left sky above. I was really sad when they stopped making it as it was my favorite color, but apparently it was highly toxic for the miners.
Cropped Lithuania screen shot from Google Street View
Dreamt I Lost My Keys So I Drew Them. Ink & watercolor, 5×8″
Sometimes I have the stupidest dreams. It’s unlikely I would actually lose my keys since I always put them in the same place. I do this because, like Winnie the Pooh, I’m “a bear of very little brain.” Although I haven’t lost anything* in a long time, I used to lose everything. My parents always said, “If your head wasn’t attached you’d lose that too!” I may not have a good memory but now I am organized about where I keep things.
The View From My Kitchen Sink, ink & watercolor, 5×8″
I did this sketch at the end of January after a month of not drawing while focusing on year-end organizing, learning a new computer, creating spreadsheets and doing taxes. The sketch is crazy wonky but it felt good to get back to drawing, even if it was just the kitchen sink, and the view out my window of my bottle brush tree, lemon tree, little purple potato tree and my neighbor’s house.
*(oops…not true…I keep losing my metal water bottles because they fall out of the too-shallow pockets on my backpack. I use a carabiner to keep the bottle attached now, but I’m going to replace the old bag with one with deeper water-bottle pockets. No point in using something that is so inefficient.)
Flowering Crab Apple Branch, left page, ink, watercolor & gouache, 8×11″
Happy spring (or autumn if you’re on the other side of the world)! Despite it being a rainy, grey day here, perfect for spending indoors in jammies (which I did since I was a bit under the weather) spring has definitely arrived in the Bay Area with blossoming trees and green things sprouting everywhere.
Out walking in Berkeley on a Sunday morning in a nice neighborhood, I spotted a beautiful flowering tree between two homes. I was debating with my walking buddy whether to knock on the door and ask if I could take a cutting to sketch and paint from. He thought not, since people might still be sleeping, and suggested I take a photo. But I wanted to draw from the real thing. I was trying to figure out which house actually owned the tree and he was trying to figure out how to get me to keep walking.
Flowering Crab Apple Branch, right page, ink, watercolor & gouache, 8×11″
Just then I heard people chatting, coming towards us on the sidewalk from around the corner. It was the homeowners who’d also been out for a walk. I asked if I could take a branch to paint and they said yes. This is the first of several pieces (two oil paintings and another sketch) I created from their branch.
I wish I’d thought to take their address so I could send a thank you card with the image on it. Maybe my friend will remember what street we were on since he chose our route.
This is the full 2-page spread in the giant Moleskine Watercolor A4 sketchbook I’m using now. It’s 8.5 x 23 inches when opened so rather unwieldy when sketching outside the studio but I’m enjoying it anyway. I drew directly with a sepia Sakura Micron Pigma Pen and then painted with watercolor and a bit of gouache.
I used gouache for the background on this sketch because I wanted a fairly smooth/flat background which I couldn’t get with watercolor because of the way the paper buckles and doesn’t lie flat because of the seam. My favorite part is the enlarged pure watercolor blossoms in the white circle on the left hand side, visible if you click and then click again on the top image. I’m craving some “real” watercolor painting on good paper.
It seems like I’ve been struggling with painting sunflowers forever but with each attempt I understand them a little better. I’m very stubborn and will continue trying until the sunflowers and I are really good friends.
I lit the flowers above with very warm light which made the olive-green backdrop cloth look gold and kind of bleached out the color of the flowers. The pictures in this post are in the reverse order I made them, with the last first.
Sunflower #3, ink & watercolor, 5×8″
I did the sketch above after having such difficulty with the two below, trying to better understand the shapes of the flowers and their structure.
Sunflowers in Vase (#2), Oil painting on canvas, 16×12″
After working for hours on the vase in the painting above I looked at it in the mirror to check the symmetry and couldn’t stop laughing. It was completely off kilter, slanted to one side as if it had melted. It’s just amazing how our eyes and brain work together to correct things and fool us. I had to completely start the vase over to get it close to right. I experimented with using a dark background and tried to paint duller, darker colors for flowers not in the light but vibrant color kept sneaking back in. After days of repainting I called it done so I could move on.
Sunflower #1, Oil painting on panel, 10×8″
The first problem with the one above was my drawing. Instead of taking the time to carefully draw these sunflowers I jumped into painting, combining a few specifics with some generic version of flowers. All the pointy, sharp shapes and droopy flowers are a good visual representation of my struggle, frustration, and ultimately, disappointment with this painting.
I completed these pieces at the end of last year and had to give up when I couldn’t find any more sunflowers. Soon sunflowers will be available and I can start painting them again.
I have a feeling it’s going to go better this time around. I am studying nature drawing with John Muir Laws at his Bay Area Nature Journal Club. This month’s session was all about drawing flowers and I learned all sorts of cool stuff. More about that another time.
End of Journal Self-Portrait in Stillman & Birn journal, ink & watercolor
OK, let’s just get this over with. At the end of each journal I sketch a self-portrait. In the one above from the end of 2012, I had new glasses but was in need of a haircut. I put on some lipstick and mascara to get in the spirit. Even though it’s not very complimentary (or maybe it is? Yikes) I think it looks like me.
End of Journal Self-Portrait, February 2013, Pitt brown Brush Pen and watercolor, 8×5″
This one was done quickly last month in a Moleskine watercolor notebook with a brown brush pen (still wearing the same old grey hoodie plus a down vest to stay warm). My hair and clothes look right but NOT my face. Oh well.
I’m now using a giant Moleskine watercolor notebook, A4 size I think. and I’m really loving it. I have a whole bunch more sketches and some oil paintings to post…. but since I feel the need to go somewhat in order I had to get these posted first. Done. Moving on.
and then painted with watercolor and a bit of gouache.
Jana Bouc, Artist 