Yep. Today is 12-12-12 and here are 12 things painted and posted on 12-12-12 at 12:12 P.M.
Lined up on my kitchen table and sketched in Moleskine Watercolor notebook.
Categories
12 Things on 12-12-12 at 12:12
Category: Sketchbook Pages
Well that’s a confusing title! What I meant was that I sketched while sitting on one of the giant cubes of stone set into the sidewalk along San Pablo Avenue in El Cerrito. I assume they are meant to be used as seats. According to this brochure, a primary goal of the recent street upgrade program that included the stone blocks was “to identify El Cerrito as a distinct place…” I guess the city fathers (and mothers?) felt that poor little El Cerrito just didn’t have enough “there” there.
The Cerrito Theatre is having its 75th birthday celebration this week. It originally opened on Christmas Day in 1937 as an art deco “motion picture palace.” It closed in the 1960s and was used as a furniture warehouse until a community group worked to bring it back to life as a theater in 2006.
I painted this portrait of a dog named Garbanzo Bean from a bad cell phone photo (see below). I’m posting it here for Garbanzo’s owner to see if she’d like me to make any changes before I deliver it.
Before I do an oil painting I usually do an ink and watercolor sketch first to try to get the feel of the subject and understand it better. This sketch isn’t a good likeness but it might have captured his feisty spirit even though it portrays him as a much bigger dog than his tiny chihuahua self.
Garbanzo is a very cute dog but the photo’s color and detail was funky. His owner’s favorite color is lavender so I made up a lavender wall in her apartment. I hope she likes it!
PiQ Cafe (Pane Italiano Qualita) serves espresso and bakes pizza and Italian pastries near U. C. Berkeley. It’s a busy place in the evening with lots of sketching opportunities. I got a fabulous Decaf Americano coffee and drew the pastries instead of eating them.
My sketch buddies sat at the outdoor sidewalk tables and drew the bookstore across the street but it was too cold and dark out there for me (Cathy’s sketch and Cristina’s sketch). I drew the bookstore too, but from inside the café.
PiQ has a unique restroom arrangement: you carry a metal pitcher attached to a key card into their elevator, take it down to the basement and follow signs around a corridor to the bathroom and then repeat the trip.
Molly B’s is a shop in North Berkeley’s Walnut Square with great window displays. They were closed but the window was lit up when I was there sketching. I think they sell ladies clothes and underwear. According to one Yelp reviewer, the store has “Beautiful fabrics, witty designs, and some amusingly bizarre skirts and trousers.”
After I finished my sketch at Molly B’s we met upstairs at the Imperial Tea Court for a little more sketching and sharing. These were a couple of large containers on the counter (and a guy sitting at a table).
And if I’m ever going to get caught up on my blog posting (I’m not even out of September yet!), I am going to have to learn to keep it short. So that’s it for this post.
Faced with a Tuesday night at home instead of out with the Urban Sketchers (nobody could go) I turned on the TV. Boring. But wait, those performers on The Voice (a singing competition show) are all so interesting looking. Why not sketch them?
Each of the performers has been crafted into a carefully defined “package,” with extensive costuming to further exaggerate their type. If you click the images to make them bigger you can read my snarky comments. Some of the finalists are incredibly talented with beautiful voices (e.g. Amanda Brown is fantastic).
It amazed me how different each of their features were, especially noses. As I was drawing, using a Lamy Safari fountain pen with the nib upside down to get a finer ink line, I was getting nervous because they were turning out well and I wanted to do all 10 in a row with no do-overs.
I finally did mess up the last one, Dez (above, his mouth got too inky and it’s not a good likeness). I could have redone him but he doesn’t interest me much (I think he’s supposed to be the “teen idol”) and I was tired. He was on his own page but I let him hang out with his neighbor across the spread here so I don’t end the post with the one funky drawing.
It took about 2 1/2 hours for the project: to find a spot in the program to pause and then to draw each of them. It was really fun! It’s amazing how much more you see when you’re really looking, even when drawing from TV.
So here it was the day before Thanksgiving and I wanted to draw a turkey. I called around trying to find a live one to sketch but failed. Then I tried to find a taxidermy turkey. No luck. The ranger at the Tilden Nature Center said they did have a collection of taxidermy birds including owl, songbirds, turkey vulture…but no turkey.
Wait! Turkey Vulture! It’s a bird, it’s named Turkey so why not? I called back to confirm they had it in stock (they rent it out: $10 for two weeks) and then drove up to Tilden Park.
Here are a few interesting things about Turkey Vultures:
- Turkey vultures (nicknamed “buzzard”) have a 5-6 foot wing span; “there is no more graceful bird in flight” but they have weak legs so walk awkwardly
- In order to fly they need a run into the wind to lift off and can fly 60 miles per hour
- Vultures are the “garbage collector of the bird world” and eat everything from dead mouse to moose.
- If they are in danger and can’t run, they vomit their foul-smelling meal at their enemy.
- Be thankful for them: “Without vultures, much of the world would be cluttered with the bodies of dead decaying animals.”
I’m Thankful For…
Along with turkey vultures, here are some things I’m grateful for:
- YOU, my dear blog visitor and reader,
- my much-loved friends and family, and
- the freedom, security, comfort, and good health that allow me to live this wonderful creative life.
I know none of the above is guaranteed or permanent so I try to be grateful every day, not just Thanksgiving. What are you thankful for?
Very near my home is Pt. Isabel Regional Shoreline, with the world’s largest and most beautiful dog park. It is situated on the San Francisco Bay directly in line with the Golden Gate Bridge. There are views of San Francisco, wetland marshes and the East Bay hills looking east. I love dogs and don’t have one so I often go down there to walk the trails and enjoy other people’s dogs.
In the sketch above, I stood on the wooden bridge over the marsh and tried to capture everything, the marsh, the freeway, the buildings behind it and the hills beyond. Too much, really, for a small 8×6 sketchbook.
On my next visit it was extremely windy and I almost lost my sketchbook and a brush over the top of the wooden bridge rail I was using for a table. The light wasn’t very interesting, very flat with no shadows.
On the third visit the tide was in and the area in the first two sketches was mostly underwater so I turned to face west with San Francisco and the bridges in the distance.
I don’t feel that I did the scene justice in any of these sketches and hesitated posting them, but will return again and keep trying until I’m happier with the result.
When we arrived at the Actual Cafe in Oakland to sketch, the sun was just starting to set. It seemed a shame to go indoors while it was still nice out so we sketched around the corner from the cafe first. Even though it’s in a rundown neighborhood, this house had some charm, with its pillars and rounded porch roof.
While I was sketching the house, Susan was sketching me sketching the house (above). She also got the house next door and the cute car as well.
And then we went inside. I had a delicious cappuccino (decaf these days) and sketched their snazzy Italian espresso machine. As you may have noticed, these are from September; I’m still trying to get caught up on posting sketches and paintings but I just keep making more. That’s a good thing, right?
St. Mary’s College in Moraga had two great landscape art shows* that I attended a month or so ago. After I visited the museum I tried sketching their chapel. I had to draw quickly while fighting off wasps that were buzzing around me and kept landing on my bright yellow Lamy Safari pen.
When I started sketching the chapel in the two pictures above, what interested me were the interesting shadows but by the time I finished drawing and was ready to paint, the shadows were mostly gone. I wasn’t having a great sketching day and struggled a bit with both of these.
It’s an interesting campus, very quiet and serene with well-scrubbed, polite students, very different from other Bay Area colleges where diversity and tattoos are the norm. On the hours the bells ring out a very dirge-like sound which seemed out of place.
*The two art shows included “The Nature of Collecting, The Early 20th Century Fine Art Collection of Roger Epperson.” Epperson was a park ranger who over 30 years collected more than 300 museum-quality California landscape paintings by shopping at antique stores, flea markets, garage sales and online. The other show was “Richard Gayton: One Square Mile in California.” I especially loved seeing his sketches and annotations in his journals of the local wildlife and his experiences drawing them within the one square mile in Mt. Diablo State Park.
Jana Bouc, Artist 