My across-the-street neighbor Matthew is a building contractor who specializes in house shingling jobs (he shingled my house and did a beautiful job with many artistic flourishes). But right now he is working on his roof. I’m amazed at his strength and stamina. He was up there all day today, ripping off the old roof and putting up a new layer of wood, then tar paper. I could hear him up there hammering after it was dark.
He is so strong that a few months ago when I stupidly sped backwards out of my driveway right into his massive pickup truck that was parked where it usually isn’t, he fixed the big dent in the back of my car for me by pulling it out with his hands. (I hit his bumper which didn’t even get scratched.)
My sketch doesn’t do him justice–he was just cleaning up on Saturday evening when I sketched him. Today he worked from about 8:00 a.m. until after 8:00 p.m. , with nothing securing him to the roof or protecting him from the sun, wind, cold.
I find it astonishing to see how hard some people work and it makes me grateful for my comfortable desk job (although it’s not without discomfort either, as all that sitting is quite hard on the back). I’m sure Matthew would have trouble sympathizing though.
The Berkeley Public Library is a beautiful old building that was lovingly preserved and added on to a few years ago. We met there to sketch last Tuesday night, enjoying the ambiance and craftsman furnishings in the lobby of the old section. I experimented with trying to get the perspective from where I sat in a room filled with wood, metal filigree screens, brass door frames, carved ceilings and handcrafted furniture.
I asked Cathy to take a picture of me sitting in the high-backed chair with diagonal arms so I could sketch it later. I messed up my face (in the sketch) so I just pasted on a fresh piece of watercolor paper and did it again.
Me for realMe sketching in funny chair
When the library closed at 8:00 we headed across the street to Peet’s Coffee, hoping that their manager (who looks like Harry Connick Jr. and dresses in fancy 1950s suits and ties and an Elvis pompadour) would be there for us to sketch. He was there but he was wearing a different costume: suspenders over a tight white t-shirt and a fedora. I asked him why he wasn’t wearing a suit and he said he hadn’t known in advance he would be working that night so wasn’t dressed for work.
Last time we were there I asked him if he was in a band and why he dressed so cool. He said he just liked to, and that years ago when he was in a band he dressed much more sloppily. (My dad was famous for starting up conversations with strangers and asking similar questions which used to embarrass us kids but I guess I inherited his curiosity.)
The manager never stopped moving and was often out of my sight but one of his buddies who seemed to be channeling Keith Richards (only looking much more alive) hung out for a while and he at least stood in one place long enough to sketch him.
Peet's: Rocker Dude
Cathy was facing a tiny, ancient man in a weathered, WWII leather aviator cap who parked his 1940s era bicycle behind me in the store’s entry way, giving her a perfect view for sketching him and the bike. He was selling bike parts to a young man. When he left she showed him the sketch of his bike (but not of him because it was just too funny) and got the information about his bike for her sketchbook.
Before they closed at 9:00 I was able to get in a quick sketch of these people at a nearby table.
Home-made book press, ink, watercolor, gouache, stencil, hardware store ticket
I made a book press as part of the process of learning to bind my own sketchbook. This of course required a trip to the wonderful Pastime Hardware store. I was so excited that the ticket I pulled from the little red take-a-number thingee for the helpful hardware guy (or in this case gal) had both my initial and my birth month/”lucky” number on it so I saved it for posterity in my sketchbook. (I put quotes around “lucky” since the number has never actually been lucky for anything but I call it my lucky number anyway.)
Just like any project that requires tools, measuring, fractions, or spatial relations, building this simple press was not easy for me. First I had to saw the wood. I didn’t want to have to go to Home Depot (ick) to get someone to do it for me I had a piece of fake oak shelving I’d bought but hadn’t used.
So I used my funky little hand saw (that I bought when I became a home owner and thought I should have a basic set of tools in a toolbox “just in case”) to cut the shelf in half into two one0-foot square pieces. It took forever and my cut was wobbly, uneven and made a mess of the veneer.
Then I measured in from each corner one inch and drilled holes, guessing how big they should be. Unfortunately, since my cut wasn’t even, the holes didn’t line up right and they were too small. So when I assembled all the pieces the boards were all tilty and got stuck. I finally got it all apart again and redrilled the holes larger. This solved the problem and the press worked fine.
Like every step in the bookbinding process, I learned something valuable along the way. In this case I learned I should have clamped the two boards together and just drilled right through both of them to make the holes line up.
In my next post I’ll offer some resources for do-it-yourself bookbinding including the tips I learned from my mistakes.
Randomly grabbing items to sketch, a little still life composed itself: one of my sister’s teacups, an aging pomegranate and an Adobe user manual (I keep four of their heavy manuals handy as weights to flatten my sketchbook when scanning it).
I’ve spent the past few days making my first hardcover journal (more about that when it’s done being pressed). And now my current sketchbook only has about 20 pages left and then I’ll get to start the new one. I used to treat sketchbooks like they were so precious and couldn’t waste a page. I’m so much happier now that I use them for everything, and enjoy filling them because that means I get to start another one. I even subject them to sketchbook abuse, dragging it everywhere and not worrying if it gets bumped or dirty, sort of the way siblings poke each other as a way of showing sisterly love.
Brennan's Bar and Restaurant, ink, watercolor and logo
I stood outside on a dark, drizzly night in front of Brennan’s Bar and Restaurant last Tuesday night, drawing until my sketchcrawl buddies arrived. Brennan’s recently moved to a new building, a former train station a block away from their former location under the University Avenue overpass in Berkeley.
I’d propped up my sketchbook on the hood of a truck parked nearby and immersed myself in figuring out the building. “HONK! HONK!” Suddenly the truck honked at me. I jumped, and moved away, thinking someone was approaching and would get in their truck and drive away. But nobody showed up so I went back to drawing. But then every few minutes the truck would HONK at me again.
Each time I jumped and then I heard guys laughing. One of the three silly, half-drunk men joking around near the bar was using his remote to play around with me. He came over to see if I was drawing him, as his friends said I was doing. Uh, no. But I told him he could pose for me. He declined and they left just as Cathy and Sonia arrived.
Brennan's Turkey Leg Dinner, ink and watercolor
We went in and ordered dinner. I have a thing for turkey legs so while Cathy and Sonia each ordered half turkey sandwiches, I got this huge plate of turkey, mixed veges, boiled cabbage (yuck, what was I thinking?) and boiled potatoes. The turkey was great and I took home enough for two more meals.
Old Dudes at the Bar, ink
I switched to using a Pilot Varsity fountain pen, adding water over the lines with a waterbrush to make washes. It was so convenient sketching at Brennan’s. The light was good, the atmosphere full of energy, and we sat right near a water and condiments station so we could fill and empty our water containers a few feet from our table. Since it’s cafeteria style dining there was no waiter to care how long we sat there.
Dining alone, ink
Cathy suggested we do some contour drawing so I drew the condiments at the next table.
Condiments and Irish Coffee
I used to go to Brennan’s back in the 70s for their Irish Coffee (and for pitchers of beer with my women’s softball team after our games). Now that I’m not consuming sugar or much caffeine that wasn’t an option. But I did get a cup of decaf and it was worse than our office coffee so I figured I probably wasn’t missing much.
Couple talk
This couple was pretty good about moving between two poses. I found that if I just waited a bit they would return to the position I was drawing.
Really nerdy guys
These guys at the bar were soooo nerdy. The guy on the left was actually wearing orange pants.
This week we’re going to the Berkeley main library to draw.
Pears on a Blue Plate, Pentel Pocket Brush Pen and gouache, 7x5"
In the week and half since I gave up sugar and Splenda, pears have become my new treat. Not only are they crispy, sweet and delicious but they come in such pretty colors too. This sketch is a celebration of their gifts.
But meanwhile, giving up coffee didn’t go as well….
Busby and the Coffee Buzz
After five days of feeling wiped out, depressed, listless and witless I couldn’t take it anymore and finally had half a cup of coffee. That’s all it took: within a few minutes I was back to my old inspired self again and the blues were gone. Yay!
Maybe I’ll try to quit caffeine when I’m retired in a few years, but for now, each day is too precious to spend feeling like a zombie.
I think we picked the craziest day to go see Avatar at a shopping center theater: the day after Christmas when shoppers were out in force, filled with pent-up shopping frenzy after a whole day of closed stores.
I purchased tickets online the day before and we left two hours early for the theater which was a good thing because we got stuck in an Emeryville traffic/parking nightmare for about 45 minutes.
Only two cars at a time were making it through each light change to turn left into the street leading to the parking lot at Emeryville’s Bay Street 16 AMC Theater. After sitting through at least 10 light changes we finally made it into the next line-up-and-wait scenario on the narrow road leading to the garage. Then when we’d finally crawled our way close to the garage entry we saw a sign saying “Garage Full” blocking the entry to the garage. The only option was for cars to exit back on to main the street we’d just come from.
I decided to just move the sign and the rubbery barriers and go in anyway, since we could see people leaving the garage and we knew they were letting people in at the other end of the shopping complex. Jessica was smart enough to run over and try out the ticketing button to see if it would raise the arm and allow entrance. Of course they’d programmed it so that it wouldn’t.
So back out into the awful traffic we went. A few blocks away we saw parking spaces by an old boarded up restaurant, parked, and speed-walked through the outdoor shopping center to the theater since it was starting to rain. I picked up our tickets from the ticketing machine and we entered the theater. We were still an hour early and only the 10th people in line. We were warm, dry and comfortable and I got to sketch some of my fellow waiters-in-line.
Our seats were great and the 3-D glasses were comfortable and worked well, even over my glasses. The Imax theater filled completely, even down in the front rows where you’d be looking up at the screen the whole time.
And the movie was fantastic—so beautiful and transporting. I still feel like I am in the incredible world Cameron created for Avatar. I had objections to a couple bits in the movie but overall, it is truly a masterpiece of filmmaking, a gorgeous work of art and imagination, and a feat of technological brilliance as well.
I like to use my winter holiday vacation as a time to review my past year and sort out what I did well and what needs work. Since this is also the end and beginning of a whole decade, this process felt even more important this year. One thing that really stood out was that I needed to kick my caffeine habit and its evil companion, sugar (both fake and real).
So, after a week of being foggy-brained, sleepy and witless, I’m now free of caffeine, sugar, and Splenda* and finally starting to feel good and my inspiration is returning.
Without the sweeteners, decaf coffee and tea were tasting pretty vile to me so I began the search for a flavorful herbal tea with at least a hint of sweetness. I finally found a couple that I like but in the meantime spent a fortune buying seductively-named but ultimately insipid teas that taste like something you might use to clean windows.
Case in point: the tin of “Hot Apple Cider Tea” pictured above. It looks and tastes like hot apple cider about as much as a picture of an apple tastes like an apple. If I’d painted a cup of that tea, it would look like a cup of water. The tea in the cup above is Good Earth Tea and warm milk. It’s not bad. 🙂 But it sure isn’t a latte. 😦
*UPDATE: Just looked up “What is Splenda” and here’s what I found:
Splenda is made from cane sugar by replacing three hydroxyl groups on the sugar molecule with chlorine. The resulting molecule is not recognized as sugar or a carbohydrate by the body and as such, is not digested. Some refer to Sucralose as Chlorinated Sugar. Sucralose does not occur in nature.
Eek! I’m embarrassed to admit how much of that stuff I was consuming!
Sketching at the Claremont Hotel, ink & watercolor
The Claremont Hotel in Berkeley is all decked out for the holidays and a good place to sketch when it’s cold outside. We met there Tuesday night and had our choice of comfy places to sketch. That’s Sonia in the sketch above, drawing a piano that is just off to her left.
I found a spot near their fancier bar and restaurant with another grand piano where (I thought) a talented jazzy piano player was entertaining the diners. I really liked the way he riffed on holiday music (although his repertoire seemed not too extensive as he began repeating the songs after about an hour).
Outside the bar at the Claremont
At the end of the evening I walked into the bar to thank the piano player, having imagined what it must be like playing holiday music in a bar, night after night, the same tunes over and over, while people celebrated. The bench was empty! The piano was playing itself, the keys popping up and down on their own.
I liked both of these sketches more as ink drawings before I overworked them with paint. I’ve been really tired this week which often leads to mucking around when I should be moving on to the next page.
Last night I needed to grab a quickie dinner between work and a 7:00 meeting so I stopped at the nearby Oakland Whole Foods. I looked over the salad bar, passed up the make your own trail munch bar (?!) and the soul food bar with pulled pork, black-eyed peas and greens, seriously considered the Indian and Chinese bars but settled on some pretty, steamed organic veges and some Mexican items.
The dining area was hopping with activity, filled with a perfect sampling of Oakland’s demographics, with people of all ages, races, preferences, and functionality. I ate quickly so I’d have a few minutes to sketch the view from my table. Then I ran out of time and had to leave, so I added watercolor at home.
Jana Bouc, Artist 