Categories
Painting Sketchbook Pages Still Life Watercolor

Quick Cantaloupe

Cantaloupe

Ink & watercolor in large Moleskine watercolor notebook
Click here to see bigger

When I was traveling across country many years ago, taking an old highway instead of a huge interstate, I stopped for breakfast in an old-fashioned roadside diner with wood panelled walls and big, dark padded booths. I was handed a typed menu covered in a thick plastic sleeve with red leatherette edging. There was a typo on the menu that said, “Fresh cantalpupe.” I’ve never been able to look at cantaloupe since then without remembering that wonderfully odd typo and saying silently to myself, “cantalpupe.” Try it…it’s so fun to say…but then so is cantaloupe with it’s extra, silent “u”. Shouldn’t it be pronounced cantaloope with that u in there?

And it tastes good too. Now I’m going to go eat my still life and go to bed!

Categories
Drawing People Sketchbook Pages

Sketching musicians in the dark

Fishtank Ensemble 2

All sketches are ink in small Moleskine notebook
Click here to see larger

The Fishtank Ensemble performs a fascinating mix of Eastern European/Klezmer/Gypsy/Flamenco/Japanese music and their beautiful lead singer has the most astonishing, operatic voice. They were performing at Ashkenaz on a Wednesday night while I was on vacation and I went by myself to hear them since for everyone else it was a “school night.”

It was a fabulous, thrilling performance, and much of the music was very fast so I was drawing really fast too, even though I could just barely see what I was doing. Here are some more of my sketchy drawings from that night. If only they could convey the excitement of the music!

Fishtank Ensemble 1

To see larger click here.
The square instrument above is a Japanese shamisen. The lead singer plays violin and saw and can make her voice sound just an ethereal saw.

Fishtank Ensemble 3 Dancer at the Fishtank Ensemble Performance

Left above: The lead singer is tall, slim and dazzling, (my drawing doesn’t do her justice), wearing a flippy little black skirt and a very small jeweled black velvet top with bare midriff and delicate high heeled sandals.

Right above: On the other hand, this woman who was dancing in front of me looked like she was trying to make herself look dumpy. She was wearing striped kneesocks with oxford shoes, a short baggy sweater on top of a long baggy shirt and a bulky pleated knit skirt. She had her hair in pigtails and was wearing big glasses. But she was having a ton of fun dancing up a storm.

Categories
Life in general Oil Painting Still Life

Rainier Cherries (Oil painting)

Cherries Oil Painting - Finished

Oil painting on RayMar panel, 8×6″
Click here to see larger

I’ve been dieting the past couple weeks, trying to take off the 10 pounds I put on over the past year and a half of blogging instead of jogging. It’s been made considerably easier by the wonderful fresh summer fruit I’ve been eating. I think the cherry season might be waning now, which makes me sad since these Rainier Cherries are more delicious than any of the junk food they replaced. I’ve lost the first five pounds and hope to be done with the diet before the succulent peaches, plums and nectarines are gone.

Oil painting is so much fun. I’m really enjoying working alla prima (with fresh paint, finishing a painting while all the paint is still wet, rather than letting it dry and painting in layers). I’m practicing this technique so that I can eventually try painting plein air with oils (but it will be a while before I’m ready for that.

Here are the steps in making this painting (if you want to see them bigger you can click on the images and and then click All Sizes:

The sketch with vine charcoal:
Cherries Oil Painting-Step 1

Blocking in the shapes and colors:
Cherries Oil Painting-Step 2

Almost done…should I have stopped here?

Cherries Oil Painting-Step 3

I had a hard time with the background, which is a white plate. It had some reflection from the cherries, highlights from the lamp pointing at it and a bit of shadow around the rim. I’m not sure if I should have stopped sooner or worked on this painting longer but since it’s about learning and practicing and moving on to try something else, I think I’m done. Any suggestions or advice very much welcomed!

Categories
Cartoon art Digital art Illustration Friday

Illustration Friday: Geeky (Computer Geek/Circus Freak)

Geek

Sketched on paper, traced manually in Painter and then automatically in Illustrator, colored in Painter, converted to Photoshop and “saved for web”.
Click here to see larger.

This weeks Illustration Friday challenge is “Geeky.” The original definition of a geek is someone from a circus or carnival freak show who ate live animals such as mice, including biting the heads off live chickens. How the word Geek came to mean someone who is into computers and nerdy, I don’t know. I guess it’s the social outsider thing. So I just took it a step further and made it a freak show guy who eats computer mice and other computer parts. I made myself stop playing with this illustration so that I’d still have time to do some real painting today, so it’s not as clean as I’d like it to be.

I’m a bit of a computer geek myself, and have recently been studying color management theory and practice between devices and software programs. It’s really complicated. This time I was able to embed my monitor and color profile in Painter so that when I converted it to Photoshop they had fairly similar color.

Refrigerator Update
For someone who prides herself on being a techno-geek, I definitely don’t have it when comes to large appliances. It turns out that whole disaster with my fridge was caused by the dial in the freezer (which I didn’t even realized existed) being turned to OFF. I don’t know how it got turned off, but that’s all that was wrong. The skinny, weasel-faced jerk of a repairman tried to charge me $98 instead of the $65 I was quoted over the phone for a diagnosis, claiming he had to charge for his (5 minutes of “labor” too).

I told him the guy on the phone said there’d be an estimate before any labor was charged and he said, oh yeah, they always tell you that. But I have to charge for my time starting with when I walk in the door.” I called Sears back and the guy on the phone confirmed I was right so I asked him to talk to the repairman. They chatted for a bit, the repairman said “OK” and handed me the phone, which I hung up. He said, “No, you were supposed to talk to him–he was going to tell you to pay the $98 and take it up with Customer Service later.”

I thought for a moment and said, “I’ll tell you what, I’ll give you the $65 I was quoted and YOU take it up with Customer Service” and crossed my arms and stared him down. He realized there was no point arguing any further and gave me a “discount” back to the original quoted price and left. Sheesh! What a scam!

Here’s the original sketch on a decorative notepad.
Original sketch for Geek

Categories
Oil Painting Painting Still Life

What color is a lemon?

Lemon on green glass plate (P1010468)

Oil on panel, 6×8″
Click here to see larger

Despite today being my last day of vacation, my cat barfing in response to fireworks, and my 3-year-old refrigerator dying yesterday, my muse has finally returned and I got started on some new painting projects. The first one is this small oil painting to try to understand what color the inside of a lemon is. It’s easy to say yellow, but as my friend Susie said, it’s transparent and reflective, like glass–and therefore not really any one particular color. I set it up on green glass so on the thin slice, the green shows through. The inside of the lemon is paler and less yellow in the original painting but I couldn’t get it quite right on the screen. Anyway, it’s not a masterpiece, but I’m pleased with getting the hang of the alla prima process (doing a whole painting at one time) with oils, and just love the feel of working with them.

Dry Ice: Interesting Stuff
Tuesday after lunch I realized my refrigerator wasn’t working and learned that the repairman couldn’t come until Thursday so I went off to buy dry ice. The guys in the shop were sympathetic and gave me 80 pounds of the stuff for free. I carefully carried in the steaming, icy bags, using potholders, 1 block at a time, loading it into the freezer and fridge. Later when I talked to my mom, she reminded me that I had another refrigerator in my studio kitchen (my house is a duplex, and the back unit is my studio). Duh!!! I rarely turn that fridge on since it’s a power hog, just using it to store extra beverages.

I turned it on and waited for it to get cold enough. Then I loaded all groceries I’d bought the day before into my laundry basket and carted them to the other kitchen. I was stunned to see that in that short time, all my wonderful lettuces and herbs and vegetables had frozen solid and were ruined. Then I left a few bottles of beer and some cans of soda in the broken fridge with the dry ice, thinking they’d be fine. I bet you can guess what happened next: The soda cans froze, expanded and exploded, covering the inside of the fridge with a layer of ice and icicles. In the freezer, frozen berries had turned to soup and they made their own lovely purple puddles of ice. But I just ignored the whole mess and spent the day in the studio.

Categories
Animals Flower Art Outdoors/Landscape Watercolor

Butterfly at Blake Gardens

Butterfly watercolor

Watercolor on Arches paper, 11 x 7.5″ (with a touch of white gouache on antennae)
Click here for larger version

Buttefly photo

(Above) Reference photo I took on Thursday at Blake Gardens.

I have two more days of vacation left and finally I’m really ready to paint. I’ve sorted out the images I want to work from and have some ideas how I want to approach them. This first image seemed to call for watercolor and it felt good to get back to paint again tonight.

But unfortunately today mostly got lost to errands, paperwork and monitor calibration again when I called the company who makes the Eye One calibration tool I bought because of some continuing problems I was having. Their tech support was superb and the patient and intelligent gentleman I spoke to uncovered a number of problems I’d created by messing around with stuff I shouldn’t have been messing with. He helped me undo my mistakes, got everything working properly, and helped me to understand more about the concept of color management.

Now it’s back to managing REAL color on the end of a paintbrush. I’m not panicking too badly about the end of vacation because I only go back to work for one day (Thursday) and then I’m off again for my usual 3 1/2 day weekend.

Categories
Digital art Illustration Friday

IF: Twist (second version) & feeling twisted

Twist 2

Drawn with pencil, scanned, redrawn and digitally painted in Painter

Apparently I’m suffering from an artist’s form of writer’s block–instead of working with oils or acrylics like I planned to today, I procrastinated by making this crappy illustration instead. I’m feeling sad and annoyed with myself that I spent my painting time today drawing on the computer. At first it was fun. I had another idea for Illustration Friday’s challenge of “Twist” this week that I had quickly scribbled in a little notebook. I intended to only spend an hour on the computer with it.

Skip the next two paragraphs if you’re not interested in boring technical stuff of what went wrong.

When I experiment with digital art I always try to learn something new. So today I tried starting with colored “paper” in Painter. Unfortunately, I discovered to late that it would prevent me from working in my usual way: preserving the line drawing as the bottom layer and adding color using the digital airbrush on new layers using “Multiply” as the layer type. The paper color showed through so I ended up working directly on the main layer, which kept erasing the lines. The colors were icky. I redid the colors a bunch of times, then redrew all the lines. Then messed some more with the colors.

I knew it was a losing proposition but I’d already invested a couple hours trying to fix things. Finally it was good enough and I imported it into Photoshop and all the colors turned way too bright. I guess Painter didn’t use the monitor/system calibration I did yesterday. So then I had to tweak it in Photoshop, making things less intense. But when I used the “save for web” command in Photoshop the colors got all too bright again. So then I experimented some more in Photoshop and learned how to use the “Replace Color” command. I’d always wondered how it worked and it’s really cool. But I could have learned that reading the manual, not spending my precious Sunday fixing a stupid drawing.

I’ve been unfocused all week, having finished all my work in progress and needing to start some new paintings–always a difficult time for me if I don’t have a burning inspiration. Clearly I need to stay away from the computer for a while and get some paintings started so I have some in progress. The problem is I have several ideas and couldn’t decide which to start. So tomorrow I’m going to start three of them, as soon as I get up in the morning and then I’ll feel much happier, I’m sure. I’m going to make the most of my last 3 days of vacation!

Categories
Every Day Matters Illustration Friday Sketchbook Pages Studio Watercolor

IF: Twist; EDM #124: Something Yellow

Twist; EDM Something Yellow

Watercolor in Moleskine large watercolor sketchbook

This week’s Illustration Friday challenge is “Twist” — there’s nothing like a nice twist of lemon in a glass of ice water (or in something more exciting, like a lemon drop martini, which I’m sure sounds better than it tastes, since I’m not a fan of martinis). And last week’s Everyday Matters challenge was to draw something yellow…so there you go.

I did this watercolor sketch yesterday but when I scanned it, my monitor display was driving me crazy. No matter what I did in Photoshop I couldn’t get an image that looked anything like the original. I tried again and again to calibrate my monitor using Adobe Gamma but just couldn’t get it right. I finally gave up around midnight, vowing to resolve the problem today one way or another.

Today I went to a great photography store in Berkeley, Looking Glass Photo. They rent and sell everything you need for digital or film photography and they’re staffed by experts who are generous with their knowledge. Initially I was going to rent a fancy set of calibration tools but a handsome, Buddha-like man named Paul (a customer who used to work there) steered me towards buying a simpler unit for not much more money than it would have cost to rent the unnecessarily fancy tools for just one day. I bought the Gretagmacbeth Eye-One Display 2 which looks like a small regular computer mouse.

I waited until it got dark out, turned on my full spectrum overhead lights only and then hung the little device over my monitor. I tried the automatic calibration which was OK, and then I tried the more detailed program, which I think did a better job. When it finished, I scanned my little lemon twist and amazingly it appeared on my screen just like the original. I have no idea how it will look on your screen, but at last, after all the changes in my studio, my monitor, scanner and printer are all working together again. Whoopee! Now I can get back to painting instead of messing with computer stuff!

P.S. If this looks washed out or too bright on your monitor, please let me know.

Categories
Flower Art Gardening Landscape Outdoors/Landscape Plants Plein Air Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

Tilden Botanical Garden

Serpentine Cone Flower

Serpentine Cone Flower
Ink and watercolor in large Moleskine watercolor notebook
Click here to see enlarged

Today I went to Berkeley’s Tilden Park Botanical Gardens with Richard. It’s a lovely, serene place filled with California native plants and trees from giant redwoods to wildflowers. He hiked around the hills, fields, bridges, creeks and wooded areas, enjoying the quiet breeze and birdsong. Most of the flowering plants had already done their big blooming in the spring but these coneflowers grabbed my interest so I sat down on the grass and did this quick sketch while Richard, a photographer, took close up shots of flowers.

Then we decided to move on to Blake Gardens. Richard had never been there and there were many parts of the estate I’d never explored, so we hiked all around there too, finding amazing jewels of nature and design at every turn. We took lots of photos but since time was limited and we wanted to see everything, I didn’t do another drawing. Now that I’ve seen the full scope of what’s there I think it holds promise for unlimited painting opportunities.

Categories
Animals Landscape Outdoors/Landscape Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

Patterson House at Ardenwood Farm

Ardenwood Patterson House

Ink and watercolor in Moleskine large watercolor sketchbook
Click here for enlarged view

This is the Patterson House at Ardenwood Farms, an historical, working Victorian farm in Fremont, California. They have a blacksmith shop and people dressed in period costumes using the tools of the time to cook, churn butter, wash clothes, and other chores; a horse drawn train, farm animals and historic farm equipment. We’d planned to go sketch all the sights and activities on Thursday but when I phoned Ardenwood they told me there would be 250 campers there that day and the next. She recommended we come today when there were no groups scheduled so we did. Unfortunately she didn’t mention that everything was shut down on Wednesdays–no docents in Victorian clothes, no activities, nothing. The only thing to see was the house and a few farm animals.

Michelle and I wandered the property, noting where things would have been happening if they weren’t closed. We decided to draw the house, which was very enjoyable. I drew directly in ink and then added watercolor. Then we visited the barnyard animals, watched the funny goats, some mating bunnies, and drew this solitary bunny:

Ardenwood bunny

Ink in moleskine sketchbook

Tonight I went by myself to Ashkenaz Music Center since nobody else wanted to join me to hear the most amazing musical group, The Fishtank Ensemble. They are a unique and extremely talented group of musicians who play a combination of Gypsy, Eastern European, Klezmer and Jazz with some unusual instruments, including a Japanese Shamisen, a musical saw, several different violins and other string instruments, accordian, standup base and a female singer with an extraordinary operatic voice. It was fantastic! I’d heard them live on the radio on an NPR program a few weeks ago and had been trying to find their CD locally and was amazed when I drove by Ashkenaz and saw their name on the marquee for tonight. What a treat! And they had their CD for sale which I bought.

I think I’m finally getting into this vacation thing–going to a musical concert on a “school night” is great!

P.S. Does the picture of the house look overly contrasty or washed out on your monitor? I’m still having trouble getting my monitor to properly display the intensity of the color and contrast. I’m afraid I’m toning down the image in Photoshop to make it look right on my monitor which tends to mamke everything look very strongly colored. So then it looks good on my monitor but I have no idea how it looks on anyone else’s.