We were all a little late for our Tuesday night sketching. We met by Peet’s Coffee and then wandered off to sketch what caught our interests. It was cold out and the sun was setting but Cafe Rouge looked warm and inviting with their red chairs and umbrellas.
I took my two favorite 12-year-old girls to Tilden Park for a Friday afternoon outing on a rare sunny day in this horrible summer of fog and wind. My plan was to relax and read on the beach while the girls played in the water and then take them to the carousel and the Little Farm Nature Area.
After a little picnic the girls gleefully headed into the water, I reached for my book and discovered I’d forgotten it. Fortunately I had my journal so instead of reading a book I drew in one.
My first attempt at drawing the lifeguard stand got the perspective all wrong so I used that page for more sketches of people.
The girls were having so much fun in the water, swimming, chatting, and fooling around that I couldn’t get them out until 5:00. I promised that if we have another sunny Friday this summer I’ll take them again. But this time I will remember my book and, if it’s warm enough, my bathing suit!
“Here Comes the Fog” is an all too common saying around here. It can be a hot, sunny day like this one at Linda Mar Beach in Pacifica. Then the fog comes rolling in, the sun disappears, and you need your jacket instead of your bathing suit. It was one of the first things I learned when I moved to the Bay Area: never leave home without a jacket, no matter what. (Painting available here).
This was a quick study in my sketchbook from the photo I took when I visited the beach in June. I used watercolor and gouache to ease back into that day at the beach.
We’d sketched at Pyramid in the evening before, (here and here) but this was the first time it was light in the brewery area. We could see the network of pipes and vessels where they brew the beer through the giant windows.
I’m not sure why I decided to do two sketches on one page that night. I guess I was feeling a little stingy with the paper. I did a couple more scribbly sketches of people that weren’t worth posting.
Our waitress was so kind and patient, not minding that four of us took over a large booth for two hours only ordering a few things. We left a good tip and thanked her. She said she was a musician herself and understood.
It was so cold, cloudy and windy the morning my plein air group met to paint in Pt. Richmond I decided to start out by sketching from my car. The old Richmond Plunge, now completely and beautifully restored, is the first thing you see when you drive into Pt. Richmond. After I finished the sketch I crossed the street and explored the building and pool. Wow! I’m inspired to start swimming again.
After my tour of the Natatorium, I headed to the main street of this little town, looking for a spot out of the wind to sketch. But I was seduced indoors by seeing my friend Sonia sketching at a table sipping a warm cup of tea. I joined her at the window table with a huge tray of apples on it and ordered a cup of coffee.
I started by drawing the apples on our table and then just kept going, drawing each next thing I saw. I was a little worried about getting the wonderful patterned floor tiles right, but took it slowly and they came out ok.
I liked Little Louie’s so much I returned the next morning with a friend for breakfast. I had a fabulous spinach, mushroom, bacon and cheddar omelet that was so big I had to take half of it home for lunch.
I’ve been trying to eat a healthier diet and choosing produce and meat that has been sustainably grown. Unfortunately, while the farming may be sustainable, often the prices aren’t.
I bought one dozen eggs from a Marin County farm at the local farmers’ market. The vendor explained how the chickens were totally free-range and so got to eat greens and bugs along with their organic vegetarian feed.
“In fact,” he bragged as he took my money, “the chickens follow the cows around and eat the maggots from their dung!” Yum! Protein!
Despite their fine, buggy diet, these eggs seemed neither fresher nor tastier than the free-range organic eggs I get at Trader Joes for less than half the $8.00 I paid for this dozen.
To try to get a little more value out of my investment, I made one of the pretty light blue eggs pose for a still life. I like the way that the lighting coming from below gives the painting a slightly spooky look.
The first time I got to sketch Barbara’s chickens they were these cute little chicks. Now they’re full-grown laying ladies and hilarious to watch as they run about with their tiny bird brains. Barbara has built the most amazing Chicken World for them in her yard, where they can run free and eat bugs and organic greens, safe from predators (raccoons are a big problem here), or snuggle in their cozy nesting house.
The last time we sketched in her garden I sketched Gertie from the front. Here she is from the back. She is a wonderful, loving, and very furry pooch. Then I started trying to sketch the bunny Barbara was babysitting for her daughter. The bunny was so twitchy, didn’t hold still and so fluffy as to be seemingly amorphous. But I knew there were some basic shapes in there somewhere so I kept trying to find them.
In the sketch above I finally did find the basic shape of a bunny. In the first attempts below, not so much. (I love that phrase “not so much” even though I’m sure it’s become passé by now, along with “Really?”, “You think?”, “How’s that working for you?” and “Meh.” Don’t know where those came from but I still like them for their sarcastic yet humorous tone.)
Above are the first attempts at the bunny, in which I became totally frustrated but didn’t give up. I’m glad I got to draw him since shortly after our sketch night he passed away from a recurrence of a serious illness he’d fought several times before. I hope he has found a home in bunny heaven as nice as the one he had with Barbara’s family.
Blowsy. [Adjective: (of a woman) Coarse, untidy, and red-faced.] That’s just what these roses were when I picked them from my poor neglected rose bush: brightly colored but messy and past their prime; yet they were just fine as my model.
It seems like once I gave myself permission to work on a painting as long as I wanted to, I’ve started being able to finish them more quickly. And it’s not just the small size; I’ve spent hours and days on other 6×6″ paintings in the past.
It could have gone even more quickly than the three hours I spent on it, had I left some of my earliest brushstrokes alone. I just find it hard to believe they were right the first time, even though that was my goal with this painting: to put down the right strokes with the right color, temperature and value and then leave them alone. (Or scrape off the stroke immediately if it’s wrong and replace it with the “right” one, rather than adding more and more paint, which eventually leads to making mud.)
I also tried to focus on using warm and cool colors to shape the form, along with the dark and light values. I’d also like to cite my inspiration for this painting, Kathryn Townsend, whose flower paintings mesmerize me.
When Cathy and I visited the Marin County Fair to sketch I was experimenting with sketching on pieces of paper instead of in my sketchbook as I wrote about here. Later I pasted the sketches into my journal. Above is a medley of chickens of various kinds along with one of the 4-H girls sitting at the “pet a chicken” table.
I asked this sweet boy if he intentionally styled his hair to match his chicken and he looked at me like I was nuts and said, “No.” The best part of the fair for me is seeing the kids who show their animals and win prizes for how well they present them.
I made numerous attempts to draw cows, trying to figure out their shapes, and finally sketched one I liked plus a few parts (head and butt). I had no idea their feet had two toes(?). Amazing what you don’t see when you don’t really look.
It got really hot so we went into the air-conditioned theater on the fair grounds to see the Shangri-La Chinese Acrobats perform. I tried sketching in the dark, adding color later. They were amazing. The sketch, not so much.
For the last sketch of the day we sketched from the midway. I sat on a ledge on the back of one of the game booths in the shade of the hanging teddy prizes. I cooled off a little more than I expected: I didn’t realize until it was too late that I was sitting in a puddle of water.
Cathy’s sketches of the day were fabulous (as always) and can be seen on our Urban Sketchers blog here.
I’d heard that saying before, “Little Pitchers Have Big Ears,” but without giving it any real consideration, assumed it had something to do with Little League baseball pitchers. Wrong. According to The American Heritage New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, “Adults must be careful about what they say within the hearing of children. The saying refers to the large handles (ears) sometimes attached to small vessels…” like this little pitcher.
My other reference for the saying is the refrain in John Prine’s touching song, “Sam Stone” about a Viet Nam vet returning home.
I was looking for flowers to paint and this little lavender hydrangea was hiding at the bottom of the bush all by itself. I did the value/composition sketches above and set about painting, completely forgetting the first step that I usually find helpful: doing a quick and simple 2-value block in using thinned paint in one color (usually Ultramarine Blue) first.
I think it worked out OK anyway, and in the next painting I did (still waiting to get photographed) I remembered to do that.
Jana Bouc, Artist 