Tag: Cafe Sketch

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Berkeley Drawing Food sketch Ink and watercolor wash Interiors Painting People Places

Sketching at Bread Workshop, Berkeley

"Packing bread," ink & watercolor & collage
"Packing bread," ink & watercolor & menu snippet

The Bread Workshop is a combination café and artisan bread bakery in Berkeley. They focus on seasonal, sustainable, organic, healthy and delicious foods served in a comfortable atmosphere.  From our table we had a view of the small team of bakery workers, hustling to get hundreds of loaves of bread packaged and ready for next morning delivery to local restaurants.

Sawyer and Oven, ink & watercolor
Sawyer and Oven, ink & watercolor

We sat beside a table of young medical students (including the above guy named Sawyer) who were studying and discussing gastroenterology and what symptoms equaled which diseases—not the most appetizing dinner conversation, but interesting nevertheless.  The back of the large “Inferno” oven faced the café and was sparkly clean and  decorated with little lights beside a bulletin board.

Bread and Snacks Counter, ink & watercolor
Bread and Snacks Counter, ink & watercolor

I stood in front of the counter where you order (above) to sketch and then painted it at our table. This was really fun to draw.

Dinner at Bread Workshop, ink & watercolor
Dinner at Bread Workshop, ink & watercolor

My grilled chicken breast had been marinated in a yogurt sauce first and it was spicy and delicious, the grilled veges were fresh and tasty and they even had brown rice.

A great evening of sketching and dining!

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Berkeley Drawing Ink and watercolor wash Interiors Life in general Painting People Places Sketchbook Pages

Sketching on a Stormy Night at Au Coquelet

Au Coquelet, Ink & watercolor
Au Coquelet, Ink & watercolor

It was a dark and stormy night when Cathy and I met at Au Coquelet Cafe to sketch while listening to people debate the existence of reality and/or study English in Chinese.

I started by sketching the guy in the middle with black hair and just kept on going, seeing more and more stuff to draw. At one point he walked by our table, saw what we were doing, pulled out his cellphone and took photos of our sketches of him. That was a first! But it seemed a fair trade.

A group of four (perhaps retired professors from the university) seemed to have gathered for the sole purpose of defining reality, or proving it’s existence, or both, punctuated regularly by “huh?” “what did you say?” as one of the gents was hard of hearing (but not hard of “talking” as he blathered on and on).  On our other side were Chinese college students studying English, but mostly in Chinese, with the occasional English phrase thrown in such as “I am a pretty girl” and “I am eating an apple” (which she wasn’t).

Au Coquelet is a perfect place to sketch.  It’s large, open very late, has a couple of rooms,  and counter service only so you don’t have to worry about waiters.  There’s lots of wood, bricks, brick-a-brack and plants, design left over from the hippie days.

I have fond memories of sketching there on another stormy night, New Year’s Eve 1997, when I was supposed to be in Yosemite National Park but had canceled the trip due to rain. And it was good I didn’t go: the next day Yosemite had the worst flooding in 100 years, with roads and bridges so damaged that people were stranded there for weeks without sanitary facilities or food.

So with no plans for the evening, I headed up to the café to draw people who did have plans, partygoers coming in before and after their parties. After a while, a tall, handsome artist sketching at another table came over and joined me. We sketched together and talked, and ended up dating for a few months until I decided that the tales he told were too good to be true.

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Art supplies Ink and watercolor wash Painting People Places Sketchbook Pages

Signs of Spring

Blossoms, blue ink & watercolor
Blossoms, blue ink & watercolor

Signs of spring were sprouting everywhere on my walk and I couldn’t resist stopping to sketch and paint. But I stopped so many times that before I’d gone half a mile I was so hungry I had to return home for lunch before heading out again.

The sketch above graces the first page of my new sketchbook, bound with Arches 90lb cold press watercolor paper. It’s quite different from the Fabriano Venezia sketchbooks I’ve been using the past year.

Princess flower bush blossoms, ink & watercolor
Princess flower bush blossoms, ink & watercolor

I’m really enjoying the way the book opens flat, it’s size (7.5″ tall x 5.5″ wide) and weight, how comfortable it is to hold and to hold open for working across the spread, the texture of the paper for painting and the way the pages don’t ripple, pill, or show through to the other side. The paper takes a lot of abuse and layering, which is both a good and a bad thing. Good because it holds up, but bad because it allows endless diddling around which isn’t really the point of sketching (but is a bad habit of mine).

Peets people, ink & watercolor
Peets people, ink & watercolor

And what’s a nice walk on a spring-like day without a stop at Peets for a Cappuccino at a sidewalk table and a bit of sketching/painting.  I’m still finding my way with this paper, trying to get a sense of how much paint to use, and which pens work best with it.

One thing I’ve determined for sure is that I prefer painting on site when I go out sketching, as I did with these, and not just drawing on site and adding paint later as I did last week with my sketching group. I just spent the evening painting the drawings from last week’s outing and it just didn’t have the zing that painting from life on site does.

You can make many more sketches and have more control of the paint when you save the painting for later, but then you either have to work from memory (of which I have too little) or photos (which never capture what you really see in person) or by using a pencil to softly write “Y” in areas that are yellow, “B” for blue, etc.) While I loved those “paint by number” kits when I was a kid, I’m not crazy about painting by letter now.