To put the finishing touches on a completed journal, I make a self-portrait for the last page. Since it was also my birthday, I wanted to incorporate my birthday flowers in the painting. So I hung a mirror with a yellow clip from one of my swing-arm lamps on my drawing table and put the vase of sunflowers between me and the mirror and then drew what I could see in front of me: the flowers in front of the mirror, with me and the flowers reflected in the mirror.
As usual for my end-of-journal self-portraits, I wasn’t willing to measure or try to draw and place features accurately but I think I did capture the feeling of me or the me as I was feeling.
In the next post I’ll show you my new journal and another idea I tried out for sketchbooking minus the sketchbook.
Red, White and Blueberries, ink & watercolor, 7x5"
Happy 4th of July, whether it’s Independence Day where you are not. Why not make every day Independence Day and claim your right to freedom from whatever holds you back?
Today I chose the freedom of sketching blueberries in my sketchbook instead of struggling with other “work” I’ve been doing in the studio. I’m also trying to claim independence from the “shoulds” that are telling me I should be at a barbeque, roasting wieners, drinking beer, and waving flags.
It looks like the Bay Area will at last have a non-foggy 4th and if so I’ll be heading up to Albany Hill to watch the fireworks around the Bay Area. And now I declare independence from my computer!
My friend Ikuko invited our Tuesday night sketching group to sketch in her lovely and lovingly tended garden. I picked a spot that was still in the last bit of sun and sat in a lawn chair to sketch and relax. For a change I tried to just be loose and free and it was really fun.
Ikuko's at Sunset, ink & watercolor, 7x5"
I was interested in all of the odd contraptions on top of her fireplace and the glowing light of the sunset on the bricks and the windows. I managed to fit almost everything I wanted on the page (with a little rearranging from real life; the mail box was below the frame but I liked it so stuck it in.) I was a little annoyed when I finished the sketch that I’d “messed up” the house numbers (the 2 is too big) but a week later, who cares!
Baby Fig Tree Grows Three Leaves, ink & watercolor, 7x5"
You might remember seeing my previous sketch of my baby fig tree here when it was just a little stick. Now it has three leaves. Yay! It was fun to sit on the sidewalk in front of my house and sketch (except for the occasional ant that tried to annoy me). That reminded me of being a little kid sitting on the sidewalk playing jacks for hours. I used to be pretty good at it. I wonder if anyone still plays jacks and if they’re still made out of metal.
Trying to sketch while recovering from a migraine and dopey from medication doesn’t always work out well. While everyone else in my plein air group painted the Berkeley Rose Garden on a sunny Saturday morning, I sat on a nearby bench and focused on drawing one tree.
I liked how it looked until I added watercolor, which I thought ruined the effect. So I stupidly added more watercolor. And more. And a bunch of lines. And then I went home and took a nap. Today I washed off as much of the paint as I could, trying to get back to the original line drawing. Then I added some muted blue and grey washes and now I like it again. Tree saved! It was actually a sunny day, just not in my head.
And now for some interesting tidbits on making choices:
Hell Yeah! On Derek Silver’s blog he explains that as a perpetually over-committed person, if he’s not enthusiastically saying “HELL YEAH!” about something, then he’s saying “NO.”
When deciding whether to commit to something, if I feel anything less than, “Wow! That would be amazing! Absolutely! Hell yeah!” – then my answer is no.
Why the Hell Not? Sid Salvera counters “Hell Yeah!” with the flip side on his post: Why the Hell Not? He asks:
Does this philosophy lead us to pass up opportunities we really should be saying “yes” to?
The most important thing I’ve learned about making choices is that if the word “SHOULD” appears in my decision-making thoughts (I should do that…) I need to swap it with “want to” or “don’t want to.”
Do you find it easy to make decisions? Do you get stuck in the “shoulds,” or say yes to things you don’t really want to do?
One way to the stack the odds in your favor with most endeavors is to rehearse. So before I attempted the oil painting above, I did a little thumbnail sketch, a full-sized value sketch, and a watercolor sketch (below). I also took photos just in case the paperclips and scotch tape holding it all together failed (but they didn’t–the stack is still standing!)
Stacked, ink & watercolor, 7x5"
I did the watercolor sketch first with the fruit sitting on my drawing table and the grey studio wall as the background. I love ink & watercolor. So immediate and so fun!
Stacked, value study with Prismacolor cool grey markers, 10x8"
Then I set up the fruit stack by my easel and did this value and compositional sketch. I wanted the sketch to be the same size as the painting so I used the Gessobord as a template, tracing around it on the sketching paper. Once I had the drawing the way I wanted it, I used Prismacolor cool grey markers (30%, 50% 80%) to shade the values. It was easy to transfer the full-sized sketch to the Gessobord with a sheet of blue Saral Transfer Paper between the sketch and the board, then drawing over the sketch with a stylus.
I revised the background by hanging a dark gold/green cloth hung behind the still life hiding the gray wall. Now I’m wondering whether to repaint the leaves. What do you think? Is it better to leave them kind of soft and blurry so they don’t attract too much attention. Did you notice them before I asked the question?
It is bright and colorful with a large variety of Middle Eastern products and freshly made food. It was quiet there on a Tuesday evening so the gentleman manning the shop was fine with us sitting at the cafe tables in the back and roaming the shop to sketch. I got so drawn into the teapot that I only had time to do one sketch before they closed at 8:00. We usually sketch from 6:30 to 8:30 or 9:00 so it was a short evening.
It was a cold and rainy night so we met indoors at the cosy Kensington Circus Pub (named for the traffic roundabout it faces in Kensington, on the Berkeley border. It’s a very pleasant place to sip a beer and sketch. After eating a delicious sandwich I spent most of the evening facing the bar and doing the sketch above. I wore my L.L. Bean flashlight hat to see to paint and it worked great.
Old friends plotting at Kensington Circus Pub, ink & watercolor, 5x7"
Then I turned to face the other direction and sketched these gentleman who were in a booth a few feet away but didn’t seem notice or care that we were drawing them. They were meeting to dine, drink and plot a business venture from what I could overhear.
Baby Hydrangea for EDM #112: Fresh, ink & Watercolor, 6"x4.5"
I’d never been able to sketch this hydrangea plant before because once the teensy little buds open they shed piles of equally teensy little petals and make a big mess. But this one was so fresh I was able to cut and draw it without the mess. (Although it did end up making a mess anyway when my cat ate one of the leaves and then delivered it later to the rug.)
EDM #120 Flashlight (Hat), ink & watercolor
The cue was to draw a flashlight. My favorite flashlight is my wonderful L.L. Bean Pathfinder Cap. It has two LED lights in the brim. One points straight down and is perfect for lighting your sketchbook when painting when it’s dark, and the other points ahead to light your path. You just squeeze a spot on the brim and it toggles between down, ahead or both. When painting in a dark pub it perfectly lit my sketchbook page but nobody could tell where the light was coming from. Someone came over to try to figure it out because it just looked like my page was illuminated.
Although I wasn’t a faithful follower of “Sketch Every Day in May,” it reinforced how much I enjoy drawing. Some of the cues sounded boring but I discovered that no matter how dull a subject may seem, drawing it rarely is.
Teddy Bear Fountain, ink & gouache on hot press paper, 6"x4"
Teddy bears hold hands in a circle in this wonderful, historic fountain* in North Berkeley on Marin Circle. We sketched there on a warm Tuesday evening as the sun was setting.
I did the one above very quickly at the end of the evening when just as I was about to pack up a worker came and switched on the fountain’s lights and adjusted the water so it sprayed up from the top. I had to give it one more try.
Teddy Bear Fountain, ink & gouache, 5 1/2 x6 1/2"
This one was done first and I spent a longer time with it—more than I should have probably, as it began to get overworked. My friend Cathy did several wonderful sketches while we were there, which you can see here.
*An interesting bit of history about the fountain: In 1908, a real estate developer came up with the idea to make Berkeley the state capitol and lobbied hard for his proposal. The Circle and the fountain were to be part of a grand entry to the new capitol building to be built nearby. The California Legislature passed the proposal and the governor signed the bill, but Berkeley was a dry city and the liquor lobbyists were successful in convincing the voters to narrowly defeat the bill.
Jana Bouc, Artist 