Tag: El Cerrito

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Ink and watercolor wash Life in general Sketchbook Pages Urban Sketchers

Electric Owls and Giant Rats: Pest Control at Pastime

Pest Control at Pastime Hardware, ink & watercolor, 5x8". Sketch of artificial owls and other pest control devices
Pest Control at Pastime Hardware, ink & watercolor, 5×8″

When we made our annual sketching pilgrimage to Pastime Hardware on a cold winter evening I picked the Pest Control department. I was attracted by the big, ugly, inflated hanging rat and the artificial owls who seemed to be discussing who was going to nab the rat.

The names of the products seemed inflated too: Pest Chaser Pro and Sonic Pest Chaser (both made me imagine cartoon critters that jump out of the box and chase critters away). And then there’s the Tom Cat Mole Trap (contains cat? that chases moles?) and Cat Stop (do you need Cat Stop after you’ve released the Tom Cat Mole Trap?)

I know someone who is courting real owls by putting up owl houses in her yard. That solution might be worse than the problem. My son has a family of screech owls living in a tree across the street from him and they keep him awake, screeching all night long.

Categories
Building Ink and watercolor wash Landscape Outdoors/Landscape Sketchbook Pages

Mira Vista Country Club Golfcarts

Mira Vista Country Club Putting Green and Carts, ink & watercolor, 5x16"
Mira Vista Country Club Putting Green and Golf Carts, ink & watercolor, 5×16″

My plein air group held our annual season kick-off meeting at the Mira Vista Country Club on Saturday where one of our painters has a membership. Afterwards, I sat on a bench in the sun and sketched the clubhouse, putting green and all the cute little golf carts.

Mira Vista, left side of spread, 5x8"
Mira Vista, left side of spread, 5×8″

Although I prefer jeans to dress up and agree with Thoreau’s quote: “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes,” the club has a dress code that prohibits denim. So it was fun seeing how nicely the paint-spattered artists I’m used to seeing at our painting sessions can clean up, even if it meant I had to dress up too.

Mira Vista, right page, 5x8"
Mira Vista, right page, 5×8″

Our plein air schedule starts up again next month. Last year I only sketched at our paintouts but this year I’ve committed to dragging my oil painting supplies again and giving actual plein air painting another try. But if I still find it too frustrating to stand in one spot instead of exploring the locations, I’ll go back to sketching.

Categories
Ink and watercolor wash Landscape Places Sketchbook Pages

Urban Angel & Exciting News!!!

Urban Angel, ink & watercolor, 8x5"
Urban Angel, ink & watercolor, 8×5″

I sketched this scene at the Sundar Shadi holiday display on Moeser Lane in El Cerrito. More about that in a minute but first the…

Exciting News

Katherine Tyrell of my favorite art-related blog, Making a Mark, has selected my painting, UPS Delivers at Night, as one of four portraits up for “Best Picture on an Art Blog 2012: The Making a Mark Prize for Best Artwork – Person.”

Katherine invited nominations and then selected 4 paintings in 4 categories (still life, people, places, nature). Now the public has 4 days to vote for their favorites. Click here to visit Making a Mark, see the beautiful work in each of the categories and vote for the ones you like best. The deadline for voting is Sunday, December 30 at 6:00 a.m. London time (10:00 p.m. in California).

Sundar Shadi

Now back to Sundar Shadi’s holiday display. Mr. Shadi was born in India but moved to the Bay Area to attend college in 1921. In 1949 he put up a holiday display on the large empty lot next door to the home he built in El Cerrito.

Sundar Shadi Holiday Display
Sundar Shadi Holiday Display (at sunset between rainstorms)

Every year until he was 96 he added to the display, building figures, animals and a whole village. He passed away but his family and volunteers continue to assemble the display each year. Sundar Shadi was a Sikh not a Christian, but created the display as a gift for the community.

View looking down the hill, Moeser Lane, El Cerrito
View looking down the hill, Moeser Lane, El Cerrito

The view looking down the hill from the display is pretty nice too!

Categories
Building Drawing Ink and watercolor wash Landscape Places Sketchbook Pages Urban Sketchers

Happy 75 Cerrito Theater! (Sketching on a Cube of Stone)

Theater, ink & watercolor, 6x8"
Theater, ink & watercolor, 6×8″

Well that’s a confusing title! What I meant was that I sketched while sitting on one of the giant cubes of stone set into the sidewalk along San Pablo Avenue in El Cerrito. I assume they are meant to be used as seats. According to this brochure, a primary goal of the recent street upgrade program that included the stone blocks was “to identify El Cerrito as a distinct place…” I guess the city fathers (and mothers?) felt that poor little El Cerrito just didn’t have enough “there” there.

The Cerrito Theatre is having its 75th birthday celebration this week.  It originally opened on Christmas Day in 1937 as an art deco “motion picture palace.” It closed in the 1960s and was used as a furniture warehouse until a community group worked to bring it back to life as a theater in 2006.

Categories
Berkeley Building Drawing Landscape Shop windows Sketchbook Pages

Turning Corners, Looking Back (plus Lightroom, LuluLemon and Dynamite)

LuluLemon, Corner of Ashby & College, Berkeley, ink & watercolor, 5x8"
LuluLemon, Corner of Ashby & College, Berkeley, ink & watercolor, 5×8″ (I don’t know what that huge loudspeaker thing is on the roof–maybe for the neighborhood’s emergency alert warning signal? There’s one in my neighborhood that runs a test every Wednesday at noon)

I’ve spent the past couple of days looking back over my artwork from the past decade while sorting and labeling it in the process of learning to use Lightroom* for managing my digital files. It’s been interesting to see what has changed (mostly for the better), and what has stayed consistent.

Along with turning a major corner in my life (more about that next week), I’ve also been looking back (and forth) through my current journal to find the pages I haven’t posted yet.  So I thought it would be appropriate to post sketches of two corners I pass often. The sketch above shows LuluLemon where I bought my periwinkle runner’s hat (photo, sketch) that I wear whenever I go out sketch or walking.

Peet's Coffee and Albany Hill, El Cerrito, ink & watercolor, 5x8"
Peet’s Coffee and Albany Hill, El Cerrito, ink & watercolor, 5×8″ (shape on right near bottom is the roof of the Old West Gunroom)

Peet’s Coffee in El Cerrito is a one mile walk from my house, a pilgrimage that I make often. Albany Hill is immediately behind it: an odd uprising in an otherwise flat area. The hill is forested with eucalyptus trees.

In the late 19th century Judson Powder Works manufactured dynamite at the foot of the hill and planted the trees to catch debris and muffle the sound of their many accidental explosions. The stop on the transcontinental railroad tracks just to the west was called Nobel Station, after the inventor of dynamite.

*If you’d like more information about Adobe Lightroom, leave a comment and I’ll either write about it here or send you the information directly. I discovered some great free resources for learning why and how to use it and set up a solid workflow for editing and managing digital image files.

Categories
Drawing Ink and watercolor wash Interiors Life in general People Sketchbook Pages Urban Sketchers

The Danger of Sketching While Tired

El Cerrito Natural Grocery, sepia ink & watercolor
El Cerrito Natural Grocery, sepia ink & watercolor, 8×5″

I was so tired I almost didn’t go to our Tuesday sketch night but our destination, El Cerrito Natural Grocery, was near home so I pushed myself out the door. I only managed the sketch above, made standing using a shopping cart as my table. Even the colors looked tired. Cathy focused on the meat department and entertained the butchers with her drawings of them. Her chicken sketch is a hoot.

We left at 8:00 when the store closed and then I sat in my car for a few minutes, checking my email on my phone while trying to talk myself out of a trip to the ice cream shop. My phone rang: “Hello, this is El Cerrito Natural and you left your little notebook in your shopping cart.”

Thank goodness I always put a note on the first page of every journal: “IF LOST PLEASE CALL…” with my phone number. I said I was still in the parking lot and ran back to the front door and gratefully took it home.

Outside Peets Coffee, Ink & watercolor
Outside Peet’s Coffee, Ink & watercolor

This was another drawing while tired. I tried taking a walk to Peet’s coffee to wake myself up. Since caffeine is no longer an option, the walking and an iced decaf had to do the trick. It didn’t. I was just more tired when I got home but at least I got to sketch a bit (and didn’t lose my sketchbook this time).

I watched the blind woman at the next table (in the sketch above) make a phone call by listening carefully to the tone as she pushed each number. Her friend arrived shortly afterwards, also blind, walking a large black poodle.

Two things I wondered:

  1. If you’re meeting someone and you can’t see them, how do you know they’re there or arriving without calling out “Susie are you here…” or phoning?
  2. Why don’t you ever see standard poodles as guide dogs? I live near a center for the blind and also often see people training guide dogs on our subway system. They’re never poodles. Though they do always wear very cute booties–I wonder why?
Categories
Ink and watercolor wash Life in general Outdoors/Landscape Painting Places Plants Richmond Annex Sketchbook Pages

Dangerous Wildflowers on Carlson Boulevard

Wildflowers on Carlson Boulevard, ink & watercolor 5x8"
Wildflowers on Carlson Boulevard, ink & watercolor 5×8″

When the two-year long repaving project on the one-mile stretch of Carlson Boulevard from El Cerrito to Richmond Annex was finally completed, someone planted wildflower seeds in the dirt-filled center dividers. The ugly, urban street took on new life as the wildflowers bloomed into a gorgeous riot of color. There were little white ones and fluffy yellows, brilliant orange California poppies, and my favorites, the blue bachelor buttons and tall lavender lupines that stood (note past tense here) three feet high.

I’m glad I spent a lovely hour enjoying sketching them because the next day work crews came through and HACKED them all down. The neighborhood email newsletter was abuzz with people horrified at the destruction.

Then we found out why. There was a serious car accident and a couple of near misses because the flowers grew so high that you couldn’t see oncoming traffic on the other side of street when crossing or making turns.  It was true; even in my sketch you can’t see the street on the other side of the center divider because the flowers completely hid it.

Happily, new, completely different wildflowers have now sprouted, and hopefully they won’t be so dangerous and will be left to bloom in peace.

Categories
Art theory Food sketch Ink and watercolor wash Interiors Places Sketchbook Pages Urban Sketchers

Squid, Vanilla Ale, Noise and Wonky Sketching at Elevation 66

Grilled squid with avocado, rice fritters, grapefruit gel and spicy avocado
Grilled squid with avocado, rice fritters, grapefruit gel and spicy avocado

I enthusiastically joined my Tuesday night sketch buddies for dinner, beer and sketching at  Elevation 66, the new El Cerrito brew pub. I loved my dinner,  displayed above, (a “small plate” combo so weird I couldn’t resist: grilled squid slices on spicy avocado sauce beside little blobs of grapefruit foam/gel (“to cleanse the palate”) and spicy deep-fried rice fritters. Odd but yummy!

Esther Vanilla Stout Ale, Delicious! ink & watercolor, 7x5"
Esther Vanilla Stout, Delicious! ink & watercolor, 7x5"

Even under the influence of a small glass of Esther Vanilla Stout, a delicious milkshake of a beer, it got so noisy by 8:00 on a Tuesday night that I couldn’t think straight and was ready to leave. I was having a hard time with drawing ellipses and symmetrical shapes (my next drawing subject to practice).

Cathy & Micaela at the bar
Cathy & Micaela sketching at the bar, ink & watercolor 5x7"

And there were lots and lots of symmetrical shapes to practice on! My drawing just kept getting wonkier as the noise got louder.

Beer in the vat, wine on the shelf with hoses
Beer in the vat, wine on the shelf with hoses

I was overly self-critical while I was sketching, wanting to get things right. Then I got my copy of The Art of Urban Sketching: Drawing On Location Around The World and discovered something wonderful: Of the two sketches of mine that Gabi chose for the book, one is very wonky and the other nicely organized. That helped me to see that there is room for both in my art life. Wonky is good! Getting it “right” is good too! Yay!

Please click on their names to see Cathy, Micaela and Beth’s excellent pub sketches from the evening on our Urban Sketchers blog.

Categories
Drawing Ink and watercolor wash Sketchbook Pages Urban Sketchers

Happy Lunar New Year at Ranch 99 Market

Happy Lunar New Year ink & watercolor sketch
Happy Lunar New Year, Shoplifters Will Be Prosecuted, ink & watercolor 5x7.5"

The shoppers at Ranch 99 Chinese supermarket were in festive spirits and the store was decked out in red and gold for Lunar New Year. There were red envelopes, red lanterns, brilliant green Narcissus in fuchsia foil wrappers, special treats in red and gold boxes, and bunches of simulated fire-crackers hanging from stop-sign shaped objects that said something in Chinese, but probably not “Stop.”

I found an empty corner in the produce section to sketch from and used a shopping cart as a table for my paints. It was an odd juxtaposition to see the “Shoplifters Will be Prosecuted” sign on a post right below the huge “Happy Lunar New Year” banner.

Whenever we sketch at Pacific East Mall, the Asian marketplace where Ranch 99 is located, I’m always surprised how the shoppers show absolutely no interest or curiosity in our odd activities. We might as well be invisible.

Chuckle Fish and Mullets, ink & watercolor
Chuckle Fish and Mullets, ink & watercolor, 5x6"

Even though I was tired at the end of the evening, I couldn’t resist drawing the fresh fish on ice when I saw their names: Chuckle Fish and Mullets. I wonder what Chuckle Fish is in Chinese?

Their huge fish department always smells as fresh as the sea, unlike the horrible ammonia scent at my local Lucky’s. The live crabs and lobsters swim in tanks and the fish are displayed whole. The fish mongers cut them to order and will even deep fry them for you.

You can see Cathy’s great sketches from the evening here and Micaela’s here on our Urban Sketchers blog. Being graphic designers they both have such wonderful design sense!

P.S. I just discovered that the store’s name is “99 Ranch” not “Ranch 99” although neither makes much sense to me. According to Wikipedia, in Chinese numerology, 99 means “doubly long in time, hence eternal; used in the name of a popular Chinese-American supermarket chain, 99 Ranch Market.”

Categories
Ink and watercolor wash Interiors Life in general People at Work Sketchbook Pages Urban Sketchers

What I Learned About Art and Life in 2011

Pastime Hardware After Dark, ink & watercolor, 5x7"
Pastime Hardware After Dark, ink & watercolor, 5x7"

Before I get to my reflections on art and life in 2011, a word or two about the sketch above (and below) from our evening at the hardware store. I stood and sketched between the paint solvent and cleaning product aisles (both stinky), using an aisle-end shelf for my paints.

Same Pastime sketch before adding the dark in the windows
Same Pastime sketch before adding the dark in the windows

When we finished and shared our work, I realized that in the original sketch above, I ignored the fact that it was dark outside. So when I got home I painted all the windows dark. I’m not sure which I like better. What do you think?

Accomplishments and Things Learned in 2011

STUDIO

  • Converted a 440 square foot garage into my new studio including a patio door onto a deck off the studio, insulation, sheet rock, flooring, electrical, and water. Once I have everything moved in I’ll post the story with pictures.

PUBLICATIONS:

ART-LIFE

  • After a brief (and briefly successful) venture into painting things to sell, returned to following my whims and inspiration instead of worrying about making work that would sell. This led to the series of 16×20 portraits of people at work in my community, now well underway.
  • Learned from Rose Frantzen video (see clip here) to say “Oops, made a mistake…but that’s ok I can fix it!” instead of “Now I ruined it!” followed by self-critical name calling. It’s downright liberating!
  • Realized that while I value and enjoy many different artists’ styles and techniques, I’ll never be as good as them at painting like them so I’m focusing on painting like me instead, which I can get good at.
  • Learned to ask myself, “What do I want to do with art today,” and doing that, not what some imaginary critic or the illusion of an audience is demanding that I should be doing.
  • I heard Robert Genn say that one’s style is often the thing one doesn’t do right, that it’s your mistakes or the rules you break that make it yours. I’m learning to relish and appreciate my wonkiness. Perfect is boring.
  • When someone plays piano and finishes a tune, there’s nothing left, just quiet. Why not paint that way too, focused on the line, the brush stroke…enjoy the process and let go of the product.

TECHNIQUE AND MATERIALS

  • Abandoned water-soluble oils and acrylics for regular oils after learning from my friend Kathryn Law how to reduce the use of toxic chemicals and still get the consistency I like.
  • Started watercolor sketching instead of oil painting at plein air paintouts to quickly capture a scene and keep moving instead of standing in one spot for hours while the light changes completely.
  • Tried a bunch of different pens, from expensive Namiki Falcon fountain pen that I didn’t love (sold it) and inexpensive uni-ball Vision Roller Ball, but returned to my favorite, Lamy Safari Extra Fine Point Fountain Pen with Carbon Platinum ink. Both hold up well on the watercolor paper I use in my journals.

STUDY/WORKSHOPS:

  • Registered for a week-long Alla Prima Portraiture class with Rose Frantzen at Scottsdale Artists School in February 2012. (So excited!!!) It is way out of my comfort zone (and budget) but I adore her work  and her book, Portrait of Maquoketa and she is a fabulous teacher.
  • Took a 3-day workshop with Peggi Kroll-Roberts in her studio after studying her series of CDs. Learned how to mix/use juicy luscious paint and more. She said I needed to work on my drawing.
  • Studying the Loomis books Drawing the Head and Hands and Figure Drawing for All It’s Worth to improve my people-drawing skills. Unlike a painting of a pear which can succeed even if the drawing is a bit off, a portrait will fail. It may still be an interesting painting, just not of the person you’re painting.

SKETCHING AND BOOKBINDING

  • Continued to sketch nearly every Tuesday night with my Urban Sketchers group and regularly sketch my world. As a group we have committed to a sketch a day in January.
  • Finally mastered binding journals using the method in my directions and can create a journal in a few hours instead of days.
  • To mix things up I switched to a Moleskine when I finished the last journal and am already missing my handmade sketchbooks with their really nice multimedia paper.

ART BUSINESS/SALES

  • Made the decision to wait until I leave my day job in a year to put effort into art biz/marketing and just concentrate on painting until then.
  • Sold a number of paintings early in the year on DailyPaintWorks.  Recently sold a sketch of Der Wienerschnitzel for their corporate collection.

BLOGGING

  • Found balance by prioritizing making art and living life above blogging about it.
  • Celebrated my six-year blogging anniversary with 180,000 views in 2011 (982,746 total); 141 new posts (total 1,004) and 418 pictures uploaded in 2011.
  • Posted regularly and administered the Urban Sketchers S.F. Bay Area blog.
  • Regularly follow about 30-50 other art blogs.