Tag: El Cerrito

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Art theory Colored pencil art Drawing Life in general Outdoors/Landscape People Places Sketchbook Pages Sketchercize

Sketchercizing My Grocery Shopping

El Cerrito Natural Grocery, Copic cobalt multiliner & Polychromos colored pencils
El Cerrito Natural Grocery, cobalt Copic multiliner and colored pencils

I had to make my morning coffee with the last drops of non-fat milk (yuck, 1% is OK but non-fat in coffee just doesn’t cut it) and there were no peaches or milk for my Cheerios. A trip to the market couldn’t be put off. But I had a full day of experiments in the studio planned and I needed some exercise. Easy solution:

  1. take the long way around, up and down big hills, to my favorite grocery store, El Cerrito Natural Grocery (cardio)
  2. sketch the market using the cobalt Copic Multiliner I wanted to experiment with (I think I prefer the sepia)
  3. shop
  4. carry groceries home in a loaded backpack plus another full bag (weight lifting)
  5. add colored pencil to the sketches to try out the new Polychromos colored pencils (LOVE THEM!)
BART riders, cobalt Copic Multiliner and colored pencils
Quick subway sketches with the cobalt Copic Multiliner and colored pencils

I’m trying to simplify my choices with my art supplies, wanting to narrow down the pens, ink, pencils and colored pencils to keep handy and those I’ll give away. I did tests today on drawing pencils, sepia liquid inks and sepia pens and will post them and my preferences tomorrow.

I’m also working on painting a grid of 16 different acrylic painting techniques to improve my understanding of acrylic techniques and possibilities. It became clear this was needed when I started a series of paintings in acrylic and realized I didn’t have the “chops” to accomplish what I wanted. I was trying to use oil painting techniques and was getting nowhere fast (and ruining brushes with all the scrubbing I was doing with them which seemed the only way to get the smooth transitions I wanted).

Each medium has its own capabilities and pitfalls. Why not make good use of the characteristics of the media instead of trying to force it to be something it’s not? Despite people claiming acrylic can be used like oils and like watercolor,  I’m going to try to learn to use it like acrylics instead and have fun with all the crazy stuff it can do. This series of large paintings wants to be in acrylic and so it shall, and soon I hope.

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Art supplies Outdoors/Landscape Places Sketchbook Pages

Sketchercizing My Errands

El Cerrito Library, Ink (Sepia Copic Multiliner)
El Cerrito Library, Ink (Sepia Copic Multiliner)

I combined walking, errands and sketching this morning, and really enjoyed all three, especially using my new sepia Copic Multiliner to draw these sketches. The pen is made of aluminum, is refillable with a replaceable tip. It’s very comfortable in the hand with a wider barrel than my usual Micron Pigmas, and the pen just glides across the page.

First stop was my little local library where I returned “Chasing Matisse”, a lackluster memoir about a guy who gets a book deal to go visit all of the places where Matisse lived. He fancies himself an artist as well as a journalist, but I didn’t think he was much of either. He basically read Hilary Spurling’s excellent two-part biography of Matisse and repeats stuff from her book in between his boring descriptions of his own  experiences seeing what Matisse had seen and sometimes even trying to sketch or paint it.

El Cerrito Post Office
El Cerrito Post Office

Next was another return of an Amazon purchase to the El Cerrito Post Office. I asked the clerk if she’d stamp my sketchbook with her round postmark stamp, just for fun but she said no and gave me some “airmail” stickers to use instead which I didn’t.

When I was a kid my grandfather had a bunch of rubber stamps and pads of old deposit slips from when he’d been a banker before the bank closed during the depression (but why did he still have them?). I used to love going to his house and playing with the rubber stamps.

I’d planned to add sepia ink washes to these sketches at home tonight because I’d ordered a bottle of that ink, but when I looked at the items that arrived in my order I discovered they’d made a mistake and sent me black ink instead. Rats. One more thing to return.

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Life in general Photos

The Witchmobile: My favorite art car ever

Art cars
Art cars at Stockton Stroll

Friday night was the monthly Stockton Avenue Art Stroll, a neighborhood art walk that is always packed with people, live music, interesting art displayed in venues ranging from actual galleries to a beauty salon and a holistic health center. This time there was also a contingent of art cars since one of the people showing his art, Ken Duffy, is married to a local art car artist, Emily Duffy (her “Vain Van” is pictured above on the right, with more photos on her website).

But Friday night I saw my favorite art car ever: The Witchmobile! (Click to enlarge to see all the glorious details below).

I’ve always loved art cars. Years ago when I was married and a stay-at-home mom, I gladly drove a rusty old brown Toyota Tercel (that we called the “TURDsel” since that’s what it looked like) so that we could afford the vintage Porche my husband had always wanted. I wanted to do tromp l’oeille painting on the Turdsel so that it looked like a pile of dog doo with flies buzzing around it in 3-D. But my husband was embarassed enough that we had that ugly rust-bucket parked in front of our house, let alone one that said out loud “I’m a piece of S**T”).

I’d also thought about turning my previous car, a white Toyota Corolla, into a swan, covering it with white feathers and making a swan head to sit on top…

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Albany Drawing Faces Ink and watercolor wash People Places Sketchbook Pages

Monday Night Sketchcrawl: Albany

Sketching San Pablo Ave to Peets
Sketching San Pablo Ave to Peets

Monday night Cathy and I did a little sketching around San Pablo Avenue between Albany and El Cerrito, not the most inspiring of locales it turns out. It amused me that the palm tree above had an Available for Lease sign just in front of it, though it was actually a space in the building behind it (that I didn’t draw) that was for lease. The other pics above are of the Albany bowl and inside Peets Coffee where we ended the evening.

Old West Gun Room
Old West Gun Room

We started at the Old Gun Room, a still-functioning, historic gun store that is terribly out of place and time. I was having trouble paying close attention to detail last night, and drew  the N in “Guns” on the sign backwards, as well as adding an extra wagon wheel in the fence. I think I did a better job last time I drew and painted the Gun Room when I painted it on site.

Hotsy Totsy Club, Albany
Hotsy Totsy Club, Albany

I like the way the Hotsy-Totsy sign came out, though I’m not sure what happened to the perspective: I KNOW I couldn’t have seen the top of the sign. But I was really hungry at that point and was having even more trouble paying attention to details. By the way, the Hotsy-Totsy Club is anything but! It opens around 7 a.m. (need I say more?).(UPDATE: the club has new owners and a new clientele and a fun retro vibe; see my newer post here).

Cathy likes to sketch on site in order to capture more images, and then adds paint at home.  I don’t usually do that, preferring to paint on site,  but tried it last night. After I’d done all the cross-hatching on the windows and door area, trying to shade them, I looked at what Cathy was doing and saw that she just does the outlines without any cross-hatching when she’s going to paint the images later. I think that makes more sense and allows the watercolor to do the shading rather than the incongruous scribbly ink that was too dark.

We decided that next week we’ll go somewhere pretty and away from traffic, like the Berkeley Rose Garden.

Categories
Animals Drawing photoshop Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

Happy Bird-Day to Me

Happy Bird-Day to Me, pencil, ink & wc 9x12
Happy Bird-Day to Me, pencil, ink & wc 9x12

This morning I made my annual birthday pilgrimage to Fat Apples for a Baked Apple Pancake along with dear friends and family. Then I sketched this little family of California Towhees [update: not robins!] who are living in the small tree outside my bedroom window.

Mom and Pop Towhee take turns guarding the nest,  feeding the babies and shopping for groceries. When one returns with a juicy white worm to feed the babies, the other flies away to gather the next round of grub (literally?). The robins enter the tree from the house side where the branches are more open, which gives me a great view from my bedroom window (except that it’s too shadey in the tree to see their features clearly).

My cats sit on the bed and watch the constant activity all day: the best Kittie TV ever. Sometimes I join them and have been amazed how hard these little birds are working to keep their babies fed.

Fabriano Venezia Sketchbook & Photoshop CS4

This sketch is in the Fabriano 9×6  sketchbook that has been giving me such pleasure when sketching and such pain when scanning. But now I have a solution. I just got the fantastic, super fast, hugely improved new version of Photoshop CS4. After scanning each page of a spread separately, Photoshop will automatically assemble the pages perfectly together as layers/masks in one file, getting rid of the bad stuff,  while lining them up perfectly. For other adjustments, Auto Levels does a great job now, better than all the manual tweaking I’ve done in the past. And a bit of the Dodge tool cleans up any remaining shadows. The new streamlined user interface and adjustment panel are huge timesavers and make image adjustments so much easier and faster.

It was a bit of a splurge, but at $199 (after the $100 off Adobe offers on on any version of Photoshop CS through August) it was so worth it. A happy birthday to me present!

Apple Pancake
Baked Apple Pancake
Categories
Bay Area Parks Ink and watercolor wash Landscape Outdoors/Landscape Places Sketchbook Pages Sketchercize

Nature Hike: Sketchercize

Nature Hike, ink and watercolor
Nature Hike, ink and watercolor, 5.5"x9"

Sunday was a glorious day in the Bay Area; sunny, breezy and in the 70s. A perfect day for some “Sketchercize.”  I packed up my sketching gear and hiking poles and headed on foot through my hilly neighborhood and up to the El Cerrito Memorial Grove and the Hillside Natural Area above it; nearly 80 acres of nature with spectacular views.

I intended to walk for at least 30 minutes before sketching but was stopped after 10 minutes by some seed pods hanging from a tree, glowing red and green in the sun that I had to sketch. Next stop was for some California poppies along the road. Then the view of the giant hill that I’d be climbing came into view so I added that with an “X” marks the spot where I was going, all on the same sketchbook page.

View from above Memorial Grove, 5.5x9"
View of SF Bay and Golden Gate Bridge from hiking trail, 5.5x9"

At last I reached the top of the hill and hiked along the skyline trail until I reached a bench where I could sit and admire the 180 degree view–a great reward for the 2 mile, mostly uphill hike. I ate my apple, sketched and then began the trek back home, which just happened to pass by Payoff #2: Baskin Robbins, where I got an ice cream cone to eat on the way (a bit counterproductive, I suppose, but quite yummy). I pasted the cone wrapper in my sketchbook when I got home.

Ice cream cone lunch
Ice cream cone lunch

The view with my house marked:

Hike Start and End
Photo at destination; Red spot points to my house
Categories
Art theory Ink and watercolor wash Oil Painting People Sketchbook Pages

Painting Demo at El Cerrito Art Association

Watching the Demo, Ink & watercolor in 6x8" sketchbook
Watching the Demo, Ink & watercolor in 8x6" sketchbook

Monday night Randall Sexton did a still life demo at the El Cerrito Art Association meeting. It was my first time attending an ECAA meeting but my second time with Randy, as I’d taken a weekend figure painting workshop with him last summer. He is an excellent painter and a gentle teacher. He was ready to start painting right on time and waited patiently for at least half an hour while the friendly group took care of business matters and announcements.

Randy Sexton demonstrating, Ink & watercolor in 8x6" sketchbook
Randy Sexton demonstrating, Ink & watercolor in 8x6" sketchbook

I’d been struggling with a still life painting that day so the demo came at a perfect time and I left knowing exactly where I’d gone wrong with the painting. Some days, just  knowing where I’ve gone wrong is as good as it gets.

(To read my notes from the demo, click the image to enlarge it.)

Categories
Ink and watercolor wash Outdoors/Landscape Places Sketchbook Pages

Sketchcrawl 22: Colusa Circle, Kensington/El Cerrito, CA

Colusa Market, Kensington, Ink & watercolor
Colusa Market, Kensington, Ink & watercolor

Today was International Sketchcrawl 22.  Martha had a morning event to attend so instead of joining the San Francisco group we met at 2:00 and sketched around the Colusa Circle in Kensington/El Cerrito. The sketch above is of my favorite grocery store, Colusa Market. Their produce is always fresh and delicious.

After a visit to pet the bunnies at Rabbit Ears, a pet store specializing in rabbits, and taking a peek into the Kensington Circus Pub (which was closed but would have been fun to sketch in) we took a hike through the nearby Sunset View Cemetery. I’ve painted there before and love the hilltop bay views and peaceful surroundings.

Sunset Cemetery, ink & watercolor
Sunset Cemetery, ink & watercolor

The fog rolled in and what had been a hot day turned chilly. Martha was cold and my butt fell asleep from sitting on a cement block so we headed back down to our cars. It was after 5:00 and time to say good bye. Not an all-day sketchcrawl this time but a good afternoon with excellent company on a beautiful day.