Strauss Family Creamery is a Marin County dairy that produces organic dairy products served in old-fashioned glass bottles from happy cows that graze on sweet grass in the hills by the sea. I enjoy their bottles as much as their cream in my coffee.
I started this painting with a goal to complete it from life in one 3-hour session, as so many plein air artists and daily painters do. I had somehow come to believe that I “should” be painting that way too. But while I met my time goal, I didn’t like the results (see original version below). And that’s when I finally accepted that it’s better to take as much time as a painting needs, and relax and enjoy the process rather than try to rush to keep up with someone else’s “rules.”
If you’re interested in seeing how I got here from there, click “keep reading” and stick around.
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.
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 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.
After a weekend of making paintings, scraping the canvas and starting over (with nothing to show for it but some learning) I accidentally knocked a 12 oz latte off the table, splattering the studio with milky coffee, requiring a major cleanup job. So tonight I thought it might be nice to stare at a pretty calla lilly that popped up in the garden, sketch it a couple of times and just calm down.
I drew the one above first, starting with a little pencil to get the shape right and then drawing with a Micron .03. When I finished I wished I’d skipped the ink.
Calla Lilly 2, ink & watercolor
With this second one I drew directly with the pen, but I liked the scratchy line even less (I think the pen is running low on ink or doesn’t like the paper) so went over it with a Pentel Brush Pen afterwards.
It’s become an annual tradition for our sketch group that when Cathy’s wisteria explodes into bloom she invites us to spend the evening in her serene Berkeley backyard garden sketching and painting. This year it was a cool, foggy evening so we bundled up and drew until our fingers were too cold and the light was gone.
Wisteria close up, ink & watercolor
Then we went indoors and shared our work while snacking on ginger cookies and pistachios.
Our excellent online Berkeley newspaper, Berkeleyside, published this wonderful photo essay “The Hanging Gardens of Berkeley” with pictures of wisteria in brilliant bloom all over Berkeley, in some cases completely hiding the buildings.
Sharing art with other sites is fun (and as it turns out profitable). Berkeleyside features my sketches of Berkeley from time to time (linked here) and I’m always honored when they do. Then a few months ago a natural foods specialist asked if she could use some of my paintings on her website. I’m glad I said yes. One of her readers just bought three of those paintings. It’s good to share!
Rose Reverence, oil on Gessobord panel, 10x10" - SOLD
My riotously rampant roses were bursting forth from their bushes so I had to put other plans aside and paint them. Their fruity scent was as intoxicating as their vibrant colors. These were two different kinds of roses, both of which change colors and shape as they open so I had to work quickly to complete this painting in one session.
I left the still life set up just in case I needed to fix anything the next morning. But of course by then they were completely different roses. And the painting was complete.
My work in the book: How to Paint Watercolor Flowers
A year ago the English publisher Quarto commissioned me to do a series of paintings for a book (working title) “Must Paint Watercolor Flowers” and at last it arrived in the mail! Now named How to Paint Watercolor Flowers: Create Your Own Masterpiece in 6 Easy Steps, it features my paintings and those of 15 other artists, along with step-by-step instructions showing how we made our paintings.
The book has 160 pages and at 11″x 9.5″ is much bigger than their “Watercolor Artist’s Bible” in which I also had several paintings. It is laid out with a beautiful 8×10 photo of the flower subject on the left side and photo-illustrated step-by-step instructions for creating the finished watercolor beside it. Hard-cover spiral binding allows the book to lay open flat for artists who wish to try the techniques while painting from the photos.
I loved seeing the beautiful work of the other artists and the many ways they approached the wide variety of subjects and techniques. The flower photos are superb, with permission granted to use them for your own paintings. The book also has excellent sections on watercolor technique, color, value, and photographing your own flowers for painting.
I haven’t read all the step-by-steps, but I’m guessing that like me, few of the artists actually created their work in just the six steps that we were limited to when writing up and photographing our work. Instead the editor highlights the key techniques that were especially important to each particular painting.
Disclaimer: I have no financial investment in the book; I was paid per painting for the publisher’s right to print my work, but receive no royalties or other benefit from sales of the book itself from the publisher or via Amazon links.
Scruffy Roses Instead of Ice Cream, ink & watercolor
Sometimes when I’m tired and grumpy it feels like the solution to all my problems could be found in a bowl of ice cream. I know I’m not alone in this because I’ve noticed that movies and TV often show female characters heading for the Haagendaz when they’re upset.
I’ve also learned that despite those crossed wires in my brain* that say tired = eat sugar, dessert is rarely the solution, and only creates other problems for me. So I try to do something else and it usually works. On this occasion I spent the evening sketching some scruffy little roses from my garden. By the time I finished, the nearby ice cream shop had closed and I was ready to go to bed.
*Sleep Deprivation and Carbohydrate Craving
In a Harvard Magazine report on sleep research they explain how and why being sleep deprived creates a physiological craving for sugar. In one study, healthy, male college students who were subjected to sleep interruptions over a couple of weeks became carb-loading sugar fiends and even developed pre-diabetes. In the article the Harvard researchers say:”It could be that a good chunk of our epidemic of obesity is actually an epidemic of sleep deprivation.”
They say that most of us now sleep less than people did a century ago, or even 50 years ago although our biological need for 8 hours of sleep a night hasn’t changed. “We are living in the middle of history’s greatest experiment in sleep deprivation and we are all a part of that experiment,” says Stickgold. “It’s not inconceivable to me that we will discover that there are major social, economic, and health consequences to that experiment. Sleep deprivation doesn’t have any good side effects.”
Today in the my watercolor class I demonstrated painting white flowers and soft-focus bright or dark backgrounds. A neighbor graciously allowed me to pick a huge bouquet of Matalija poppies from her gigantic bush so each artist had their own flower to paint.
To save time I only painted a quarter of the flower before going on to paint the background. This made it a little difficult to finish the painting after the class since by then the flower had completely changed so I just pretended a little.
To paint the background I started by making three different puddles in little bowls: Permanent Alizarin Crimson, Quinacridone Gold and Winsor (phthalo) Blue. I used a separate brush for each color to keep the colors clean. Then I just worked my way around, washing on little gold, a patch of red beside it, a splotch of blue, letting the colors touch and mingle.
Matalija Poppy Sketch, green brush pen & watercolor
To warm up for today’s demo I did this sketch last night using my fun new green Pitt Artists Brush Pen and then added watercolor. And I spelled the flower name wrong. Which I’ve been doing forever, or at least since I painted the first one several years ago found on my website here.
Jana Bouc, Artist 