This lady carefully marked up her cheesy crime novel, “Guns Before Butter” with her pencil as she read. The train ride was really bumpy and so my ink line got pretty squiggly. I switched to drawing her after a big guy with a bike got on and completely blocked my view of the man above her.
Two guys in green, ink & colored pencil
I experimented some more with the brown craft paper sketchbook, drawing with a black brush pen on BART and (above) adding white pen and colored pencil at home.
More Brown Paper People
And below, some ink drawings done on BART with watercolor added at home later.
Waiting patiently, ink & watercolorElderly Asian couple, ink & watercolor
Fishing & Strolling Berkeley Pier at Sunset, ink & watercolor
It was the hottest August day in the history of San Francisco, smack in the middle of the coldest summer since 1975. So for our Tuesday night sketch-out we headed for the cooling breezes coming in off the Pacific Ocean through the Golden Gate Bridge (in the center of the picture above, to the right of the San Francisco skyline). We weren’t alone. The pier was full of people strolling and fishing and enjoying the rare warm evening.
Men's Bathroom on the Pier at Sunset, ink & watercolor
Although my sketch buddies selected a more scenic perspective from the same vantage point (which you can see on our Urban Sketchers Bay Area blog here), the men’s bathroom and shoreline rocks glowing pink and orange in the sunset attracted me instead. Apparently I was holding my sketchbook at a strange angle as I was drawing and painting (or else the world temporarily tilted) causing the wonky slanted horizon and bridge.
The sky turned indigo blue as we walked back down the pier towards land, and a huge full moon rose over the hills. Then a group of half a dozen kayakers with little headlights on their boats paddled right under the pier and out the other side below us. It is special sights like this that make getting out in the world to sketch so special.
Peet's Coffee El Cerrito and Albany Hill, ink & watercolor
Our Tuesday night sketch group is now an official Urban Sketchers group, known as Urban Sketchers SF Bay Area. If you’d like to visit our Urban Sketchers blog, you’ll get to meet my fellow Bay Area sketchers and see the different ways we interpret scenes in our sketchbooks, often from the same viewpoint.
The sketch above was done while sitting on the steps of the Pier One across from Peet’s in El Cerrito. It was the first sunny day in ages and it felt so good to enjoy a latte and some sketching in the sun. Albany Hill sticks up right behind Peet’s. It’s an odd bit of geography that resembles a very tall cupcake (sprinkled with trees instead of jimmies) in an otherwise flat landscape.
Albany Hill’s “Dynamite” History
In the late 19th century, the Judson Powder Works used the hill for the manufacture of dynamite. The company was forced to move from San Francisco and then Berkeley because of continuing accidental explosions. They planted the eucalyptus trees on the hill to catch debris and muffle the sound of their explosions. The stop on the transcontinental railroad tracks just to the west was called Nobel Station, after the inventor of dynamite.
District 12 at Mrs. Dalloway's Bookstore, Ink & watercolor
Since I’d read, and surprisingly enjoyed, The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins’ first book in her dystopian futuristic trilogy, I understood why this display was in the Mrs. Dalloway’s Bookstore window: it was advertising the third book in the series, Mockingjay.
The Hunger Games trilogy is about a boy and a girl struggling to survive an annual contest where teenagers from 12 impoverished districts are forced to fight for their lives in the ultimate televised reality show, with the winner bringing honor to her district. When a reliable friend recommended this young adult novel, I was highly skeptical on so many levels. But I found it to be a good read (or listen really–I borrowed the book on CD from the library).
Goorin Hats, Berkeley
Before sketching Mrs. Dalloways, this little brown craft-paper sketchbook from the UC Davis college bookstore (a gift from my friend Pete Scully) was perfect for warm-up sketches with a brush pen. College Avenue is full of interesting, upscale little shops like this hat shop.
This previous sketch of Mrs. Dalloway’s is one of my favorites. It’s a wonderful bookstore with a special focus on books about gardens.
Self Portrait with Sketchbooks and Tea, ink & watercolor
When I set up my old mirror to sketch the self-portrait I end each journal with, I could see my sketchbooks on the shelf behind me in the mirror, along with the cup of tea behind the mirror. When I finished the sketch I pasted this photo of my Lady Gaga Makeover on the opposite page:
Me with Lady Gaga Hair
I found Instyle’s Hollywood Makeover website when I was looking for new hairstyle ideas. You upload a photo of your face, line it up, and select a hairstyle (from a huge collection of celebrity photos) which then appears on your face. I haven’t laughed so hard in a long time!
Once you select a hairstyle (and even change the hair color) you can choose face and eye makeup, creating a complete makeover, which I did. If you register on their site you can save and download your makeover photos and it’s all free.
Jennifer Garner Hair Makeover
I brought this more reasonable makeover photo to my hairdresser, who rolled her eyes since the original model (Jennifer Garner) has thick, straight hair and mine isn’t. But with the help of her scissors and blow dryer, I did get something close.
Of course now my hair has gone native again, back to curly, since that’s so much easier than trying to turn it into something it isn’t with gels and blow driers and clips and pins and staying out of the wind and fog.
If you try the makeover site, please share the results! Or at least enjoy the laugh!
Does this ever happen to you? You start off the morning feeling optimistic about everything you’ll get done today and then suddenly it’s evening and the To-Do list has only grown? Not only the day flew by, but given the date on this sketch, so has a week or two.
I sketched this sign while sipping an afternoon latte at Peet’s Coffee. Two women at the next table seemed so intrigued by my watercolor pencils and water brush that I said, “Here, try it!” and let them color and paint (on their napkins).
I’ve been so busy with working, teaching watercolor, and squeezing in a little time for painting and sketching that I’ve gotten behind on posting. But my number one priority today is finishing binding a new journal as I’m down to the last two pages in my current one and they’re reserved for my end-of-sketchbook self portraits.
Micaela suggested the Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute (CHORI) building in North Oakland for our Tuesday night sketching and it was an interesting challenge. The 1923 building with 80,000 square feet of space was once a high school. Abandoned in the 1980s, it sat disintegrating for many years, with boarded up windows and peeling paint.
When Children’s Hospital took over the building they kept the original design and built within a high-tech facility for the study of biochemistry, hematology, molecular biology, genetics, and more. The laboratory is backed up by emergency power and critical systems such as freezers and incubators are monitored 24 hours a day.
We could hear the hum and buzz of those systems (along with the loud passing BART trains on the overhead rail across the street) while we sketched. It was so cold, foggy and drizzly damp that Sonia sat in her car to sketch and Micaela and I wore multiple layers of down and fleece. Will summer ever come to the Bay Area?
I was feeling so proud of myself for finally setting up a compost bin for food scraps and thought tonight’s red bell pepper contribution looked pretty enough to paint. After I drew the contents in ink, I grabbed what I thought was a spray bottle of water and sprayed all the colors in my palette to wet them. Then I smelled the bleach.
Refusing to believe there could be bleach in there since I remembered emptying the bottle and washing all the bleach out, I sniffed the contents, and stupidly even tasted the end of the sprayer tube, convinced it must be water. Nope, it still had bleach in it and now I have the taste of bleach in my mouth, even after a cup of cinnamon tea.
Finally I remembered that I’d “temporarily” re-filled the spray bottle with a bleach/water mixture again when I needed to spray something to de-germ it, and that time, hadn’t emptied it.
The next day
Although I painted this sketch with the bleachified paint, I decided it wasn’t worth taking the chance to continue using the paint. I soaked my palette overnight in the sink, and then used paper towels to soak up and scoop out the big blobs of paint remaining.
And now I have a nice clean palette, filled with nice fresh watercolor paint. And I used the spray bottle of bleach mixture to clean the sink afterward. The sink is nice and white. And the bottle is now marked “BLEACH!”
The past two Tuesday nights we’ve taken advantage of the absence of U. C. Berkeley students to sketch in the area known as the Northside on Euclid between Hearst and Ridge Road. The first week I wandered onto campus a bit and sat on the balcony of the Asian Studies building with this great view of the library. I spent the entire evening there on this one sketch, having a blast with all the details as the sun was setting.
Since I was so late getting there last week after going home from work for dinner first, I went directly to the Northside this week. But I still only managed to get in these two sketches. I was intrigued by the window above on the left and the view of all the signs stacked behind each other looking straight down Euclid towards campus.
The highlight of the evening was hearing Cathy’s tales from the Urban Sketchers International Symposium last weekend in Portland and seeing her sketches, notes from the panels, and how inspired and excited she was by the event.
Last Sunday I went to a lovely birthday brunch at Elinore’s favorite restaurant, Liaison Bistro in North Berkeley. The food was absolutely fabulous, the service was excellent, even with the large group, and the company was delightful.
After we ate and the plates were cleared, the waiter walked around the long table with a big rubber stamp, printing the dessert menu on the papers covering the tablecloth. When he came to me, I said, “Wait!” and pulled out my sketchbook, asking him to stamp the book instead.
The stamp became the frame for my drawing of Elinore’s mimosa. I had my mini-sketching kit with me so used a couple watercolor pencils and a waterbrush for color. Then people wanted to see the book, passing it around and looking through it, but being polite about not reading the personal stuff (I hope).
Later I used a gold gel pen to title the page and pasted in the wrapper for the little chocolates they put at each place.
Jana Bouc, Artist 