Figs on Photoshop Manual, Pencil and watercolor, 6x9
These organic figs were disappointingly tasteless and so they became still life subjects instead of eating objects. I’ve been using the heavy Photoshop manual (seen under the figs) as a weight on top of the the Fabriano Venezia sketchbook when I scan it. My new copy of Photoshop CS4 doesn’t come with a manual, although there is one online that can be downloaded and saved.
I’m one of those weird people who actually read manuals. When I get a new application I always read the manual first, to find out what the program can do and then I refer to it when I need to figure out how to do one of those things.
I don’t like reading on the computer but I refuse to pay another $55 for a manual that should have been included in the first place. In the meantime, the old manual makes a very nice paperweight or doorstop (or still life holder). 824 pages! And I read/skimmed the whole thing when I got it.
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!
Except for doing these sketches while watching the NBA Basketball Finals last week, it was a pretty rough week, with no energy for art or blogging. I kept putting the TiVo on pause to sketch, enjoying drawing with a Pilot fountain pen and then adding a bit of water to make the line bleed and turn into an ink wash.
NBA Finals: Aiming for a free throw, ink
Then I started trying to capture a little more action, drawing in pencil.
NBA Finals pencil sketch
I enjoy watching basketball playoffs and seeing these 7 foot tall, extremely buff, and mostly really cute guys with charming smiles, maneuver their massive bodies like ballerinas, leaping through the air, dodging and dancing around each other, or just storming down the court like a locomotive, charging the hoop, hanging from it when they dunk the ball in, or tossing the ball from across the court and watching it swish right in (or not).
I took so long with pausing the game to sketch that I had to fast forward to the last five minutes to see who won so that I could go to bed before midnight.
My plein air painting buddy Cathy, invited me over to sketch her wisteria which was blooming in her beautiful, backyard Zen garden.
Cathy is a graphic designer and her wonderful design sense is apparent throughout her home and garden. I loved being in the presence of the quiet empty spaces, balanced with beautifully designed sculptural installations of plantings, ceramics, orchids and bonsais; and Japanese style fences, stones used to simulate streams and landscape features.
With a fountain tinkling, bees visiting the wisteria and hummingbirds sipping from the fuchsia while we sat in the shade sketching, it was a wonderful way to end the day feeling relaxed and at peace.
This morning when I was watering the roses I noticed that the one I sketched yesterday (see below) had opened and was even prettier today. But it was way too hot to sketch outside so I cut the rose and brought it in. Then it was way too hot in the studio too, even with all the blinds closed and the lights off.
Trying to ignore the heat, I put the rose in a vase on the drawing table and shined one small light on it, with no light on my sketchbook and tried to really focus on the drawing instead of just approximating the shapes. It’s amazing how focusing on drawing makes the problems and discomforts of the world just drop away. But when the drawing was done, I couldn’t take the heat anymore and dragged the portable air conditioner into the studio. Ahhh relief.
I tried to be more careful with the washes for the shadows than I was yesterday, to keep the white rose white and let the shadows define the form. I’m happy with the way it turned out.
But yesterday, when I drew Rose version #1 below, I really liked my initial pencil drawing. Then I added watercolor on just the rose and liked that too [shoulda stopped]…but then I painted in the background and felt like I lost the definition of the form [shoulda stopped] …
White Rose Version #1, ink & watercolor 5x5"
…so then I added some lines with my Micron Pigma which just made it worse. At that point there was nothing I could do but close the sketchbook and look forward to the day when I finally learn the lesson of stopping while I was ahead!
I’ve been desperate to get back to sketching and was determined to do some today while I was out for a walk doing errands. Just as I sat down to sketch, cup of coffee in hand, it started raining. I didn’t care. Little drops of rain splattered on my paper, making interesting texture where they met the ink.
I’d forgotten my watercolor kit at home and was annoyed until I looked at the cup of coffee in my hand and thought of how much I liked sepia washes that Pete Scully sometimes adds to his sketches. I dipped my finger in the coffee and began finger painting.
Then it was time to head home and get ready for a special 10-year-old’s birthday party. I’m the antithesis of a party girl these days, preferring quiet time alone or in one-on-one time with friends. But last night’s dinner party and today’s birthday party were both “command performances” so I gave myself the push I needed to show up.
The intimate, sophisticated dinner party for 6 last night was a joy; the other diners brilliant, funny intellectuals beside whom I felt like a peanut brain. But I adore them all and it was an absolute delight. What a contrast to the non-stop activity and noise of kids loaded up on sugar and then cooped up indoors because of the rain today.
Mariah's Birthday Guests, pencil drawing, 8x6"
I spent the last hour of the 4-hour birthday marathon trying to sketch the jumping-bean children. They were nice kids; a junior United Nations representing as many nationalities as there were guests (and there was a dozen of them, I think).
I’m happy to be home now with no plans for the next couple days besides painting and sketching.
Silly Pose on BART, Drawn later at home, Graphite 8x6
Riding our subway known as BART the other day, I sat down beside a young man who was talking to his friend in the next seat. I asked if they wanted to sit together and they made a joke about not liking each other (actually it was a racist joke that shocked me at first when I thought they were serious—they were of different races ). So I sat down and took out my sketchbook like I usually do. The guy beside me insisted I draw his friend and his friend immediately struck a crazy pose for me to draw.
I said I only had 5 minutes before I was getting off but they egged me on. I drew as fast as I could (in ink—what was I thinking!) and was making a pretty bad job of it—talk about pressure! Then I had to get off and we all had a good laugh about the bad sketch (see below). I asked if I could take his picture and he agreed, continuing the pose as I quickly snapped a photo with my iPhone and then jumped off the train as the doors were closing. Here’s the photo that I put on my computer monitor across the room to draw the sketch above in my sketchbook last night:
Quick Photo of Silly Pose
And here’s the original sketch done on BART, along with a few others from this week:
Quick ink sketch done on BART
BART people, graphite
BART people ink
Quick Photo of Silly Pose
Silly Pose on Bart, Graphite 8×6
Now, about feeling like a Zombie… I’ve been doing prep this week for a colonoscopy this afternoon. I’ve had nothing to eat since yesterday morning, except sugary clear liquids and the gallon of “Go-Litely” (hah! what false advertising!) and very little sleep due to drinking the first half gallon last night and then “Go-ing” all nite, thus the only “Litely” was my sleeping! And for the three days prior, I was told to eat none of my usually healthy diet: no vegetables, no fruits, no whole grains. Just white bread and meat, basically. The procedure isn’t until 2:00 so until then, I’ll be under a pile of blankets in bed trying to get warm and watching a movie on my laptop.
Coffee & White Socks, 8x6", pencil sketch in sketchbook
Trying to recover from a caffeine hangover headache this morning, and completely out of coffee at home, I walked (slowly) to Peet’s for a latte and a bag of beans to replenish my supply. While I was sipping and sketching this lady, two clerks from the nearby Trader Joes sat at the table next to me and held a training session that provided an interesting behind-the-scenes look at the grocery business for the always curious (and eavesdropping) me.
They took turns reading aloud from a document contained in a bright blue cardboard folder. I learned that the average checker completes about 200 sales per day and that that number is used to compare the productivity of workers. I learned about when and why they have to declare goods unsellable and that they then donate them to food banks, including flowers.
They pondered that one for a while, trying to figure out who would actually want unsellable flowers and what they would do with them. They concluded that food banks probably don’t need flowers so they must go elsewhere. But I was thinking the flowers would be nice to brighten the homes of the needy people getting the food.
Who am I as an artist? What really interests me enough to spend hours painting it? Do I really like painting landscapes? Do I really like painting plein air? Do I even like looking at plein air landscape paintings?
After making 100 plein air landscape studies and only liking 2 of them, it seemed like a good time to reevaluate and those are the questions I’ve been asking myself.
Before I took up oils a year or so ago I was fascinated by details and enjoyed seeing and painting the reflections in glass, faces that told stories (human and non-human animals), the world inside a flower, urban scenes from around my quirky home town.
Then I started painting mostly plein air landscapes in oils and was told I needed to lose the details; simplify; just paint the big shapes; soften the edges, go for design and composition rather than content. But the more I simplified the less I enjoyed painting. I started to question whether I wanted to continue with oil painting and plein air painting.
Then I serendipitously discovered a book of Charles Sheeler‘s paintings at a used book store. I’d never been much interested in his work before, but when I looked at the images and started reading I was led to the answers I’d been looking for. I saw in his landscapes (mostly urban/industrial), still lifes and interior scenes a specificity, strong point of view, personality, AND great design. I saw a way I could translate what gave me joy in watercolor into my oil painting.
I realized that what interests me is the PARTICULAR, not the general; the close up, personal view that tells a story; a portrait of an object, a person or a place; not the general widescreen view as I’ve been doing.
In trying to better define my thoughts, while waiting for my train at the at the El Cerrito Plaza BART station I sketched the thumbnails at the top and bottom of this post (which can be enlarged by clicking either image). Below is a photo of the scene, though a slightly different point of view:
Photo of similar view from BART minus foreground
And here is what I discovered and wrote in my sketchbook, thumbnail by thumbnail:
1: No focus, BORING. What I’ve been doing: including every single detail from the window frame in the foreground to the cars, parking lot, city, bay, hills across the bay, and the sky.
2. A little more interesting. Focus on the Cerrito Theatre marquis sticking up with foreground and background being less important.
3. A close up view but no focal point, still boring. 3 trees. Who cares?
4. BORING. Sky mountain water. Big Fat So What!
5. Maybe… a portrait of specific trees and lamp post but still not interesting enough to bother painting.
6. Now this interests me! A person waiting, a bench, a sign, a particular tree.
Thumbnails of BART view
Now I just hope I can find a way to implement this new way of viewing and painting with oil paints. I wrote several more pages about these ideas in my sketchbook, but I’ve probably bored you enough for today. Now off to paint!
Nel and Rita both did wonderful portraits of me for the Portrait Party. You can see Rita’s here andNel’s here. They captured my likeness and a sense of my funny side and joyfulness.
You might notice that the drawing is exactly the same in both paintings. That’s because I did the drawing first and scanned it “just in case” I messed up. Then, when I wanted to do another painting, I printed the drawing out on a piece of watercolor paper and started again.
I’m not happy with any of these, and I seem to have put my frustration on Nel’s face. Since that seems to be the general theme in my painting this week, maybe it’s time to move on to making color charts, always a good thing to do when the muse is on strike.
Jana Bouc, Artist 
