Tag: Sketchbook Pages

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Drawing Faces Life in general People Sketchbook Pages

Girls Just Wanna Be…. (Dredging the Past for New Series)

Finding Tina (top from memory, bottom from yearbook)
Finding Tina (top from memory, bottom from yearbook)

I was sketching and looking at my high school yearbook in preparation for a series of paintings I’m starting. I was surprised by the low expectations so many of the girls in the yearbook had for themselves compared to today’s young women. I started counting how many “hoped to eventually” to become beauticians, secretaries and airline hostesses (flight attendants). Even my high school best friend Tina’s yearbook entry said she aimed to be a beautician (not to denigrate those important jobs, but there are so many more options for women now.) Maybe it was the elaborate, sculptural hairstyles back then that made so many of us want to be hairstylists?

When I read the tender, poetic inscription Tina wrote in my annual,  I decided to try to find her again.  We’d lost touch with when I moved away a year after high school and have unsuccessfully searched for her for years. Today I found her 86-year-0ld father, just by typing his last name and the city where we lived into the people finder on YellowPages.com! He promised to give her my phone number and then filled me in on her life over the many decades since we last were together.

Jana's senior picture and yearbook entry
Jana's senior picture and yearbook entry

When I filled out the form for my blurb I was trying to be funny:  “Hopes to marry a millionaire…especially liked the people, weekends, and vacations.” But there was some truth in it too. I was so done with high school and wasn’t looking forward to having to grow up and get a job, either.

OK, so maybe I was procrastinating and avoiding the nice blank canvas waiting for me… but, (not counting the girls who said they just wanted to be happy, or didn’t mention their goals at all), here is my tally of career goals for San Diego’s Crawford High class of  ’66 (I put the odd outliers in red):

  • Teacher: 67  (90% said elementary teacher)
  • Graduate from college: 55 (and then get married: 30)
  • Secretary: 51
  • Airline hostess: 33
  • Beautician: 23
  • Nurse 21
  • Housewife: 20
  • Dental/medical assistant: 19
  • Commercial artist: 14
  • Social worker: 11
  • Psychologist or Psychoanalyst: 11
  • Travel the world: 11
  • Interior Decorator: 9
  • Dress designer: 8
  • Model: 6
  • Doctor: 6 (mostly pediatricians)
  • Scientist, mathematician, engineer: 3
  • Diplomat, linguist: 2
  • Bullfighter: 2
  • FBI/Secret Agent: 2
  • Probation officer: 2
  • Owner of Village of Pancake House: 1
  • Mortician: 1
  • Police woman: 1
  • Artist: 1 (and she is did it: Deborah Butterfield is famous for her sculptures of horses)
Categories
Art theory Berkeley Drawing Ink and watercolor wash Outdoors/Landscape Painting Places Sketchbook Pages

Monday Night Sketchcrawl: Shattuck and Vine, Berkeley

Vine Street Pumping Station, Ink and watercolor
Vine Street Pumping Station, Ink and watercolor

Cathy and I met at Shattuck and Vine to sketch, and started with this historic building, now a wine shop called Vintage Berkeley, converted from the former utility district’s Vine Street Pumping Station. Actually we’d started a little further up the street, but my sketch was terrible so no point in posting it.

By the time we finished drawing there, I was getting hungry so we looked around for somewhere to sketch and eat but that ate up sketching time too. We ended up at Dara Thai/Lao Cusine where we sat outdoors and sketched and I ate grilled calamari on shredded lettuce with cilantro sauce. It was warm, filling and delicious.

Dara Thai/Lao Cuisine, ink 9x6
Dara Thai/Lao Cuisine, ink 9x6

I didn’t get to finish this sketch because it got dark and cold…and because I spent so much time drawing details in the fancy roof of the little shelter. Despite hearing from great art teachers, “Simplify, reduce details, draw only what you see when squinting, see how much you can leave out,” I love details. That’s just how it is.

But the funny thing is that because I got so absorbed in the details on that one roof, I didn’t have time to draw all the roofs of all the shelters behind this one, which would have filled the whole page with details.

So maybe those teachers are right….?

Categories
Animals Drawing Sketchbook Pages

Baby Bird Steps Out

Baby bird steps out and I have questions
Baby bird steps out and I have questions

The day before the baby bird in the nest outside my window left the nest for the first time, his entire extended family of California Towhees chirped loudly all day, making a metallic “chip” sound, calling to him and to each other. The next day there he was, sitting in the tree on a branch near my window, looking right at me. He was bigger than I expected and was definitely having a bad hair day.

And now, quiet. No more constant activity of  bringing food, standing guard, warning off interlopers. The nest is empty and the chirping is over.  After watching them for days raised so many questions, which I scattered in my sketchbook among my 10 attempts to sketch the baby. My favorite was #8 when he turned his head to see mom bringing food and then opened wide to eat that yummy stuff.

I’d always thought birding was for boring old folks but now that I’m a boring old folk myself, I’m finding it quite interesting. Since my knowledge of birds is pretty limited, I initially assumed these guys were robins, since they sort of looked like them but without the red breast. Then I found the Cornell Lab of Ornithology All About Birds website where you can search by many different criteria to identify a bird, including their sounds.

That’s how I learned that these guys are California Towhees which I confirmed by listening to them here. If you click the link and go listen to their sounds, you’ll understand how I came to feel that a community of chirping Towhees was as annoying as a neighbor’s constantly barking dog. I’m guessing they were all calling to the baby, “Come out, it’s safe, we’re standing guard, come out, come out, and try your new wings!”

I’m glad the incessant metallic chip, chip, chip sound only lasted one day, but I miss watching the birds being busy in the tree outside  my window and so do my cats.

Categories
photoshop Sketchbook Pages Still Life Watercolor

FIGuratively Speaking

Figs on Photoshop Manual, Pencil and watercolor, 6x9
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.

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
Berkeley Drawing Gardening Ink and watercolor wash Sketchbook Pages

Sketching Berkeley’s Northbrae Neighborhood

Monterey Market Watermelons, ink & watercolor, 6x9"
Monterey Market Watermelons, ink & watercolor, 6x9"

Cathy and I met at Monterey Market on Hopkins Street in Berkeley’s Northbrae neighborhood for our Monday night sketchcrawl. The scent of ripe fruit was heavenly in their screened fruit patio, but the store was closing so we were soon out on the street.

Cathy sketching
Cathy sketching

I stood behind Cathy while she leaned on a bike rack to sketch the signs on the corner. Then we walked up Hopkins to the Country Cheese and Coffee Market.

Country Cheese, Sepia Micron Pigma, 9x8"
Country Cheese, Sepia Micron Pigma, 9x8"

The scents were quite different here: damp cardboard and wafts of the day’s refuse from all the now-closed food sellers on this block including Magnanis Poultry and Monterey Fish Market.  My butt fell asleep from leaning against a large metal box on the sidewalk while I was sketching. I could have sat on the chair but decided to sketch it instead. It felt good to start moving again. We walked around the block looking for inspiration at Berkeley Horticultural Nursery but since they were closed there wasn’t enough to see through the fence.

We headed up Rose Street and through the King Middle School play yard where people were throwing frisbees for their dogs in the sunshine at 8:00 at night. It was really starting to feel like summer.

Alice Waters of Chez Panisse fame, helped start an “edible garden” on the school property and that’s where we did our final sketches, surrounded by beds of vegetables, flowers and fruit.

Edible Garden "campfire", ink & watercolor, 9x12"
Edible Garden "campfire", ink & watercolor, 9x12"

We felt like we were at camp, sitting on hale bales arranged in a large circle under an arbor made of rough hewn posts and branches woven together. At the center of the circle, a huge “campfire” of flaming pink and red poppies blazed. I imagined how rewarding it must be for a class of young gardeners to gather there for lessons with their teacher, the beautiful results of their work growing all around them. What a wonderful learning environment!

Categories
Drawing People Sketchbook Pages

Sketching the NBA Basketball Finals

NBA players and yelling manager, ink
NBA players and yelling manager, ink

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
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
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.

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 supplies Drawing Flower Art Ink and watercolor wash Painting Photos photoshop Sketchbook Pages Still Life Watercolor

Hydrangeas: More Testing Fabriano Venezia Sketchbook

Hydrangeas in Pitcher, 9x11", ink & watercolor
Hydrangeas in Pitcher, 9x11", ink & watercolor

The first hydrangeas of the season provided an opportunity to try out ink and watercolor in the Fabriano Venezzia sketchbook I posted about yesterday. First I drew directly in ink and then tried painting the flower on the right by wetting the paper there, and painting into it.  I didn’t like the results and tried lifting off the paint with a tissue and was pleased and surprised that it came right off, leaving only a slight stain.  Then I painted back into the damp area and got the results I wanted and completed the rest of the painting working very loosely.

The painting was easy compared to trying to get the image in the sketchbook scanned or photographed for posting. The image above was the result of clamping the edges of the sketchbook to photograph it (see below) and then using Photoshop’s Clone Stamp tool to “erase” the clamps and then using the Levels and Dodge tools to clean up the shadows caused by the paper buckling and some reflections from the light source.

Ready to photograph

I also tried scanning the page in the sketchbook but encountered the same problems I had yesterday with severe blurring plus shadow from the seam. I (want to) like this sketchbook, but preparing the images for posting is really a hassle. Even if I wasn’t working across the spread and just painted on one page I’d still have the problem with the shadow and blurring since it happens on the righthand page.

Scanned version, after touch-up
Scanned version, after major touch-up

Have you had this problem and solved it? I’d be so grateful for suggestions!

Hydrangeas and sketchbook
Hydrangeas and sketchbook
Categories
Art supplies Drawing People Sketchbook Pages Subway drawings

Dignity, in New Fabriano Sketchbook

Dignity, ink, 9x10" in Fabriano sketchbook
Dignity, ink, 9x10" in Fabriano sketchbook

When I saw this woman reading on BART I had to draw her. She seemed to express the essence of dignity to me. She was carefully dressed and groomed, all in white,  grey and black, with her hair covered in a white crocheted net and that wrapped with a perfectly ironed bandana, tied in a tiny bow in front.

This was my first drawing in my new Fabriano Venezia sketchbook that Roz had tested and praised and that I bought in a couple of sizes from Wet Paint. This is in the 9×6″ size. I left the first page blank to serve as a title page/table of contents later and did this drawing on the next page. I was totally in love with the sketchbook, writing a little rave review on the page of this first sketch about how wonderfully smooth and thick the paper was, and how nicely it worked with the Micron Pigma .01.

I was a little concerned about how much larger and heavier to carry around it is than the Moleskine watercolor notebooks I’ve been using, but thought it would be worth it. BUT when I tried to scan my drawing and the book didn’t quite fit on the scanner, cropping off part of the image, and the middle seam caused half the image to blur and have a dark shadow, no matter what I tried.

Then tonight I tried adding a watered down ink wash to her jacket, which had been black. The paper acted very strangely, not at all like I’d expected. I knew it wasn’t watercolor paper, and thus wasn’t sized, but now I’m now worried how these books will react with watercolor. I guess I’ll find out soon.

Here’s the same image with the ink wash that went all splotchy.

Less Dignity with ink wash
Less Dignity with ink wash

She was so carefully groomed, with everything perfectly ironed and smooth and now she looks much less dignified with her splotchy jacket.  I don’t think the ink wash added anything positive to the drawing, do you? And I don’t think adding more ink to try to make it smoother or darker would be a good thing either.