Tag: Sketchbook Pages

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Drawing Ink and watercolor wash Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

Sketchcrawl Part II: Hog Island Oysters

Hog Island Oysters
Hog Island Oysters, seaweed

If only there was a rewind button to click at the end of a day to get a do-over. I planned to paint all day but didn’t get in the studio until dinner time and  finally added watercolor to these two sketches from Saturday’s International Sketchcrawl. They are mostly from our wonderful lunch at Hog Island Oysters in the Ferry Building.

We shared a 12 oyster sampler: two of each of the six kinds of oysters they had that day, served on crushed ice and garnished with curly red seaweed. Then we shared a bowl of amazing clam chowder with the clams steamed in their shells on top of the soup and a sparkling  fresh salad of baby greens. Even the sourdough bread was sensational. A cold wheat beer for me and champagne for Martha only added to the perfection.

Hog Island grid
Hog Island grid

That big fish is mounted on the wall, not hanging over diners’ heads as it appears in the picture. Martha gave me the idea of doing a grid at lunch which was fun, although a little frustrating because I had to work so small. These were drawn in my small watercolor moleskin so each grid section is only a couple inches across.

We spent so much time at our table that we felt too guilty to stay longer to add watercolor. There was a line of people waiting for seats and we were hogging a primo window seat. Here’s what it looked like pre-watercolor:

Hog Island grid, ink only
Hog Island grid, ink only

I love this photo Martha took of me sketching at the table. While we were at the table we used our iPhones to connect by email, text message and Facebook with other sketch blogger friends participating in the Sketchcrawl, Lisa in Texas, Marta in San Diego and Shirley in New York.

Happy Jana, photo by Martha
Happy Jana

It was such a great day!

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Ink and watercolor wash Life in general Outdoors/Landscape Painting People Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

A Cold Walk by Macaroni Grill, El Cerrito

Macaroni Grill on a cold day, ink & watercolor
Macaroni Grill on a cold day, ink & watercolor

On the last dayof vacation before returning to work, the world outside my windows looked raw, blustery and wet after a frost-covered morning. Hibernating sounded good, but I was feeling uninspired and blah and could tell if I stayed home I was just going to mope around. Since I needed to pick up my my sunglasses from the optometrist, I decided to walk up there.

I almost turned back after the first couple of blocks. My ears were cold and my feet were complaining. But I kept going and eventually began to perk up and enjoy myself. By the time I got to Peets Coffee (a mile later and across the street from my eye doctor’s office in El Cerrito Plaza) I was feeling enthusiastic and cheerful.  With a hot latte in my hand, I sat at a cafe table outside Peets and sketched this odd chain restaurant across the street.

I ate there once when it first opened (I was curious about the new restaurant in my neighborhood) and enjoyed it, but have never been able to get anyone to go back there with me. With so many unique and trendy restaurants in the Berkeley area, I suppose there’s really no reason to go to a “big box” version of an Italian restaurant, though people do seem to pack the place on weekends.

But I’ve always had an aversion to stupid business names, and the name “Macaroni Grill” irks me. I keep picturing the chef trying to grill slippery macaroni and cheese, with all the noodles falling through the grill grates. When I was a kid I remember being annoyed by a hair salon named “Lipstick Beauty Parlor,” which I thought made no sense.

New Sunglasses
New Sunglasses

While I was waiting at the optometris’ts office, I started sketching a stand that holds many pairs of eye glasses. There were too many tiny, overlapping details and I wasn’t really interested. Fortunately the optician arrived with my glasses so I stopped. When I got home, instead of leaving a partially messed up page I turned the page 90 degrees and added a quick sketch of my sunglasses (from memory) and then stuck myself in them.

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Gardening Ink and watercolor wash Painting Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

Walking and Sketching in the Neighborhood

Fireplug and Flowers
Fireplug and Flowers

I see something that inspires me to draw every time I take a walk. On this sunny winter walk, neighbors were out tending to their gardens, and flowers were blooming in unexpected places, like surrounding the fireplug above on a busy street corner.

Cactus Trimming Day, Ink & watercolor
Cactus Trimming Day, Ink & watercolor

There’s a house a few blocks from mine where the front lawn was replaced long ago by a hundred different kinds of cacti and succulents. I wondered how they managed to keep the various spikey things trimmed and on this day I found out: carefully, with very thick gloves and shovels.

They’d trimmed their enormous Nopales (or Prickly Pear) cactus and piled up the “paddles” in this old wheelbarrow. As the husband and wife worked they acted like it was completely normal for me to be standing in front of their house for 15 minutes sketching their wheelbarrow. I’m not sure what they ended up doing with the pieces of cactus. As I finished sketching, the husband piled a few paddles on his shovel and walked off down the street with them.

Ready to party
Ready to party

Later I passed this cheery scene in someone’s driveway. I didn’t see anyone around, but the brightly colored chairs and containers of (?) on a tray looked awfully inviting.

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Life in general Painting Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

What Makes Sweaters Itchy?

Itchy Sweater Bugs, Ink & Watercolor
Itchy Sweater Bugs, Ink & Watercolor

This used to be my favorite sweater but I hadn’t worn it in a few years. When I discovered it hiding in my sweater drawer I  decided to wear it out to dinner last night.  I put it on and was surprised how short the sleeves were. I couldn’t remember whether they were originally 3/4 length (a stupid style I’ve never understood) or if they just shrunk. The rest of the sweater fit fine so I tried lengthening the sleeves by pulling on them which didn’t create a truly attractive look. One stretched longer and one stretched wider for some reason.

It was a cold night and I figured it would mostly be covered with a jacket so I left it on and went off to dine. Within minutes of leaving the house I started itching. First there was a scratchy tag tickling my side. Then it started feeling like a circus of tiny tickle bugs with little claws were dancing around inside the sweater, tickling me everywhere and driving me crazy. I didn’t want to scratch myself constantly so tried raising and lowering my shoulders which sort of rubbed the sweater against me and was better than doing nothing.

I couldn’t wait to get home. Fortunately, after a short postprandial stroll, my dining companion and I parted ways. I pulled that hideous sweater over my head, put on my pajamas and hung the sweater over my drawing table for its good-bye painting and a little illustration of those pesky (usually invisible) sweater tickle bugs dancing around as they do.

Then I put it in the to-be-donated bag. I’m not sure whether donating it is a kindness or a crime.

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Art supplies Every Day Matters Ink and watercolor wash Sketchbook Pages Still Life Watercolor

Salad Remains with Danny: Finishing Sketchbooks

Salad Remains with Danny's Book (ink & watercolor)
Salad Remains with Danny's Book (ink & watercolor)

I was feasting my eyes on Danny Gregory‘s new book, “An Illustrated Life” while I was eating a delicious salad in my big yellow salad bowl for lunch today. When I finished eating I had to sketch the colorful remains. The first drawing didn’t work (partially seen on the previous sketchbook page above), though I took it as far as I could and then drew it again and painted it (happily using up two pages in this sketchbook I don’t like).

I love reading about all the other sketchbook artists in Danny’s book and the way they think about sketching and their sketchbooks. It inspired me to finally finish off all of the random sketchbooks I have going. I have at least half a dozen unfinished sketchbooks, some that I’ve made (like the one used above) and some that I’ve bought. I keep them in a special open box and grab the one that calls to me.

There are several that I don’t like for a variety of reasons (e.g. don’t like the paper, don’t like the dimensions, don’t lay flat, don’t scan well, too fancy…) and they’ve been partially used and abandoned. I’m making it my goal to fill them all by January 1 so that I can put them on a shelf and start working in one book at a time in a chronological order. I like order.

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Ink and watercolor wash Other Art Blogs I Read Sketchbook Pages Still Life Watercolor

Not Wood Roses

Wood Roses or Pine Cones? (ink & watercolor)
Wood Roses or Pine Cones? (ink & watercolor)

I found these taking a walk (I was walking, not these thingees) which I thought might be called Wood Roses…but I looked it up and learned that Woodrose is “a parasitic plant endemic to New Zealand.”  Since these fell from a pine tree in Berkeley, they’re definitely not woodrose, but they do look like Wood Roses!

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Faces Ink and watercolor wash Life in general Painting People Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

Sketching as an Antidote to Insanity

Marcy calling home, ink & watercolor
Marcy calling home from Mom's porch, ink & watercolor

It wasn’t an easy weekend in L.A. visiting family but sketching really helped me to avoid going completely bonkers. There were some lovely moments: walking on the beach in the misty morning with my sister Marcy, taking a tour with Mom and Marce of an historic house (now a museum) in Santa Monica where a huge retrospective of Milford Zorne‘s amazing paintings were on display (more about that in another post).

Mom cooking stinky cabbage, ink & watercolor
Mom cooking stinky cabbage, ink & watercolor

My 85 year old mother doesn’t cook much anymore, but she got inspired to make Pracas (sweet and sour meatballs in cabbage).  But despite not having some of the ingredients or being able to see the recipe in the cookbook well enough to follow it, and despite the jar of ancient fossilized onion flakes she substituted for the actual onion in the recipe (demanding that I use a sharp knife to break the clump up so it could be extracted from the jar), and the house stinking like cabbage all afternoon, dinner wasn’t that bad, really.

Guy sleeping holding his boarding pass; hanging out at Mom's
Guy sleeping holding his boarding pass at Oakland airport; hanging out at Mom's
Grateful for my pen & sketchbook
Grateful for my sketchbook

It’s amazing how sketching can calm my nerves and put the whole dysfunctional family thing at a distance while still being physically present.

Josh reading
Josh reading

It’s really good to be back home.

Categories
Drawing Life in general People Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

Life Without Coffee

Life Without Coffee, ink & watercolor in sketchbook
Life Without Coffee, ink & watercolor in sketchbook

This is what I look like far too often these days as I’ve gradually been reducing my caffeine intake. I’m down to one cup of 25% caf & 75% decaf in the morning and then nothing but decaf after that.

My painting ritual had been to make a cup of coffee before heading into the studio and bringing an entire vacuum pot of the stuff when I went out plein air painting. The extra energy from caffeine not only kept me painting when I should have been sleeping, but it also fueled my late night blog visiting and email answering.

It was fun having that artificial boost, but burning the candle at both ends was doing bad things to my health. While I miss the energy, I am sleeping at night now and waking up feeling alive and ready to go instead of feeling like my head is full of mashed potatoes.

It reminds me of something Maya Angelou said her grandmother told her:

“You don’t always get what you pay for, but you always pay for what you get.”

Yes I was squeezing extra hours out of the day but I was paying for them with being constantly sleep-deprived.

I asked a friend who doesn’t use caffeine what you’re supposed to do when you’re tired if you can’t drink coffee, thinking she’d have some other trick for keeping going. She looked at me perplexed at what seemed like a silly question.

“You rest!” she said. What a novel concept!

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Sketchbook Pages Still Life Watercolor

Summer Leftovers #2: Avocado & Apricot Pits

Avocado & Apricot Pits, Watercolor on coldpress paper, 6x8
Avocado & Apricot Pits, Watercolor on coldpress paper, 6x8"

I thought that these apricot pits and this avocado pit, still in a bit of it’s outer papery sheath would be a good subject for using my set of Kremer Pigments’ pan watercolors.  The Kremer watercolors are unusual in that they’re so highly pigmented, mostly opaque and mostly sedimentary. They are quite stable when applied: the colors don’t charge or bleed much into each other, unlike the more volatile quinacridone and other synthetic pigments.

But I found that those qualities make them less suitable for glazing because their opacity and and saturation mean that one layer hides the one beneath it. Half of the colors in my 14-color palette are muted shades of red, brown, gold, green; a few are more brilliant, but so richly colored that they have to be thinned way down to appear transparent.

I guess what I’m saying is that I’m not as familiar with how these colors work together as I am my regular palette of mostly Winsor Newton tube watercolors. It takes practice to have control over one’s media and I felt pretty out of control with these but enjoyed playing with them. I’ll try them again for the next summer leftovers.

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Sketchbook Pages Still Life

Summer Leftovers #1: Rosehips in Watercolor

Rosehips, watercolor on hotpress paper, 6x8"
Rosehips, watercolor on hotpress paper, 6x8"

After yesterday’s major migraine adding insult to a weeklong cold/flu bug, I’m grateful to be back among the living today, even if still less than 100%. It seemed like a good day to start doing some watercolor sketches of the collection of thingees I’ve saved from the summer, including pits from all my favorite stone fruits, shriveled and dried things from plants now gone, and stuff I’ve picked up on walks. These rosehips were the most recent and most colorful; all of the other stuff is in shades of brown and more about texture than color.

Since I’ve gotten used to oil painting alla prima*, it’s interesting to switch to watercolor and slow down to let sections/layers of watercolor dry before each next step. It makes for a nice rhythm and prevents that mindless paint paint paint I run into with oils. Waiting for the paint to dry gives time to step away and and then return to see what’s needed with fresh eyes and a chance to think a bit before putting down the paint.

*Alla Prima: A style of painting where the painting is done in one session while the paint is still wet. From the Italian word which literally means at all at once).