Pete's Harbor

Studio painting on paper

Above is my second attempt at this scene - done in the studio from my plein air painting.

Plein air painting on watercolor canvas

Pete's Harbor is a favorite place of mine to paint and last Thursday I had high hopes of creating a good painting on watercolor canvas.  Unfortunately my plein air mojo has left me and it was a bit of a disaster!  The first painting I washed off (great thing about the watercolor canvas!) because the composition was bad. Then I had another go after lunch and that was only a little better.  I had drawn on the canvas with a pencil and that was a bad mistake because second time around I ended up with a scribbled boat floating in the middle of my sky. I had to paint a big pink cloud over it!

Rusty Stuff

I've been attending Kay Duffy's drop-in art class at Hakone Gardens and having a lot of fun with watercolors. Two weeks ago we did rusty stuff using lots of different things like wax paper, salt, cardboard etc., to create texture. Here's my  piece.

Carmel

I spent a couple of days in the wonderful company of other women artists down in Carmel. 

On day One we went to Point Lobos and saw a couple of elderly people watching the crabs in the tide pools

A view of Carmel Valley Ranch from the Organic Garden

Lovers Point Beach

The beach was a wonderful place for people watching. Lots of little children jumped in and out of the waves.  Sue and I found some wonderful kelp and stuff on the beach and fun making a beach collage with it!

Kelp - all sorts of interesting textures and colors!

Sketches from Boston - June

Back in June I visited Boston and managed a few pen sketches.

Courtyard of the Aloft Hotel Lexington

Citgo Sign - famous Boston Landmark

View of Harvard Bridge and Prudential Center from Memorial Drive

More mucking about with acrylics

Foil piece

Today Sue and I had another artistic get together to see what more we could do with our crazy acrylic pieces. We decided to utilize sketches we already had. I added a drawing of a deer to my foil piece. It was a challenge as there is a lot of rough texture on it so the form is still a little vague and the crackle paste I put on last time is a bit dominant yet.

Deer Hunters

On my other piece I had black gessoed over the initial trials and then put a washy layer of white gesso with cling film on that. Once that dried I sketched the deer in and started painting.  As it developed I began to see figures in the background and am in the process of bringing them out.  I added some foil to this piece.  It will get further layers of paint - and depending on how it comes out it may either be finished or gessoed again!
I like the foil technique a lot so I've been going around the house and garden taking foil impressions of anything I can find. All silly fun!

Vasona Hike and Sketch

A little walk in the park turned out to be more fun than I thought.  The weather was changeable, but that made for great skies and changing light. We saw a ton of birds - including goslings and quite a few small herons. We lunched at the foot of the dam - very atmospheric with the dam looming above us, water cascading in front of us and a wonderful metallic clanking sound coming from the roadworks nearby. You could imagine yourself in the War of the Worlds! Lots of people would have thought it terrible - but I enjoyed it enormously! Sadly had to leave early for an appointment so my dam sketch is unfinished and doesn't do it justice.

The dam at Vasona is 1000 feet long and 30 feet high. At the foot of this behemoth a small heron was fishing, two ducks sunbathed and a small group of artists had lunch

Dick Zunkel Demo at Los Gatos Plaza Park

The last sketch I did, using brush pens not the dip pen. My fountain looks more like a collection of ghosts!

Thursday's demo by Dick Zunkel was excellent. It reintroduced me to the joy of drawing with dip pens and ink - I had forgotten what wonderfully expressive lines you can get with them. The only problem was that the ink seemed to get everywhere! Dick's style is very loose and dynamic and looks deceptively easy. I had a hard time getting to grips with it - I think I should have been working on larger paper.

I caught the Western Wheelers having lunch right in front of us. Drawn directly with the pen.