Watercolors and sketching in Yosemite

Over the holidays, we went on a trip to Yosemite. I brought my stuff and did some sketching with a new Pentel Pocket Brush Pen.  I LOVED this thing!  Has an ink cartridge, but comes with actual (synthetic) bristles.  Very repsonsive.  Provides a nice variety of line width, as well as some nice bristly dry brush work, etc. I also did a plein air watercolor piece while I was out in one of the meadows.

Here's the plein air watercolor sketch (perhaps 9"x9")-

 

And here are some of the ink sketches I did--

Yosemite Falls in the winter-

Various scenes from the valley-

and some quick sketches of people in one of the cafes.  

A good time was had.  I've not sketched so much in a long time.  :)  The valley in the winter is wonderful.  Practically deserted.  Cold and quiet.  Parking's a breeze too!  LOL!

How to Paint a Mural- Step Nine- Grassy Meadow

Happy Winter Solstice!!  :)

Well, back in September I had the opportunity to get a few good painting sessions in, and that means.... progress!  I got all the grasses blocked in.  I used a variety of green, with more browns at the base. For the foreground grasses, one is more a yellow-green and the other a blue-green.  In the background I used a grey-green to help push the distance.

So far, around 70 hours.  I figure I'm aiming for 80-90.

Step 1- Grass Blocked in with highlights

Step 2- Scrumbling and Glazing
In the end, I felt the green was too green, and that it need to get toned down.  I also wanted to try out glazing and scrumbling, so I thinned a green-brown mixture I'd made with Acrylic Glazing Medium and painted it over the green and then "scrubbed it out" with a dry rag.  The effect is subtle, but there.  It basically got ground into the deeper crevices of the wall's texture, and pushed that experience more.  It looks as if there's a "heavier shadow" in the second pic, but there's not.  Same exact lighting, just a darker brown is ground into the wall's texture.

Step 3- Additional mid-ground grey green
I decided to add one more layer of green, to overlap and push the back, well, farther back, and the foreground farther forward.  I like the effect.  It's busy and alive, snake-like, but all very vertical.  It still reads as grass to me, busy and varied tonally, but, hopefully, it doesn't detract from what is the true center of the image- the red poppies- and instead leads the eye to them in a lively, winding sort of way.

edit- Addendum-
I took this closeup photo and made some notes to show the step by step process I went through in making the grass.

I pondered layering it a darker shade at the bottom of the wall, on a gradient upwards, but the truth is I think that ship has sailed.  I should have done it at the beginning, and didn't.  Now it'll be an incredible pain, and I'm not sure if it'd be worth it for the effort-- it already reads well enough, and I don't think I could replicate the feathering I got in there with the greens.  In the end, I think it's a lesson to be learned for future experiences, and this will just have to represent the best I can do now.

Here's the current panorama that I've got as of mid-December.  Getting there!  I may make it to the finish line in 7-8 months! LOL!

Poem- Thank You, Mary Oliver

I've been wanting to share a number of "older" poems from the last few years.  This one, in response to the poetry of Mary Oliver, was finished a few months ago, but started in late 2012.

I like Mary Oliver, but I'm not a "fan" or anything.  I've read her work, and own a book.  Her words are worth reading and giving your time to.  But a year or so ago, she spoke in SF at the Arts Center.  They broadcast it on NPR.  I hadn't written much for over a year at the time, and felt very dry creatively.  I was driving home in the dark, I'm not sure why or from where, but you could hear her coming on stage.  Her voice was old but steady.  She read some poems and spoke, and she gave, in speaking, each word the kind of respect that's heartening to hear.  And something sort of woke up in me.  I sat in the driveway in the car,  in the dark, and listened and listened until my throat was full.


Thank you, Mary Oliver



Those words were dead
when I found them in your dark pond.
I listened to you
pull them from the water.  They glistened
like seal skin or trout
in the moonlight, as you lay their bodies
on the sand.

Thank you Mary Oliver.
You did not bow to the twig,
but embraced it.  Americans
don’t like bowing, but are game for a good conversation.
You conversed with the twig
as it hatched the morning
from its calloused spindles.

Mary Oliver, you
had a kind of cadence
I agreed with. 
Where words have hands
and are used for lifting.
You weren’t afraid of silence,
or that the smooth gun metal chain might break.

You laid your hands upon the fish, no fuss,
and words began to slap against the peppered sand.
Eager for the baptism, you barely had to help them
scootch from the shore.  I liked that— no fuss
about the word laid sideways
in the service of life.  So thank you, Mary Oliver,
for the smell of tadpoles and the rippled ink.



9/6/12

Making a mural with my daughter in her room

I just wanted to share something different today.  Many, many months ago my daughter, Natasha, asked me if we could make a mural in her room.   She's 5.  I think it was after I started working on the big one in my bedroom.  I had gotten her a smock for Xmas last year and she was eager to use it.  I said sure, and so I sat down with her around May and had her draw up some pictures of what she had in mind, asking her questions and guiding her.  She had some birthday money, and so she decided she wanted to get her own paint.  We went out to Michael's and got some simple bottles of acrylic paint and some simple brushes. 

We sketched things out in pencil first. I helped some with that.  But then most of the bulk painting was done by her.  I mostly came back along and cleaned  up the edges now and then, gave some pointers about color design, put in the perspective on the chair to make it read.  Stuff like that.  It's been very piecemeal over the last 6 months, a bit here and a bit there, depending on her mood and mine both matching up, but we finished it the other day. She's an artist! :)  Fun!

Here's the preliminary drawings she made.  They're of a dinosaur teacher and a dinosaur student.  I did the actual writing, but she did the rest.  There's a lot of joy in these images. 

 

Watercolors- Using Masking Fluid and Plastic Wrap for an Abstract Flower

I got some new masking fluid in early September, and I got around to playing with it.  Here's the pic--

So, finally, some success with the masking fluid! I've ruined a few paintings in the past with masking fluid, and never could figure out why.  I was getting a bit of tearing whenever I would try and lift it.

So, I read a bit on how to use it, and discovered that the most common reasons for failure were either 1) that it was an old bottle that had separated too much (mine was almost 3 years old), 2) that it was the Windsor & Newton brand of masking fluid (which mine was) or 3) that you either applied it while the paper was still even a little bit damp (I often did), or 4) that you removed it before it was totally and completely dry (I did this too).  So, no wonder I'd been failing. 

Anyways, this time me and Tasha practiced splattering the fluid, and painting some marks.  I would do this one night then paint the next day.  Peel in the evening, then paint again.  Splatter in the morning then paint in the evening, etc.  So far, the experiment has been fun!  And all in the all the painting might be considering successful.

1. Here's the first step, with the masking fluid still largely on in an number of areas.  It's where it looks very orange and kind of shiny.  I just did a wet, playful, loose wash in the background and let it run.  Black bleeds occurred where the watercolor was caught and trapped by the masking fluid!

2. I laid down the first set of yellow-green washes in what would become the background.  Me and Tasha recently played with plastic wrap (Xmas red!) and watercolors, in a bout of experimentation and internet research.  Fun stuff!  Makes amazing, random, natural shapes and patterns.  Pardon the cooky perspective.

3. Here you can see the beginnings of of the background patterns.  I've also begun to peel off some of the masking fluid- but not all of it!  I decided to go for a more mottled, varied look, by removing different areas of masking fluid and painting on different layers at different times.

4.  Here you can see background after I've punched in 2-3 layers of blue green, as well as a few more applications of plastic wrap.  All the masking fluid is now off too.  Here I've also begun to map out the shape of the flower more-- I put some blues around its edges, as if it were lit from the center, and I've dropped in some more red and yellow into the center, to draw the eye in.

5.  All done.  Here I've added some streaks of blue-green into the flower itself, to push the sense of emanating light through some cast shadows, as well as to define the sense of the crenulated  (??a word??) texture.  I've also done a few more washes in various corners to add a sense of background light coming from one direction.

Watercolors- Wet Red Poppies

I did this one on Aquabord back in early September.  Aquabord is a kind of hard, plaster surface that you can paint directly on with watercolors.  It's not on paper, so there's no prep or stretching required.  Once you're finished, if you want to protect it you just seal it with a varnish and you can hang it.  Some come pre-attached to a mounting frame as well.  What's cool is that you can also just put the whole thing under running water, rub it a bit, and it all washes away.  Cool!  But a bit scary....

It's had to work this kind of surface aggressively, as the paint will eventually come up.  Instead, I really just dove in and did my layering smoothly and quickly.  This works very well on surface, and it doesn't muddy up at all.  In the end, a very different experience than paper, but fun!  I loved that prep wasn't required at all.  That really got me painting.

Of course, it costs much more than normal paper does, but I've got to prep so much with the normal paper that I don't paint as much as I'd like.  With this stuff, it may cost a bit more, but it seems like I might actually paint a bit more because of the lack of prep required.

Poem- Folding Clothes

I wrote a new poem last and thought I'd share it.  It was a quiet afternoon and I had chores to do. Kat was out with Tasha.  So I sat down to fold.  I could hear a neighbor working on something with a hammer.  There was someone else listening to a Spanish pop-song on a radio.  Everything felt sort of pleasantly peaceful and not-too-close.  I like some of Emily Dickinson's poems, where she's engaged in trivial, day to day activities and observations.  I like that sort of attentiveness.  I like to imagine someone far away or in the future reading it and wondering "What was daily life like in the early 21st century in the US?  Were they just like us?"  I've written a poem about cooking muffins before, to give an example, and have often thought a sort of Ode to the Ladle would be fun and informative to write.  Anyways, here's this one.

Folding Clothes

I like folding clothes

when the house is quiet

and the windows open.

I tuck the pockets in first, for the pants.

Then I fold them in quarters, tugging at the seams.

The towels I fold in thirds

like my father taught me,

the shorts in half .  The bras

I fold cup into cup, with the straps bundled inside

like a bowl of noodles.  The socks—

I separate them and match at the end, like my mother.

I match

 seam to seam.

I tuck the arms in.

I drape them properly on my lap.

I fold them in half, then half again,

            so they’ll fit in the drawers.

I pull the folds tight, and I place them in their pile.

You can get into a rhythm,

if you’re careful and quiet,

            much like the drapes,

                                                billowing and receding,

that sigh now

against the wood like waves.

9/22/13