A Peek Into Studio B

Our bird illustration workshop Sunday was at the Davis Art Center. Next door to our classroom was the weaving studio, Studio B. It was unoccupied, so I poked my nose in. Hundreds of weaving bobbins were on the shelves in the studio, the yarns arranged in color order forming a very pretty sight.

Once again I’ve gotten fascinated by color and its mysteries. But my peek into that room reminds me why I am much more interested in drawing and watercolor painting than color photography — it seems such a hard problem to photographically capture the color in that room and make a successful print of it. Why not just work directly and apply pigment on brush to paper?

Bug Art

This artist clearly would have the upper tarsus in a submission to the current edition of qarrtsiluni.

Subtle Yet Precise

Silverpoint: you draw on a prepared ground with a stylus that is made of silver. The metal leaves traces on the ground which then darken (tarnish) yet never become really black.

Numenius and I went for a walk today in the hills, given that we’ll be doing Thompson Canyon for the Christmas Count in two weeks and I haven’t been hiking too many hills what with oil spills and whatnot. We saw a hermit thrush in a buckeye, which was now all bare apart from a few beautiful pendulant fruits. (We brought some home to draw and paint: think horse chestnut/conker, with all that velvet warmth, but twice the size.)

Oh, said I, that would be a good Bateman subject. Nah, said Numenius, too monochrome, it’s more up Keith Hansen’s alley.

Nah, said I, that’s too dark, black. This was subtle gray. Warm grays on silver grays. A moment…

Silverpoint. I gotta get me one of those. Good thing I have a brother who’s a jeweler. (We chanced upon the Open Studios on Point Reyes last week and saw the work of Gary Smith who had some very large silverpoints, stretching the medium to places I didn’t know it could be stretched, but that’s why you go to these things…)

Persimmon

This persimmon came from our neighbor across the street Mary. I sketched it with Inktense pencils.

Illustration Friday: The Zoo

The Illustration Friday topic this week is The Zoo, so here is another sketch from our trip to the zoo at the beginning of the month. I sketched this giraffe with a fountain pen and a marker pen.

Calamari And True Love

Two graffiti from the road leading from our place into campus and town. The first is under the freeway right near campus. The text reads “Looks Like Rain”.

The second one at right is from the bridge over Putah Creek. I expect it will last longer than the first one: the campus grounds people usually paint over graffiti under the freeway pretty quickly.

Tertials and Telescopes

Pica finally had a day off oil spill duty (she goes right at it again tomorrow, having to shepherd a national media crew around the Cordelia center at 8 in the morning) just in time for us to attend the Central Valley Bird Symposium down in Stockton. This event has the usual mix of field trips and indoors workshops, but we went down for two reasons — to attend Keith Hansen’s workshop on bird sketching, and for Pica to buy a new spotting scope.

Keith starts his bird sketches with two circles (or ellipses), body and head. In pencil, with eraser. I don’t even generally bring pencils when I go sketching, preferring to be bold in ink. I do see the point though. Keith worked up to an excellent overhead pencil view of a red-tailed hawk, done completely from memory. I decided maybe I should have brought the Derwent Graphitints.

Then to the optics question. It is surprisingly hard to properly compare optics when contemplating a purchase, for in general places that have a wide selection of binoculars and telescopes are few and far between. The best store in Northern California for this task (Out of This World) is way up in Mendocino. This is why one waits for events like the birding symposium because the dealer from Mendocino came down to our neck of the woods with assorted goodies. Pica quickly confirmed that the scope she was investigating was the one she really wanted (the 50mm Nikon ED Fieldscope), but tested out eyepieces before going with the 13-30x zoom instead of the 20x wide angle. She also learned to expect lots of comments saying “oh, what a cute scope!”

Once we got home, I practiced with the Graphitints a bit, but not on a bird, see above.

Baseball note — the new Stockton Sheraton where the symposium was held is right by the ballpark for the Stockton Ports, which is the Single-A minor league team for the Oakland A’s. A nice little stadium — it would be fun to go to a game there next year.

Arrival of New Sketchbooks

Finding the perfect sketchbook is as chimerical as finding the perfect planner: you basically need to make your own. Well, now you can: on a recommendation by John Muir Laws, I checked out Komtrak, a quaintly archaic company out of Plainview, New York, which offers completely customizable sketchbooks and notebooks (and, it must be said, planners).

The three sketchbook options I ordered arrived today. The paper options include drawing, multi-surface, arches cold press, a very fine paper for pen and ink work. You can get pastel paper, or just cut up your own and get it punched at Kinko’s or some other such place: the vinyl-covered sketchbooks can be refilled easily.

I tried a couple of the surfaces but will hope to put these books through their paces this weekend.

Brush Pen in the Zoo

Every time we go on a sketching outing we are always faced with the crisis of what art materials to pack. Not having to carry the materials on a week-long backpacking trip means the luxury of porting drawing implements one never ends up using. Of course I try to guess what will be most useful, but the guess is usually somewhat off.

My experiment yesterday at the zoo with the waterbrush loaded with ink was interesting — I like the technique, but the particular waterbrush I had was leaking too much ink onto my hands. I ended up using mainly a sepia Faber-Castell brush artist pen together with watercolor wash. The red pandas were simply crying out for lots of rich burnt sienna. At left is one of them being fed bamboo leaves. I also drew lots of the big cats — at right is a tiger I sketched just before we headed out.

Sketchcrawl XVI: Sacramento Zoo

There were about eleven of us at the Sketchcrawl though I think we added some numbers along the way (it goes like this: What, are you guys in a class? No, this is worldwide sketching day. Oh. That’s really cool. Turning to partner: I think we should go and get some paper and a pencil and start drawing. Haha, the cult’s expanding…)

Some really fine artists were among the bunch, and a good time was had by all, especially by young George who’s in line to be the next zoo docent: “That’s a giant anteater. It’s bigger than you are. Daddy, can we go on the train?”