1 August 25
The Sketchbook Format Dilemma
As evident by many of my recent posts, I keep a daily sketchbook. Because at the beginning of the year I switched over from sketching buildings on weekends to sketching trees, I started sketching in a portrait format sketchbook (a Stillman & Birn 8.5×5.5” softcover Gamma book), since trees tend to be vertical rather than square. This works well for my weekend tree sketches, which tend to be extended sessions away from the house, but less well on weekdays when I just want to do a quick sketch, and a square format book seems best. My current sketchbook is entirely of plant bits, all of which lie happily on a portrait page. I like the consistency of the theme but it might be time to move on from plant stems. This leads to the dilemma of what format should be my next daily sketchbook. Here are some of the issues:
- A square format sketchbook works well for quicker sketches but is not so good for trees. What would be my next subjects for weekend field sketching?
- I have trouble finding subjects for portrait format sketchbooks that are not plant bits. I suppose there is the vacuum cleaner, water bottles, and the cat tower.
- Landscape format sketchbooks are great for, well, landscapes but there’s too much surface to cover for quick weekday sketches.
- I like the Stillman and Birn Gamma paper but the Gamma softcover sketchbooks don’t come in square format. The Alpha ones do but they are a relatively large 7.5” square size.
- Having a background in 4:3 camera formats (the little Panasonic ZS-50, micro four-thirds cameras), I much prefer 4 to 3 ratios for layout within a frame. I don’t know any 4:3 sketchbooks though.
30 July 25
Daily Sketch - Delphinium
Today’s sketch is of a delphinium in our garden. There are not too many flowers left on the plant as a whole, and the seed pods are developing well.
24 July 25
Daily Sketch - Prunus
Here is a sketch of a branch from a small volunteer tree that is growing in the yard on the north side of our house. I’m pretty sure it’s some sort of Prunus, quite possibly Prunus cerasifera ‘Atropurpurea’.
22 July 25
A Photographic Diary
I recently watched a YouTube video by Emily Lowrey (her channel is “Micro Four Nerds”) entitled “how to document your life with your camera (and WHY!)”. I like this concept and am trying it out. One’s day-to-day life produces plenty of photographic material — look for it and have a camera with you. But the photos should be about what you do in your own life rather than other subjects, however visually interesting they may be. In this vein, I went grocery shopping this morning, and here is my record of that event.
20 July 25
Blues Are Hard
I have gotten through my project of selecting 7 different picture profiles for my compact Sony camera. As related previously, I went down this rabbithole because the skies in the reference photos of the trees I’d sketch were tinged cyan (see the example at right). I am better off now after finding some good profiles, but Blues Are Still Hard.
To begin with historically, blue pigments have been very hard to come by. Taking one example, until it was synthesized by the chemist Christian Gmelin in 1828, ultramarine was only obtainable by laboriously preparing the mineral lapis lazuli sourced mainly from Afghanistan. (I should read science writer Kai Kupferschmidt’s book from 2021, Blue: In Search of Nature’s Rarest Color).
Next, in summertime here the skies are blue with nary a cloud to be seen for months at a time. Photographically this becomes a challenge because if I’m exposing on a street-level subject, the skies will tend to be overexposed and blown-out. This is not what the eye sees, since the eye-brain has a much higher dynamic range than any camera. In other words, our visual system is quite capable of taking in a bright blue sky together with details in shadows underneath shrubbery at the same time, but cameras cannot handle this.
I sketch using either watercolors or watercolor pencils as my color medium. Here is a different problem. Consider a scene where one is looking through sunlit leaves up into a bright blue sky. The leaves may end up having a lighter value than the blue sky because they are transmitting direct light. This is really hard to paint in watercolor – one can’t do a uniform blue wash for the sky without laboriously masking out the leaves, and then painting the leaves a very light yellow green. Photographing such a scene isn’t much easier because of aforementioned dynamic range problems.
At least I’ve worked out that the best pigment for painting Northern California skies is cobalt blue. This doesn’t necessarily hold for other places in the world.
18 July 25
Daily Sketch - Figs
Sketched with watercolor pencils and De Atramentis urban gray ink. None of the figs on this tree are ripe yet – maybe another two or three weeks?
17 July 25
Drawing a Postcard
It’s actually very difficult to find postcards of Davis to send to people around the world through Postcrossing. Often people request “pictures of your town” and there really aren’t any photos for sale here of things like the Davis train station or the Arboretum when the redbud is out. But recently someone I was assigned to send a postcard to wanted a bird, an OWL, and preferably a drawing of one.
I like drawing birds of prey and especially owls. I like giving the suggestion of the softness of their feathers. I hope I did this bird some justice… we have a pair locally; I heard one the other night.
14 July 25
Weekend Tree Sketching - Palm
This sketch is from yesterday’s outing to Central Park in Davis. I took my Schmincke pan set of watercolors and appreciated having the cobalt blue handy.
12 July 25
The Profile Selection Project
I am now deep into the project of figuring out which film simulation profiles to select for my little Sony ZV-1. As previously described, there are about 85 profiles in the recipe book, and the camera has slots for 10 of them at a time. I’ll need to pick and choose. Basically I want to cover a range of styles. Of the 10 slots, I will reserve one for scratch, and two of them will be monochrome styles: one low-contrast, and the other high-contrast. This leaves seven for color profiles. The way to figure which to choose is to do lots of testing. So now when I go for my morning and late-afternoon walks I load up the camera with a new profile and take some pictures using it.
At right is an example comparing four different color profiles. The photos were taken one after another.
10 July 25
Weekend Tree Sketching - Cypress
On weekends nowadays I head out to find a tree to draw as my daily sketch. Here is my sketch from this past Sunday of a cypress that is in front of a nearby church. When I sketched it I realized that the watercolors I wanted to paint it with were in my Schmincke pan color set back at home, so I finished it off there. The paints I used were raw umber for the trunk and perylene green and yellow ochre for the foliage.