11 October 26
Perpetual
Today I started a perpetual nature journal. I’m going to do a drawing per week at the UC Davis Arboretum. I ordered a leather-bound journal containing Fabriano hot press paper from Lindsey Meares following a concept by Lara Call Gastinger. Since many drawings will fit on a two-page spread representing a week, this might take five years to fill… The advantage is to chart a defined location over time and follow the changes that happen in the plant and animal life there.
4 October 26
Ameliorating Waterbrush Sin
I’m not saying that using a waterbrush while painting watercolors automatically puts one in a state of sin but I’m not not saying that either. Waterbrushes are very handy art tools for quick watercolor sketches especially in the field, but lack the control of traditional watercolor brushes, in particular in terms of the dilution of the paint. Anyway, it is helpful to test out methods for using actual watercolor brushes on location.
Pica during the Wild Wonder Conference learned about an artist in Cornwall who has come up with a system for making watercolor sketching in the field a little easier. This is a lightweight board that clips to one’s sketchbook and holds a small metal palette magnetically and a little water container. Pica ordered a couple of these “JustGoSketching companions” and today I went to the garden at Central Park to test the kit out with an actual watercolor brush. The setup is at left, and my sketch for the day is at right. I don’t think the kit completely solves the ergonomic problems of field watercolor painting but I do get more interesting brushmarks using an actual watercolor brush.
2 October 26
A Month of Haunting
One of the things I like most of all about October is seeing all the Halloween decorations come out. Since we’ve lived in town I have always taken lots of photos of the decorations. The folks living in this house made sure the skeleton and spiderwebs were in place by the first of the month.
26 September 26
Cormorant Sketching In Realtime
Pica and I are starting to watch recorded sessions from the Wild Wonder Conference that we were unable to catch live. Yesterday we watched a workshop entitled “Argh, It Moved” given by Charlotte Belland, who is a professional animator and art school professor. She presented her primary technique for field sketching of animals, who tend to move when you are trying to sketch them. She summarizes this with the phrase “Observe — Flow — Details”. The first step is to observe the animal carefully, fixating on it for 7 or 10 seconds and trying to map its form to some other familiar object. The second step is to spend a minute or so sketching the animal without glancing back at it, emphasizing its movement flow lines. In the final step one looks at the animal again and begins drawing in the details. We practiced this technique in the class by looking at pairs of bird photos, the bird having moved in the second photo.
I decided I wanted to practice this technique in the field so this morning I went to the UC Davis Arboretum to see what water birds were on the lake there. There was a double-crested cormorant floating in the lake as there often is and I did a series of sketches of it in my nature journal. I am trying to figure out what the best mark-making tools are for me for this technique. After today’s session I think my approach will be to do the flow sketch with a light-valued colored pencil, and draw the details with a combination of more colored pencil, ink, and perhaps wash. My nature journal page from the day is at left.
The cormorant moved out of sight for a while, so I did my urban sketch for the day of a tree on the other side of the lake, as shown at right.
25 September 26
Stumbling Across Treasures
I was walking home from the café near our house the other day and came across this dead butterfly. Painted ladies migrate collectively, several successive generations getting them to where they need to go. I picked it up and brought it home so I could draw it.
24 September 26
Guava Regrowth
Sometime over the past winter the landscapers planted a guava tree out in our backyard. By early summer it didn’t seem to be doing so well —- it was losing its leaves and many of the ones remaining had turned brown on their upper half. We thought the tree had been underwatered and was in trouble so we started deep watering it. In late July a miracle happened! Leaves started budding out all over the tree. By now (see the sketch at left) there is a whole new generation of healthy young leaves all over the tree.
In yesterday’s Davis Enterprise there was a column from the UC Master Gardeners program about heat damage in plants. I think that’s what befell the tree.
(This post and sketch comes from my nature journal page for today. I’m beginning to get the hang of the nature journaling practice).
22 September 26
Slinking Towards Nature Journaling
I have not been very consistent about nature journaling, unlike my daily sketching habit and writing my daily regular journal. After watching some of the Wild Wonder conference last week I’d like to be doing more of it but need to figure out what barriers have been getting in my way. One of this is the sentiment I have to be out in the wilds to do nature journaling, though this is of course not the case. Another is that I’ve been exposed to two major exemplars for nature journaling, neither of which is going to work for me. The first is the Grinnell Method for writing field notes, which I was exposed to as a zoology student 44 years ago. This is very rigorous and scientific but not a great deal of fun. The second is seeing the journals of professional scientific illustrators, which intimidate me in with the quality of their field sketches. What if I instead think of the journal as a record of nature as it comes along in my daily path? Backyard garden notes are good to do here.
This page is from a nature journaling outing I did yesterday to the local arboretum. This isn’t precisely my backyard, but it’s only eight blocks.
20 September 26
Alley Without A Name
Yesterday was the monthly Let’s Draw Davis sketchcrawl. We met downtown at a landmark red English phone booth and then dispersed to do our sketching. Several of us went to the alley between D and E streets which as our organizer Pete Scully pointed out doesn’t seem to have a name. This alley is right behind the Pence Gallery and there is much of visual interest there, both to sketch and to photograph.
17 September 26
More Sketching During Webinars
The Wild Wonder Conference continues. Here are two sessions I attended today.
Austin Kleon gave the keynote address this evening… I’m going to be thinking about what he said for a long time.
15 September 26
Wild Wondering
I’ve attended four zoom presentations today at the Wild Wonder Conference, all of them excellent, but I’m exhausted now. This one was the first, when I was still fresh at 8:30 this morning.
All goats are obnoxious even when they’re pretending to be friendly…
ETA: It was five, not four, zoom presentations, though I snuck out for a coffee during one of them.