Daily Painting – Tujunga valley
Watercolor on 140# paper 7″ x 11″
Today one of my plant loving friends offered a potted ficus tree to a good home, and we happily drove over to his hillside home in Tujunga to pick it up. On the way back I was treated to a view of the valley from the vantage point of the Verdugo hills. It’s typical California chapparal – scrubby brush with dry grass below. But in the foggy cool light of the afternoon, the colors were atypically desaturated, a nice change from our usual tropical sunniness. A patch of beavertail cactus decorates the left hillside. And yes, that’s a datura meteloides (locoweed) plant growing close to the pavement. Its white whirled flowers are the ones that Castaneda’s Don Juan and Georgia O Keefe were both so fond of, for distinctly different reasons. So, bit by bit, you’ll get a feeling for my natural habitat.
Near Lake Piru
Watercolor on paper – For Sale
I posted this so late last night that I didn’t even get time to write anything, sorry.
More thoughts on painting later today … work calls …
Daily Painting – Sycamore Sentinel
7″ x 11″ Watercolor on 140# paper
SOLD
A sycamore at Eaton Canyon in the early fall, the San Gabriel mountains in the background. Do you see the white bird flying in the background over the mountain? It wasn’t intentional, just a little white space left by the twist of my brush as I was putting in the mountains. In fact, I didn’t see it until after I scanned it. Funny how these things are …
I’m not quite sure what’s happened in the last couple of days, or where this somewhat new direction is coming from, but for the moment I’m not going to question it, and just follow it and see what happens.
Descanso Grape Arbor
11 x 14″ watercolor on 140# paper
This week I was not able to enjoy the company of our paintout group due to work conflicts, so when things settled down in the evening, I finished a painting that I began last week, plein air. It is a view of a pathway at my beloved Descanso Gardens – a path that goes by the native plant area where there is a small arbor covered with grapevines. As I was telling my art friend Belinda last week, I feel especially drawn to paths, roads, bridges and other sorts of landscape features that lead to somewhere else – perhaps somewhere mysterious and wonderful. And the color green – oh how I love green, which has always been my favorite color, and probably always will be.
Painting a Day – Country Roads
Original watercolor – 10.5″ x 7″ – available
Although much of Santa Barbara is cosmopolitan and sophisticated, there are some rural areas where abandoned roads still sprawl over undeveloped land in the foothills of the Santa Ynez Mountains.
I wanted to climb over that little wire fence and see where the forgotten path would lead, but I didn’t really want to get stopped or questioned for trespassing. Now that the heat of summer has passed, it’s the very best time of year for getting out and overindulging in the beauty of nature. Within six weeks, the first of the trees will start changing in Southern California and the skies will be a little bluer as the heat haze becomes a memory, blown away by cooler autumn gusts.
It’s a dangerous time for fire, as well, and I hope that this season we don’t see the firestorms that have ravaged parts of our local mountains in previous years.
Do you have a favorite season for getting out and drawing, painting, or photographing nature? Is it this one?
Mango and knife study
A watercolor sketchbook study in preparation for an oil painting. This sketch is 10″ x 7.25″
I bought the mango last week, attracted by its shape and color, but it wasn’t quite ripe yet. As it aged, it changed in wonderful ways, developing new speckles and coloration.
My patient husband looks at it longingly.
Are we having margaritas yet?
Any day now, dear, any day now …
Santa Barbara Botanic Garden
Watercolor – 11 x 15 cold press paper – plein air at the Santa Barbara CA Botanic Garden for Native Plants
Today we took a drive up to Santa Barbara to scout a location for a work project, and my dear husband suggested I turn it into a painting day as well. I had never visited the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden, which enjoys a reciprocal membership with Descanso Gardens, so we spent a little time there in the early afternoon.
Unlike Descanso, all of the plantings are California natives. Just walking through the oak groves and open meadows reminded me what natural beauty we have here without planting water-demanding non-natives. I found a shady place at the entrance to one of the trails and set up my easel.
This was painted using three brushes: a one inch flat, a #12 round and a ‘rigger,’ which is a thin, flexible springy little brush. As usual, the light was changing rapidly as the sun is wont to do. Even in the 75 min. or so that I spent painting, the shadow patterns had shifted dramatically.
So I’m going to call this an entry for the “Go Somewhere New and Draw (Paint) what you see” challenge.
Here’s what the scene really looked like … with my easel in place …
Geranium way (sketch)
Another fast and rough sketch in the 9 x 12″ Raffine… in preparation for doing another painting in watercolor or oils. This one was painted with a half inch flat and a #12 round. Late afternoon on a tropical California side street.
In fact, it’s right next door to this house Capistrano Fence which I painted about a month ago.
The 20th anniversary issue of Watercolor magazine came in the mail the other day … oh, my the inspiration. If you haven’t seen it, go get it at the newsstand. The work is just outstanding … it makes you want to vow not to let a day go by without painting.
Sycamore Grove
Yesterday I got my first Raffine sketchbook by Lana, recommended by Lin Frye, so I decided to give it a test drive. The 9 x 12″ paper is very thick and slightly absorbent, and I’d say it takes a wet wash pretty well without bleeding through the back side of the paper. There was only slight buckling. I used a 1″ flat brush for this sketch and a thin flexible “rigger” brush. For quick studies (this took about 15-20 minutes) and an economical price tag (12.99 for a 48 page book) this might just be my favorite so far. I even like the slightly rough texture which makes it possible to get some interesting textures.
I haven’t tried a watercolor Moleskine yet, but the large size of this sketchbook appeals in that it allows me to use a bigger brush and to concentrate on large areas of color and value. Watercolor colors used: light red, quin magenta, burnt sienna, cobalt blue, sap green, yellow green.
In the coming days I’ll also try it out with ink, colored pencil, charcoal, pencil and acrylic, if you’d like to check back to see the results of my experiments …
P.S. My first eBay watercolor painting auction concludes Sunday night …
Click to see auction
Eaton Canyon Abstract
This was one of the other watercolor sketches that I did on our paint out day last Tuesday. (Compare with the other sketch – scroll down.) It was toward the end of the morning and I just grabbed a smaller piece of Fabriano to experiment on with more calligraphic brushwork. I had no expectations which was quite freeing, actually. The limited palette encouraged me to think more about shape and value and less about mixing a whole bunch of colors. Some was painted wet in wet, and some painted after it dried. I’m thinking that this might be a good warmup exercise for the next outing, but because the light continues to degrade as the morning goes on, I usually want to get busy on a bigger piece.
