14 October 26
Post With Hat
I am continuing to experiment with my Neocolor IIs overlaid on top of ink continuous line drawings. This hat is hanging outside on a nail hammered into a vertical post at the front of our porch. With the Neocolor IIs I like having semi-opaque pigment to move about with a brush.
12 October 26
Contour and Neocolor II
On Saturday there was a sketchcrawl at the Amtrak station downtown. We went to it briefly but didn’t stay long since we wanted to catch the soccer match between the U.S. Women’s National Team and Spain’s side. I decided I was going to sketch the train station itself, a beautiful but difficult building to sketch, but do it in a hurry, so I opted for a continuous line contour sketch. Continuous line drawing leads to surprisingly interesting sketches, since doubling back on lines and adding disconnected details will increase the line mass.
Yesterday and today I continued with practicing continuous line drawing, this time using black waterproof ink in a fountain pen together with marks from my Neocolor II watersoluble wax crayons, trying to get some bold color into the sketch. Here is my sketch from today, a portion of the bougainvillea on one side of our backyard.
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.
5 October 26
FOMO meets ADHD
It’s Inktober. It’s also Socktober, SAWtober, Birdtober… so many tobers.
I’m mostly doing mashups of Inktober, SAWtober, and Birdtober. They will appear sporadically over the course of the next few weeks…
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.
30 September 26
Grey Ink
On Sunday I went down to Central Park in Davis to do my urban sketch for the day and started drawing in the garden portion, doing a quick undersketch with muted light green colored pencil. I decided then that it was not going to work to develop the sketch in black ink, so I took out a medium grey fineliner I carry in my sketching kit to do the ink drawing. I then painted over it with a mix of sap green, green apatite genuine, and perylene green.
This has gotten me in a phase where I am sketching with these grey fineliners. These are the Faber-Castell Warm Grey IV Pitt Artist Pens. There are subjects such as this garden scene where you want the linework to be muted, and the grey works well here. I am forever rotating through the media I use in my line and wash sketches depending on what seems to have worked recently.
27 September 26
Reminded to Pen a Letter
I recently finished reading Virginia Evans’ The Correspondent, an epistolary novel featuring a retired lawyer and her correspondence with a wide range of people of all ages and backgrounds.
I love writing letters but I don’t do it as often as I used to. A note arrived back in April from a college friend which I hadn’t answered. I sat at the kitchen table and drew a couple of sketches of the Anna’s hummingbird visiting the feeder on my favorite letter-writing paper, Clairefontaine Triomphe. Then I thought they’d make a nice border so I kept drawing them, nature journaling practice being uppermost in my mind following Wild Wonder.
I finished the letter and sent it off, and then I wrote another one. It’s been a year today since my mother died. She was a master letter-writer and I’d like to think she’d be encouraging me to do this more often than I do.
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.
23 September 26
Enhancing My Kit
It should come as no surprise to anyone who’s ever seen me sketching that I like writing and sketching in fountain pen. But sometimes I need something really fine, finer than any of the nibs I have.
At the Wild Wonder Conference I heard about the Lumos pen: a refillable finemarker developed by a guy in the UK to try and avoid sending markers to the landfill. The pen I ordered arrived today, and I’ve been playing with it. I think it will become a permanent fixture in my nature journaling kit…