Ink & watercolor 5.5″x3.25″ (larger)

I’m back from my week-long workshop with Camille Przewodek in Petaluma. It was a powerful learning experience and an incredible opportunity two learn from two masters, Camille and her husband Dale Axelrod.  They studied for many years with Henry Hensche at the Cape Cod School of Art and are carrying on and expanding upon Hensche’s and Hawthorne’s work with color and light.

We painted in beautiful scenic locations from wetland marshes to the quaint village of Nicasio and the last day painted four models by the river that runs alongside Camille’s studio in charming and historic downtown Petaluma. We also did Hensche’s traditional colored block studies. All painting was done outdoors in bright sunlight and the weather couldn’t have been better.

I’ll write more about what I learned at the workshop when my paintings are dry and easier to handle, photograph and post.  In the meantime, here’s just a corner of the huge Mothers Day bouquet my son Cody surprised me with before we went to Brushstrokes Studio, a cute little pottery painting place in Berkeley. Cody and I decorated catfood bowls while his significant other designed a beautiful cup and daughter M painted a plate with a beach scene as a memorial for her grandmother who recently passed away. Then it was off to Pyramid Brewery for a yummy Mothers Day dinner accompanied by refreshing Pyramid Hefeweizen Ale served with a wedge of lemon.

Ink and watercolor, 9×6 (larger)

This was my view while I was getting my hair cut on Friday. The beautiful peonies were an apology gift to my hairdresser from one of her clients. I don’t know what the client had done wrong but I thought the combination of the scissors, hairbrush and flowers made an interesting still life.

I’m going to be in a painting workshop all week with Camille Przewodek in Petaluma and may not have a chance to post until I return. It should be an exciting and intense week of painting. It’s also a vacation from work (whoopee) and I intend to enjoy every moment!

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Once everyone left the office I could finally concentrate on a complicated project. By the time I finished and headed out it was nearly 8:00 p.m. I arrived at the BART station just as my train was pulling away and the flashing sign said it would be 20 minutes until the next one. I was exhausted, hungry and alone on the platform with nothing to do.

Within a few minutes, more late commuters began to arrive, sit down and kill time. I grabbed my sketchbook and the 20 minutes flew by. I drew the people above while waiting (felt pen added at home because I liked the negative space) and the folks below on the train ride home.

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Ink & watercolor (Larger)

Saturday I painted wtih the East Bay Plein Air Painters at the foot of 5th Avenue in Oakland. It’s an amazing little enclave of funky art studios, rusty old boats in a beat-up marina, and industrial buildings not far from Jack London Square.

I arrived very late, being unable to push myself this weekend to move quickly or arise early. I did this one little watercolor sketch sitting in the hot sun and took a lot of photos. I was fascinated by the many varieties of fire extinguisher equipment on all the old waterfront shacks (I’m easily amused, I suppose) and painted the oil below from one of the photos I took on Saturday, working from the image displayed on my computer screen.

Oil on panel, 8×6″ (Larger)

Here’s a photo from the 5th Avenue Marina, or, as it says in the photo, the “Oakland Riviera”:

Click image to enlarge and see the soldiers on the missile. I’ll be posting more of my photos and paintings from 5th Avenue soon.

Oil on panel, 14×11″ (larger)

These roses were making me sneeze. I’d set up the still life last Monday and then ran out of time on the painting and left it set up all week. When I finally got back to painting today, the studio smelled like like a perfume factory. That might be a pleasant experience if I wasn’t allergic and didn’t dislike strong scents, especially roses.

My goal for this painting was to be loose, work quickly, trying to get some of the freedom I experience with my line drawing and watercolor wash, while secondarily trying to pay attention to color and light.

Here are the steps along the way: (to see the steps, please click “Continue Reading” below)

First I sketched with a light blue Nupastel and then when I had the drawing about right, went over the pastel with a thin wash of blue paint:

Then I started blocking in the color:

This was as far as I got on Monday before coming back to it today:

I decided to change the color of the cloth in the painting and not have the vase in the corner as it is in this photo of the still life set up. And of course the flowers opened and kept changed during the week.

This painting was a lot of fun. As usual I think I liked the earliest stages best, but was pleased with several aspects of the finished painting nevertheless. I may be tempted to clean up a few areas later, but for now, it’s time to move on to the next.

Ink & watercolor (larger)

I was folding my laundry and admiring my collection of wonderful SmartWool socks when it struck me: I haven’t lost a single sock since I began living alone. When I was married with kids, socks disappeared on a regular basis and I had a drawerful of one-of-a-kind socks.

My son still comes over to do his laundry but even so, only one sock temporarily migrated but he brought it back (a year later at the insistence of his girlfriend), along with a pair of my undies that had somehow ended up in his laundry.

There’s pros and cons to living alone, of course. One downside is that if you do lose something, you have nobody to blame for it. Even now, when something goes missing, my first thought is that one of my sons must have taken it. But my only available scapegoats are my cats.

Fiona the calico does like to steal my SmartWool socks (maybe they smell a bit like animals, being made of wool?). I try to keep them away from her, since she tosses them around and wrestles with them and when I find them under the bed they are shredded and holey.

At least she doesn’t eat them. My friend Marean has a beautiful Sheltie who eats her socks whole, and has had to have stomach surgery to have a “sock-ectomy.”

Ink & watercolor, 9×6″ (larger)

When I picked these roses yesterday evening, they were heartbreakingly fresh, new and beautiful. I put them in a vase of water in the kitchen, planning to paint them today. This morning I found them laying on the counter where they’d obviously been without water too long and looked limp.

Either they jumped out of their vase or my cats had a hand (er… paw) in their escape. After a few hours back in water they plumped right back up and were a joy to draw. I only had about an hour and that was just enough time to make a happy ink and watercolor.

But why do I feel so sad seeing the beauty of my seven rose bushes and thick patch of irises all loaded with flowers? It’s as if I’m already mourning their demise, knowing how temporary their burst of color and vibrancy is before winter comes again.

Is it my enhanced awareness of the cycle of life and death as I approach one of those milestone birthdays this June? Or is that time seems to be moving so fast these days that I can picture the blooming season flying by like those time-lapse films where the flowers sprout, bloom, shrivel and die within moments.

Instead of feeling sad about their demise (and my own, for that matter), I need to remember the Buddhist teaching of being in the present moment, accepting that everything changes, everything dies; that desire and clinging cause suffering and that letting go relieves it.

So with that, I will allow my flowers to live and die as nature sees fit (as if I had any other choice!), and will enjoy them while they’re here. I’ll try to make the most of my own moments while I’m here too, with as much acceptance as I can. And maybe I’ll finally return to my Zen meditation practice which always brought me such joy and peace, and made all of life more vibrant.

Ink & Kremer watercolors (larger)

I’m probably going to regret this post tomorrow so I apologize in advance if you find the image unsavory. It’s just that I was so tired tonight all I wanted to do was curl up with a good book and a big bowl of popcorn. To avoid the carb overload and squeeze in a little fun after a long work day, I tried to inspire myself to draw a bit. Looking for a subject, I wandered through the house and saw my shiny, excellent Toto toilet.

I highly value competence, good design, and well-made tools (from cars to combs, to clocks to computers–anything that helps manage my daily life I consider a tool). My Toto toilet is a terrific tool. It never has the problems my other WC does (which requires keeping a plunger nearby it at all times).

Here are some other tools I use and appreciate regularly for their great design and functionality: Soltek easel, iPhone, Toyota RAV 4, electric teakettle, Canon MP610 Scanner/Printer, TiVo, Canon Power Shot SD800IS camera, Photoshop, caller ID, Cheap Joes Golden Fleece brushes for watercolor and Robert Simmons Signet brushes for oil, ancient Eagle Creek backpack, my slippers, my bed…

Just writing this list makes me realize how lucky I am and how much I have to be grateful for, and this is just in the tools department, not the really important stuff of life, like friends, family and health.

That’s the great thing about drawing. I start out grumpy and tired and end up feeling grateful. So maybe I won’t regret this post after all.

One last thing: why is grateful spelled “grate” and not “great?” Grate is what you do with cheese or carrots. Great means good. Full of great makes more sense than full of grate.

OK, I had to look it up on Dictionary.com, another wonderful tool:

• Grate in grateful comes from the Latin, grātus, which means pleasing.
• Grate (framework of metal bars) comes from L crāt- (s. of crātis) which means wickerwork, hurdle or crate.
• Grate (as in grating cheese or grating on your nerves) originally comes from German, kratzen to scratch.
• GREAT comes from Groat, which was a silver coin of England, equal to four pennies, issued from 1279 to 1662 and which was larger than other coins in former use.

Oh the poor English learners! What a complex melting pot the English language is!

11 colors x 11 colors = Joy! (Larger)

Richard Schmid said it best, when writing about his experience with doing these charts when he was an art student:

“When I finished I knew more about my paint than I had ever thought possible. It was an astonishing experience—imagine being taken into the kitchen of a great chef and shown everything he could do with flavors—that was what it was like for me! There was nothing tedious or boring about doing the charts; each was a revelation of the power that awaited me…”

I’ve been working on these charts for about two weeks and it has been an amazing experience, just as Schmid described. I’ve had moments of sheer delight at the unexpected appearance of a beautiful coppery color or a lovely mulberry. I was flown back in time to memories of dipping easter eggs in dye and seeing the colors emerge, and could almost smell the scent of the redwood forest with the appearance of sharp dark greens and rich deep reds.

The purpose of doing the charts is to see, understand, and remember how they behave. They also provide a wonderful resource to refer to again and again. I mixed 11 colors with each other and then lightened them in 5 steps, so that the first row is pure color and the last row is a tinted white. Adding more colors, more steps…the possibilities are endless! These could also be done with watercolor, using water instead of white paint.
(Please click “Continue Reading” for more…).

Before I did these charts I did a number of others to narrow down the paints I’d use in my “final” palette. I’d been using mostly Gamblin paints but have switched to Winsor Newton. After doing tests comparing the intensity, brightness and consistency I strongly preferred the WNs.

The basic palette I settled on is Cadmimum Lemon, Cadmium Yellow, Yellow Ochre Pale, Cadmium Orange, Winsor Red, Alizarin Permanent, Burnt Sienna, Winsor Violet, French Ultramarine, Manganese Hue, Viridian.

The four charts in the first thumbnail below are Cad Lemon, Cad Yellow, Yellow Ochre Pale and Cad Orange. The 2nd thumbnail has Burnt Sienna, Winsor Red, Alizarin Permanent, and Winsor Violet. The last set of charts is Ultramarine, Manganese and Viridian and one chart with all of those colors unmixed. It also has some Cadmium Reds and is labeled as such. Click each thumbnail for a close-up view.

To paint the squares I used a small palette knife on a Fredrix 12×16″ canvas pad (actual primed canvas sheets in a pad) that I taped with 1/4″ artist tape into one inch squares. A palette knife makes the process much quicker because you can quickly wipe the paint off the knife without having to clean a brush before moving on to the next color.

To help me easily get the order right, I made a little spreadsheet in Excel. If you click to enlarge the image, you’ll see that each row in the spreadsheet matches a top row in one of the charts. On each row, the left column is the primary color for the chart that is mixed with each of the colors moving across to the right.

The detailed instructions I followed are in Richard Schmid’s book Alla Prima: Everything I know About Painting (expensive, but a worthwhile investment). Here’s a brief paraphrased excerpt:

1. Top row across each chart is pigment as it comes from the tube. The vertical columns are those same pigments or mixtures with white added in increasing amoutns, like a little value scale for each color.
2. Bottom row should be just off white, as light as possible while still being an identifiable color.
3. Middle row should be the value halfway between top and bottom rows and will vary depending on how darkor light the color is.
4. Second and fourth rows should be halfway between the rows above/below them.
5. First chart is each pigment straight from the tube and then lightened down to make 5 values. The second chart is Cadmium Lemon mixed with each palette color (top row) with the Cad Lemon predominating, then lightened with white down to five values. Continue with a new chart for each of the palette colors.

This has been a tremendous learning experience and a very enjoyable process. I highly recommend it.

Ink & watercolor, 8×6″ (larger)

When we had all our paintings lined up to view after our plein air paint-out today, a very cheery homeless man passed by, examined everyone’s work, and announced that my oil painting (below) was the only one he would buy, repeating this several times. It wasn’t as high praise as one of the others in the group got: this is the third week in a row she’s sold her painting right off her easel!

I started the day with the oil painting below, trying to make use of some of the color mixing theory I’ve been studying. I was hungry to do some more detailed drawing too, so after the critique, I put away my painting gear and got out my sketchbook to do the ink and watercolor above.

Oil on panel, 8×10″ (larger)

Brick buildings are rare in California as they do not tend to survive earthquakes. But Hotel Mac, this three-story, red brick building in Pt. Richmond, a quaint, bayside community, was built in 1911, and must have weathered many quakes over the years.

Pt. Richmond is only a 15 minute drive from my house but I’d never been there before. I was pleasantly surprised by this little town on a hill. The street is lined with charming cafes and just over the hill is a huge, beautiful waterfront park (Miller/Knox Regional Shoreline) with gorgeous views of San Francisco across the water, a lagoon, and a railroad museum. I’m definitely going back there to paint again!