Cherry blossoms at Descanso

Around the house tonight: "Daylight savings? What? We spring forward tonight?! Hey, can't we get some kind of heads-up, here? Maybe a time-out from politics? Hello!
[Both checking different calendars] Oh ... wait, it's here. Argh. But, still!"



Cherry Blossoms Click to see this photo's flickr page
Arty note: watercolor pencils. I removed the label from the sketch book, so I can't remember the brand or type paper, but, yes, the paper is toned, maybe even recycled, and not too rough, like normal tan craft paper typically is. I've been enjoying working on the toned paper lately. I sure wish my arms were toned. But I digress.

I stopped over at Descanso Gardens Friday, since I was in the area. I knew the cherry blossoms (I want to type "cheery") were in bloom and wanted to see them - the ones by the Tea House are just about finishing up, a little tired-looking. But certainly worth sitting and sketching for a little bit.

I walked over to the Rose Gardens, but, the roses aren't in bloom yet. There was, though, one cherry tree just bursting with glorious, delicate white blossoms. To stand underneath it and look up into the blue sky with layers and layers of endless flowers was just heavenly. I would have stayed even longer, lingering in this reverie (yes, I know: you can imagine) taking pictures and soaking it all in, but the bees were out, enjoying this all, too. I know well enough to share.


Cherry Blossoms Click to see this photo's flickr page

The rest of the set, including a few of a clump of very perky poppies (I worry that I will type "puppies", or perhaps, worse, "poopies") in the parking lot, here.

Dreamy gardens

I walk in the garden, I look at the flowers and shrubs and trees and discover in them an exquisiteness of contour, a vitality of edge, or a vigor of spring, as well as an infinite variety of color that no artifact I have seen in the last sixty years can rival... each day, as I look, I wonder where my eyes were yesterday. -Bernard Berenson

I spent some time in the library this week to look for books with good reference images of plants, trees, shrubbery ("Bring me a shwubbery!"). To daydream about a future garden. Or to paint. But mostly to daydream (you can imagine this, yes?). Flipping through, I realized that I have gardening books with great photos. And then I realized that I have plenty of really super images (or, nice images of super memories) from a class I took in school. It was an elective, The History of Gardens. There were lectures, but the field trips were the real treat. We toured a number of local Southern California gardens, both private and public. It was just fantastic.

The Lummis Home / El Alisal
The Getty
Huntington Library
Norton Simon
Descanso
Lotusland
Hannah Carter Japanese Garden

One assignment of the class was to keep a garden notebook, with images, trimmings, thoughts from the gardens and notes on several of our design assignments. I found my notebook and flipped through the pictures, thinking, daydreamily, "Oh, now these are what I should paint."

I managed to find and salvage the digital photo files from archive CDs and lookit, it’s just so much fun and so much from a bright sunny Southern California summer, that I had to share.


Click here for the Flickr photo set.

Sending dreamy thoughts of the first bursts of color of spring and the warmth of summer to you all. Have a great weekend. xox -w

Not bad, just unfinished

This is from earlier in the spring, at Descanso. I was never happy with how this little postcard-sized painted sketch had ended up at the end of that morning. I was putzing around this weekend and decided to try and deepen some of the colors, then added some ink linework. I'm happier with it now. I mean, happier with it enough to share.
I have a hard time throwing out some of the bad; hoping that at some point I can rework it, make it better. Does that make me a hopeless optimist, or a hopeless packrat?

Okay, don’t answer that.

The creative process takes practice to work with, and so hard to explain.

A designer friend of mine went on an interview and sent me her thoughts on it. She said, I think, knowing that it’s something that I would cover in my classes, that one thing she wishes that we’d learned in (design) school is how to better manage conversations with other disciplines, especially those that think more linearly, like engineers, business people. We’re accustomed to communicating our ideas in drawings and words, but forget how very different our language can be. Ideas like “emotion”, “brainstorm”, “concepts”, “experience” – they’re so basic ideas to me that I can’t imagine that someone else can’t grasp what I’m trying to convey. I forget, sometimes, the blank, not-getting-it-at-all stares. “Emotion”? I took a good long pause and am taking this to heart; this term, my students and I will be practicing not only conveying who we are, but trying to build bridges as designers, helping others understand our process, our value.

It underscores for me how much I treasure being able to connect with other creative, visual people. I’ll bet if I say that I’m going to get, say, new carpeting (Karen goes, “Oooo! Finally! Remodeling!”), and say to you that I’m thinking of a medium grey, that if continue and say it’s going to be about a … 70% cool grey, that a lot of you would be nodding, “Ooooh. Yes I see”. I like being able to communicate that kind of subtle preciseness. We try so hard to make our work really meaningful and really spot-on, and sometimes it connects with people, for reasons they can’t quite understand or explain. That’s so gratifying to see. Sometimes people can’t see what the heck you’re trying to do, and no matter how you try to explain it, neither you nor your work makes a connection. Argh.

Everybody wants to be heard; whatever the language. I’d forgotten what a special language it is that the artistic speak and feel. When my guy talks about the golden sunlight of the morning, and how it’s so soft and clear, bringing out the texture of the mountains, my knees go weak and I melt.

Oh, and we’re not actually getting new carpet, btw.

Descanso Mulberry Pond

Another great late morning spent sketching at Descanso. The late spring flowers are thriving, the mini train was running, the sun was bright, and we got visited by a very confident goose! We got to watch the grounds keepers working to clear out the area around the Mulberry Pond, and were visited by a number of groups of school children on field trips and families out and about. So very cute, alert and curious.

I’ve found all my little travel paint sets and brushes, but my pencil sketches were working out best. I keep saying it, and I’ll say it again here: Someday, I’d really like to take a painting class to learn to use watercolors and acrylics and have the excuse to actually spend dedicated time working on it...

Watercolor crayons

Whatever it is that I’m supposed to be doing, clearly, I am not. [sigh] You know, if I were really procrastinating, I’d be doing something that I normally don’t do, like … dust! Right now, I’m … just finishing up my first cuppa coffee for the day and, um, dawdling.

I treated myself to some time outside to sketch and paint yesterday. It seems like forever since I drew outside, and could tell that that’s what my psyche really needed. I opened my travel watercolor kit and found a paper napkin that I’d used the last time I painted outside.

From Yosemite.

In November.

Yes, it’s been far too long since I’ve just dabbled with some color. So you can imagine that it felt really good to get out and paint.





Descanso Tea House (the roof, as seen from below the bridge)
Prismacolor sketch with Caran d’Ache watersoluble crayons

Artsy note:
I also took along some water-soluble crayons, a set of 30 made by Caran d’Ache, Neocolor 2. I’ve had the set for a while and love them. Worked dry, they are just so yummy in their application of color, such rich pigment. Worked and blended with water, the color intensifies so nicely. I scribble blocks of color onto another sheet of paper that I use as a palette, or pick up pigment directly from the crayons with my brush. This seems to be a nice work-around for me, to work outside - - I’m too messy and disorganized to have gotten around to schlepping my tubes of watercolor with me, and I’m not quite crazy about the travel kit watercolor pans… I have trouble getting very intense color with them. The only thing about the crayons is I might have to worry about leaving them in the car on those long, hot summer days here in Southern California.

I’m happy with how these turned out.

I’ll be trying to get my class started tonight with graphic markers, and grabbed some unconventional (in the world of product design, yes) sample objects for them to work from. I’ll have them set up little groupings to draw, looking at scale and proportion, perspective, look at the shadows, shade and highlights. My goal is to have them complete nice, accurate line drawings that they’ll use as underlays for monochromatic pencil renderings and also markers. They’ve been wanting to work with markers. I’m not sure they’ve gotten the sense of how wonderful it feels to just draw, to lay down pigment onto a sheet of paper with just a colored pencil, to work with the expressive quality of their lines. I don’t think they’ve gotten that, but at this point I’d be happy if we can accomplish clean, accurate line drawings. And then move onward!
I fully intend to sketch with them tonight, these little compositions, so in theory, I’ll have a few of my own sketches to noodle with when I get home, late late tonight. It’ll be fun to see.

Trust me.

Stay tuned.

Escape

Another early morning dealing with unannounced construction guys. The details aren’t worth relaying anymore. Suffice to say, the kitchen reconstruction lingers endlessly on. Long story -> short: I went off to paint for a few hours with Karen.

We wandered (see Descanso) and settled on a spot with great views in every direction in the middle of the rose garden. It was a glorious, sunny, cloudless day, and the gardens were lush with vibrant color.



We drew and painted (smeared paint around), and caught up with each other. As the sun dropped lower and lower, the sunlight bathed the trees, the leaves and blooms with a warm, golden glow. The shadows grew longer and longer, and took on an even more lazy purple tint.



Here are my sketches and a few postcard paintings:

I started with some watercolor postcards. I want to play with the media more, to better control the intensity of the pigment and to start working on larger paper. I went back over these with w/c pencils later to work in darker colors.




I’ve been doing this modified contour-drawing thing - - if you quilt, it’s roughly in the spirit of continuous-line quilting. I’ve been playing with it for a little while, trying to get different textures to read. I think it’s starting to make a little more sense in this drawing; yet another gnarly tree!

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This is the last sketch I did. The watercolors frustrated me a bit, and I wanted to be able to more clearly and succinctly depict some of the textures and work in some darker values to show more dramatic contrast.




Here's the updated Descanso 10-2006 flickr photos

It was a great afternoon, such a perfect escape from the insanity, even if for just a few hours. We should all remember to get out, enjoy the sunshine and all the beauty that Fall has to offer.

Another Gnarly Tree

.. this one at Descanso. Two of my sketchy-painting buddies couldn’t make the Plein Air session, and I missed them, not just because their company is always good, but also because I so enjoy seeing their work (and if you follow along closely to this blog, I trust you do, too). But, you know, these are busy, busy women! Hopefully next time, you two – I hope you’re both doing well.

And wait, how is it that I’m painting, and not working, huh? [These voices, these incessant voices. OMG, where do they come from? Do they ever stop?] Hey, sometimes, you have to do what you need to, to soothe your soul. Sometimes being artful does the trick. Sometimes, chocolate. Sometimes, a beer. And when times are tough, heck, it might take all three, and then some.

But maybe I just wanted to take some time and get in a little bit of painting.
[Yeah, that’s it]

There might have been a light shower earlier in the morning, and the skies were cloudy, threatening more rain. But the gardens were bright with blooms, and sections of the garden were decorated to celebrate a warm and vivid Fall season! We were surprised to see any flowers at all, expecting that the summer heat might have done them in. But – wow, the bountiful colors!



I’ve been playing with trying out scribbly interpretations of foliage – trying to get down shorthand gestures and outlines of the overall mass, rather than blocks of color, or individual leaves, or ... ? I’m not sure I’m at a point where any particular scribble is successful in accurately describing what kind of plant I’m drawing (I’m shooting for at least a little bit of reality), but it’s kind of fun, in a lazy, don’t-wanna-think-too-much sort of way.

I’ve started in on a Moleskine sketchbook, rather than just an un-ruled notebook. The sketchbook paper is thicker, so my hope was to do more painting work in the new book and not having to worry about the sheets curling and warping after being painted on. Alas! I’d forgotten how unfriendly the Moleskine paper can be to water-based media. Nix Moleskine Warm-up Drawing # 1. Doh!

I’ve also been carrying along some watercolor paper pads, to entice myself to play more with watercolors (both opaque and transparent). I carry around a lot of art stuff, actually, to entice myself to just do more of it. I schlep it around, but every once in a while, it’s good to have just the right thing, to settle in and play with whatever media fits my mood at that one, inspired moment. So, I finally whipped out the watercolor postcard pad and played with that a bit. It’s nice, you know, because it’s just a 3x5” card, and not a big, demanding blank sheet. I love how Karen captures the gestures of plants; it’s inspiring. So here, I’m trying to get just a little section of a larger plant grouping; so many colors, textures … You know, "Oh, just one more dab of yellow..."


And I’ve still got some of the brown cardstock with little flecks - - it’s been fun to draw on; I’ve got the gnarly tree thing down, I think. I meant to do something else other than the tree, but it was just fun. The three of us that were there commented on how great it is to look up into the leaves of a tree, to see the layers of overlapping leaves, the sky, and the sunlight. It would be great fun to do a more graphical illustration, of the leaves and overlapping shapes and colors, all on a background of sky blue. Right, so that’s what I was thinking, when I drew Gnarly Tree #2. And when I was done, I thought, “Oh great. sigh. Another gnarly tree. Gee..”

So, I was feeling inspired to capture more of what we were actually seeing and feeling and did another little postcard watercolor.

If you can’t quite make it out, it’s the sky, with not-so threatening clouds, and a bit of the tree overhead. See it now? I kind of like the idea of seeing overlapping patterns, without having to see (or draw) the whole tree. Hey, where’d those leaves come from? Does it matter? I’m having fun with this idea, so I’m thinking this is something I’m going to play with for a bit. Watch this space for more … trunkless … leaves in the sky.

My photos and the paintings from the day are here: