It's no secret to those who know me: I don't love San Francisco. I think it's interesting, topographically speaking, but my affection generally ends there. We live barely an hour south, and I go up there for work or a sketching event fairly frequently, but I usually don't crave a ramble there otherwise. So when I was preparing for my focus session on urban sketching at the Plein Air Convention, I had a hard time finding sketches I had done of the city.
For a Bay Area "local," that was a bit ... embarrassing.
Time to change that, right? As a prelude to the convention, I took Heather Martin's gouache workshop at Yerba Buena Gardens. (Her work is amazing, by the way.) I had passed the place en route to the Moscone Center a dozen times, but I had never actually wandered in. So it was lovely to park myself on a bench and play with color, soaking in the SF sunshine.
I told myself I'd do my best to play (savvy) tourist during the convention: to explore and sketch and learn to love (well, at least *like*) the City by the Bay.
Glad that a fellow artist has resurrected the long-neglected South Bay Plein Air Meetup group. Yesterday there were three of us at Vasona Lake County Park in Los Gatos. Since I was squeezing this session in between errands and appointments, I chose to do a quick painting in gouache on Canson Mi-Teintes Touch toned paper. The sun was hot and climbing, so the paint dried almost instantly. The whole thing took less than an hour from setup to signature.
Little Red Barn in Vermont, from an original photo. Holbein gouache in Strathmore Toned Gray sketchbook.
Since we're not going to London Book Fair this year, I've decided to attend the 3rd Annual Plein Air Convention & Expo in Monterey, California. I've been thinking about what materials to take besides watercolor. All the outdoor videos from last year's convention show painters dealing with a lot of wind (it is the coast, after all), so I'd probably have to invest in slower-drying acrylics if I went that route.
Gouache, on the other hand, seems to fit the bill nicely. It is compact, can be rewetted, and seems perfect for the smaller supports I'd be painting on given I'm taking two flights there and back. Feels like gouache (or even just adding opaque white to regular watercolors) flies under the radar a bit.
I've been looking at artists like Nathan Fowkes for inspiration, and playing with different papers. I'm really liking the way gouache looks on the Strathmore Toned Gray paper, and will try others.
What's your experience (if any) with gouache?
The weekend before the superstorm, I was in Atlanta visiting my college roommate. We went to the Country Living Fair at Stone Mountain, lunched at Bocado, had a lovely dinner at Watershed, and saw the scarecrows at the Atlanta Botanical Garden.
A jacket that my friend bought at the fair led us to Roswell, a city just north of Atlanta with a cute downtown full of restaurants and shops. We wandered the length of Canton Street, peeked into the little boutiques, and paused at Roswell Provisions for tea and a cookie. I was smitten with their kraft-paper shopping bags (they're stamped with a bicycle image!), so I picked one up to draw on as we sat in the window seat with our snack.
After completing the sketch on location, I added some color using my new Holbein gouache paints. I'm reasonably satisfied with it, but it will definitely take some time to get used to working with such pigmented, opaque paint.
Amazingly I was able to fly back Sunday night as planned (all the New York City flights were being cancelled, but thankfully I'd booked my trip to White Plains). Monday was a day of waiting. The winds kicked up; a dry pillar of a tree in our backyard fell gracefully, damaging nothing but the ancient deck.
The power blinked off just after 6 pm. We ate spicy turnip soup by candlelight, put the leftovers on ice in the cooler, and sat in bed with the blue glow of our phones for company. The police drove in blaring a sudden evacuation order at 10 o'clock, but we chose to stay -- we felt we were on high enough ground and trusted (blindly?) that the surge wouldn't overtop Stamford's hurricane barrier. (It didn't.)
Tuesday we emerged and looked at the smashed poles and twisted wires and flooded roads. Through Twitter we learned that Barcelona was open and operating downtown. (Light, heat, tapas!) They were encouraging people to come in, recharge, drink wine, savor a meal, swap stories. And so we, and many others, flocked in.
In our area, the power was back on Wednesday evening. But as we look at the devastation in places like Breezy Point, Hoboken, Staten Island and the Rockaways, we feel very lucky indeed to have escaped with a just a brief outage and a downed dead tree.
A jacket that my friend bought at the fair led us to Roswell, a city just north of Atlanta with a cute downtown full of restaurants and shops. We wandered the length of Canton Street, peeked into the little boutiques, and paused at Roswell Provisions for tea and a cookie. I was smitten with their kraft-paper shopping bags (they're stamped with a bicycle image!), so I picked one up to draw on as we sat in the window seat with our snack.
After completing the sketch on location, I added some color using my new Holbein gouache paints. I'm reasonably satisfied with it, but it will definitely take some time to get used to working with such pigmented, opaque paint.
Amazingly I was able to fly back Sunday night as planned (all the New York City flights were being cancelled, but thankfully I'd booked my trip to White Plains). Monday was a day of waiting. The winds kicked up; a dry pillar of a tree in our backyard fell gracefully, damaging nothing but the ancient deck.
The power blinked off just after 6 pm. We ate spicy turnip soup by candlelight, put the leftovers on ice in the cooler, and sat in bed with the blue glow of our phones for company. The police drove in blaring a sudden evacuation order at 10 o'clock, but we chose to stay -- we felt we were on high enough ground and trusted (blindly?) that the surge wouldn't overtop Stamford's hurricane barrier. (It didn't.)
Tuesday we emerged and looked at the smashed poles and twisted wires and flooded roads. Through Twitter we learned that Barcelona was open and operating downtown. (Light, heat, tapas!) They were encouraging people to come in, recharge, drink wine, savor a meal, swap stories. And so we, and many others, flocked in.
In our area, the power was back on Wednesday evening. But as we look at the devastation in places like Breezy Point, Hoboken, Staten Island and the Rockaways, we feel very lucky indeed to have escaped with a just a brief outage and a downed dead tree.
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