Muir Woods

Hot hot day today in Oakland. What to do? Pack everything up and head out to take refuge under the trees. Spent the day amongst the redwoods of Muir Woods. As soon as I got there, I was reminded that I really need to do it much more often.

 

We weren't the only ones with that idea. It was rather packed with people. But even all the crowds along the walkway can't diminish the beauty or the majesty of those ancient giants. And when you stand on the path and crane your head up to see the sun streaming through from so high up, and hear the distant rustle of the leaves, there is a peace and calm that steals through you.

Dreaming Beyond the Gray

Dreaming Beyond the Gray

Size: 25x14 inches

Medium: Mixed

Detail closeup views, prints ($16.95) and original available -here-

 

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Some of the in progress stages:

Initial concept and thumbnail doodles in my sketchbook, and some notes to myself about coloring.

First pass at a sketch for the figure. Actually started to develop this much further, but then when I got to the ribbons attached to the sides and back of her dress, a thought occurred to me. What if they not only held her dress on, but her whole facade, like a full-body mask.

 Resketched with the new approach. And the blackbird flying into the void of her body.

Transferred the sketch to the illustration board. Sketched out the poppies and the woman fairly detailed. The rest of it was going to be left to chance and serendipity. Large scale application of the experimental techniques I've been playing with in the past month. Took an inch wide flat brush and slapped India ink all over the upper third and right side. Then I tilted the page and let the drips trickle down,

 After letting that dry, I was fairly certain I had completely screwed it all up and was absolutely hating how it looked. I considered tossing it entirely, but decided to sleep on it and see how I felt in the morning. 

Well, sunlight didn't help my perspective. I still hated it. But I slathered some white and green and decided to keep slogging onward. I focused on the parts I knew I could handle, within my comfort zone: the details of the gray queen and the raven. Detailed rendering so that I could ignore that huge black splotch staring at me from the other half of the piece.

 That made me feel better. Slightly. Brave enough to try tackling the Splotch. While painting the queen, I started to see shapes in the textures of the upper green areas. Distant walls of a city.

 Okay, the scary randomness was starting to get a little more under control after the city appeared. I worked some more on the poppies at the bottom, the only other part besides the gray queen that I had purposely planned. As the sloping ground started to resolve, I saw eyes and ghostly shapes waiting among the poppies as well.

 Hello, my friends.

 And the darker foreground ruins.

More travel sketchbook. Ballet class

More sketches today, while sitting around, at my daughter's dance class.

Travel Sketchbook

Been a while since I've dragged this sketchbook around with me.  Daughter's preschool class took a field trip on the ferry and into San Francisco today, and I decided to do some drawing. As usual when I do these, they are sketched directly with pen, quickly, on site. Gesture drawings for the most part. Good way to exercise visual memory and quick transfer of what you see down to paper.

Passing by this dock, I liked how all the lines led up the ramp, and you could glimpse the ship through the archway.

Playing with Paint

Sometimes you just have to mess around to stir things up a bit. I had a dream a couple of weeks ago, and I wanted to paint it. And by the way, though I've been asked it often, I rarely if ever paint my dreams. They're way too boring and prosaic to make good images. I mean, unless you like to see a painting of an artist freaking out after forgetting to pack or ship things to a convention (That's an illustrator's version of the stereotype "Student's Nightmare"...you know, going to school and finding out that it's final exam time for that history class you never signed up for, and by the way, it's in French).

Anyway, getting sidetracked. So I DID have a dream I wanted to paint. But it involved much darker tones and saturation than I usually get. So I dug through the closet and pulled out everything that looked like it might be useful, which included: Stamp pad refill ink, India ink, metallic watercolor medium (that a friend gave me from a stash he found in his closet, thank you Stephen), granulation medium, frisket, rubbing alcohol, and scrap pieces of illustration board, some with washes that I had started once upon a time then discarded. 

I set about making a mess with those. And after a half hour of fun, I had this:

I propped them up to let the ink drip down the page (ala Jackson Pollack & UC Berkeley's stuck-in-the-60's art classes!) making bigger runny messes on my desk and drawing boards. After that, I walked away and waited for them to dry.

Over the next week, I've done these pieces with the results of that initial ink-mess. With the addition of Daniel Smith watercolor ground (for the broad areas of white), white gel pen, and watercolors. My initial impulse to paint that dream hasn't really materialized in any of these, but they've spawned a host of other images. It's a very un-planned process. I'm just looking into the shapes that the texture of drying paint and ink leaves, and then pulling out details and focusing them into images.

These have all been relatively small pieces. Hopefully you'll be seeing some of these techniques combined with my standard Steph-watercolors for some larger and more ambitious images in the near future. I have some ideas of where to go with it, but so far it's rather nebulous.

Lightness

Lightness

Size: 9x13 inches

Medium: Watercolors

Prints and detailed closeups available -here-

You might remember this one from a few years ago. Or not. It's one of the keyword sketch cards I did in 2010 for a tarot special edition order. Anyway, it was always one of my favorites, and I've been meaning to do a painting based on it for a long time. So when it got commissioned recently I was happy to dive into it!

 Some changes from the original ink sketch. Refining anatomy. Changing the background a bit. Bye turtle, hello birds.

Further refining. Ready to paint at this stage.

 In-progress painting scan.

Beacon

Beacon

Medium: Mixed (watercolors, watercolor metallic powder, white watercolor ground, gel pen, india ink)

Size: 4x8 inches

Detail closeups, Prints ($16.95), and Original painting ($295.00) available -here-

What started off as experimenting with some bottles and jars of various mediums I had tucked away in the closet last night, finally took form. 

Started off with numerous ink & metallic powder washes. Just trying to get texture.

This morning I picked up one of the results and started working watercolor and granulation medium into it as well, and the image started to emerge.

What I ended up being really happy with, that unfortunately you can't appreciate in a digital online reproduction, is the way the metallic powder integrated with the colors. The white in the sky was painted on top, so that has a flat tone, but at certain angles, the forest and trees glow with a golden texture.