An Orchard is Thinking About Blooming

We had a tumultuous March - some bright sunshine on cold days, some very warm rains, a couple of atmospheric rivers, a few crazy winds, and at least one dense hail. So I am not entirely sure what this orchard is thinking - did it try to bloom and the wind got all the flowers? Is it waiting for a proper start of spring? Is it as confused about the future as I am? I passed by it a couple of times trying to gauge when would be a good time to come over and sketch it and could not make up my mind but then an opportunity presented itself and Suhita (@Suhita Shirodkar) joined me for this outing to Los Altos Hills - it was short but accompanied by singing birds and we saw some unusually large California poppies - which means we soon will be heading for the hills to paint them!

I started thinking that I would make a one-page sketch but quickly realized that I wanted to expand to a much wider view and used both pages - so not a lot of planning went into this composition but in my defense, I can say that I was too distracted by courting turkeys between the trees and dreams of bringing a concertina to get a whole horizon in. Turkeys did not make it to my sketch though. Tender pink flowers on the branches are telling me I will get at least one more chance with this landscape before a delicate monolith of leaves obscures the structure of branches that I love so much. 

There were other sketches from the same outing and I will share them too when I process them - when I figure out what bothers me about those sketches :) 

Cooking Disaster - Illustrated

I enjoy cooking for an everyday chance to experiment, an opportunity to work with other people, and, frankly, because I love to eat. In particular, I like making desserts and one of the reasons is because I get to eat them and then draw them and then eat more of them. Making cookies is such a satisfying thing - while you are working a dough you can get a lot of energy out of your system, or in when you are tasting them :) I've been making oatmeal cookies for years and some come out as good as a song, others are great, sometimes they are a reliable staple, but recently I had a batch that... was a fiasco. 

After tasting this cardboard I realized that I forgot to put sugar and it is actually a very much needed ingredient for other components to work! It melts and binds and seeps and it makes the cookie a cookie! 

After a day or two I made a fresh batch - just to mend my discolored self-esteem and because I wanted an oatmeal cookie - and this time my creation was devoured with the usual speed - so all is good now. Lesson learned!

Camellias in a different medium

Last week I posted my "work in progress" on catching camellia colors in my sketchbook. While I struggled with the color problem I had a lovely art date with a friend whom I promised to show my experiments with gelli plate monoprinting. I've been accumulating all sorts of knowledge about this tantalizing texture-making yet amazingly hard-to-control relatively new medium and we made a nice pile of "I wonder what will happen if I try this" and a few "here is how I can make a drawing and then make a print out of it" pages - here are some that did not make it to the recycling can immediately. 

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First one is gelli place painting, second is a print pulled from the second image, last image is a third print pulled from the same original plate. Second print got trashed because I used too wet page to get it - the paper got ripped.

We were having too much fun for taking photos of the process :)

Four Attempts at Catching Camellia Colors.

On a day full of running errands, I stopped by my friend's place for a hug and a cup of chai. We ended up cutting a couple of branches from her camellia bush to sketch and then I took them home - they were my sketching companions for quite a bit.  

What an amazingly layered flower - the structure of petals reminded me of tightly packed cones of the blue cedar tree and I definitely need to go back to these and try and figure out the color - even though I enjoyed mixing all of these none matches the slightly-transparent glowing orange hue of the camelia pink flowers. 

California: Mustard Fields and Blue Sky

Spring in the San Francisco Bay Area means lots of mustard flowers! My friend showed me one of the early fields, and as we were sitting there drawing a blanket of yellow flowers under the piercing California blue sky, we talked about Ukraine, America, the past, and the future.

I was torn between doing a full-color sketch in watercolor or gouache but then decided to dive in with the two main colors: blue and yellow and have the rest in monotone. Yellow proved to be a tricky layer as it did not go well over the gray texture that I created - so I added darker tones as a background and then used white gouache, and when it dried - yellow oil pastel (from Jennifer's kit). The sketch turned out not as I thought as my yellow is a much gentle but I like how it did not overwhelm the rest of the sketch.