Apple-Pine

You know November is Here When...

In the San Francisco Bay Area, Fall is a slow-moving season, and everyone navigates it differently. For me, when I see some maple trees worth sketching (they come before the Chinese Pistaches that put fire in the neighborhood and before ginkos that make you wish for 100 different shades of yellow pencils), and when you draw your first persimmons of the season, the fall is really here!

Trip to The East Coast - Part 5: Materials After Returning

As I mentioned in my original materials post for this trip, I did my best to note what I was missing during the trip, what I used most, and what I did not touch at all, and here are some results:

1. This was a very short trip, so this amount of gouache was enough, but if I were traveling for a longer time, I would definitely take some tubes to both refill my palette and also to have access, for some "just out of the tube" thick paint that is needed, at the finishing touches, often. I had five different blues so I was fine - but yellows were

2. I really enjoyed my first-ever posca pencil (ivory) - it was doing a really good job covering over other materials.

3. Little gouache sticks are amazing - I wish they were more widely spread - but access to this instant color with the possibility of texture is for me a difference between starting a sketch or not - if I feel like I do not have enough time.

4. I missed yellow. I have a favorite yellow marker at the moment, it is semi-transparent and layers over other colors in such a luminous way that I can use it with just one other color and still call it a full-color sketch.

5. I missed some purple. I had a violet-gray from Luminance but needed something brighter. And I missed some brown, which I tried to figure out at the end of my sketchbooks, going over all the browns I could find, but I did not pinpoint what exactly was missing. This is something to remember for the next time: to write a little more about the color that I am missing - brown is not enough! After all, when I am teaching, I always ask people to use at least 3, between 4 and 5 words to describe color - why didn't I do it myself and just scribbled "missing brown"?

6. I missed my Pilot Parallel pen - I had a great substitute (zig calligraphy), but this beauty is capable of making such an expressive line that the sheer prospect of seeing it glide on the page can be a motivation enough for me to take a little sketching break. I guess rule number one of packing for a trip is "take your favorite tool" :)

here are some color-swatching pages on which I was trying to figure out what exact color I was missing:

Trip to The East Coast 2025:
Part 1: Packing My Sketch Tools
Part 2: People, Bids, Animals and Apples
Part 3: Landscapes
Part 4: More Landscapes
Part 5: What Materials worked and what I missed
Video of the Sketchbook Flip-Through.

Trip to The East Coast - Part 4: More Landscapes.

On this trip, every single location was worth sketching - it was marvelously inspiring in both color and light.

All of the sketches below (except for the very last one, which was done with highlighters as a first layer and then a black zig calligraphy marker) started with a big and super quick gouache wash. Some you see as they were on location, others I finished from photos and memory, as color pencils work the best on a dry surface (especially when the paper is soft), and I really wanted to bring up some light and push back some dark parts. Now I am not sure which one is my favorite and if adding things later made such a great difference - but they all bring back lots of great memories :) Click on the images to see them larger!

Trip to The East Coast - Part 3: Landscapes (about half of them).

I will break this post into two as there are quite a few drawings and some of them I would like to annotate more than others. As always you can see larger image if you click on it.

This is one of my favorite sketches from the trip - I painted with gouache without any drawing underneath and added some lines with zig calligraphy pen mid-drawing when I thought that I might have to stop abruptly. But since I had some more time I added more gouache over the ink lines.

There two pages of sketches above started super quickly, using markers to put down large shapes and then most of details in the three-sketch page were added from photos and sketch on the right was completed on location - which shows that by having more time I get to a better contrast place with my sketches. You can see some of the gorgeous paper from my hand-made sketchbook as a border on the left sketch above.

This was a very fast attempt to catch lightness of the lake behind darker but also more detailed trees in the front. I started with super fast layer of gouache used as watercolor but it was too wet to finish right away. And I lost both the light and freshness when I tried to pick it up on the way back to the car. I like some dynamic pencil lines though and I think dark green works really nice with the pumpkin orange and washed yellow with gray purple.

Trip to The East Coast - Part 2: People, Birds, Animals and Apples

Here is a selection of sketches which will tell you about people that I met at airports, a porcupine that I met in the woods and lots of apples and animals that I found on a Pennsylvania farm. Oh - and birds - these were identified using my phone and drawn based on some images I found online in inaturalist and cornell bird id apps.