An Orchard Past Its Prime: Saratoga

For several years now Suhita Shirodkar and I have made a pilgrimage to paint at the orchard by the Saratoga Public Library. Knotty, shapely, dark silhouettes of fruit trees covered in gentle white blossoms, lots of space between us and Santa Cruz Mountains, and yellow mustard fields are what we are after. This year we were joined by Laurie Wigham whom we promised all the things we hoped to see. However, the orchard was quite different. It was an unusually hot day for March (it reached 83F where we were located), a few days prior we had a storm, and most of the blossoms were gone. And on top of it, all the ground was thoroughly plowed - there were mustard plants here and there but no feeling of a "carpet". Our reality did not match our expectations, to say the least. 

But a huge oak tree had a very dense shadow, and the gnarliness of the trees could not be erased by wind or tractor! Plus all sorts of creatures came over to be with us while we painted - and by the end, it was a wonderful outing of talking and drawing side-by-side with great people and it filled my cup at least as much as I expected - if not more!

More Camellias!

My quest for painting camellias continues! The color of the deep red-coral ones still escapes me, and I found some off-white ones I sketched in Gamble Gardens.

two previous camelias-related posts from this year:
Camellias in a different medium

Four Attempts at Catching Camellia Colors

Two more sketches from the Orchard Outing: Teaching Experiment

Last week I shared my sketch - spread over two pages of a new (to me) sketchbook (it is a Pith sketchbook - more about it soon as I continue some experiments). I made two more sketches at the same outing and it took me some time to scan them properly and think about what was working and not working for me. Mainly because I created these sketches based on the workshops that I will be running this summer. I will be teaching two sessions at the Chicago Urban Sketchers Seminar on July 11-13 and then a week later a little different version of the workshop but with the same technique - at the Sketcher Fest Edmonds. Two sketches below were a run through the process which I will be sharing. I know that Chicago is sold out but I believe some tickets are still available for Edmonds! 

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. 

Magnolia Season

Magnolias are among my favorite plants and when they bloom it is one of my "great color experiences of the year." So when it is upon us, I try to make it count. As we have many microclimates in the San Francisco Bay Area, the season rolls south to north and depends on waves in weather - so I got to sketch some in Suhita's neighborhood on a very hot day, and when trees near her started dropping their heavy petals on a sidewalk, trees near me were in peak - so we arranged for a second outing and got some time with these glorious flowers. 

One Week 100 People 2025

This week I took part in #oneweek100people challenge hosted by @lizsteelart and @m.holmes.art - they run this challenge every year - sometimes via facebook, sometimes on instagram - but the idea is to give your people sketching muscles a workout for a week. I tried to take part in this challenge in 2020 - here is a post that details how I prepared (the world closed up by the end of that week - not many people drawing happened for a long while after). Then I did a fun one in 2021. In 2022 and 2023 I skipped these as the war in Ukraine consumed all the spare resources. But 2024 this was one challenge that I went back to and actually completed.  

For 2025 I decided to make it about my community and sketch on location. During the week of March 3rd I walked, biked and drove around my neighborhood to capture people as they were going about their week. 

What helped me was 

1. Having a very simple set of tools in my shoulder bag (see below) ready to go
2. Scheduling time (mostly at the end of my lunch hour) throughout the week to do this.
3. Having a list of potential places to go ready (so that if there is no energy to make a choice - I have a good default - see below).

Here are my 100 people: kids at school, people in the park, at stores, in the old folks home and in the library and at the protest. 

On My Table: Beginning of March 2025.

February was full of many things - I did some fun clients projects, interesting experiments and had many sketching opportunities!

 

Participating in Democracy

Last week was filled with many events that were hard on many levels. Here is what I am doing in response:

1. As I live in the United States I called my representatives and left a message (there were answering machine options and humans who picked up the phone. You can also write an email). My message was super short: Name, zip code of where I live, and these words: I would like to encourage (name of your senator or representative) to support Ukraine and I do not want my country - USA - to be aligned with russia who is an aggressor in this conflict. Thank you.

It took me 5 minutes from clicking on a link (see below) to find a phone numbers to hanging up after the last phone call. This is how democracy works - we tell people who represent our interests what we want and stand up for what we believe in. Nobody can change what is happening alone but every single one of us can make a choice and add to one side of the equation or another. Not making a choice is also a choice. 

Find your senator: https://www.senate.gov/senators/senators-contact.htm

Find your representative: https://www.house.gov/representatives

Or use an automated reach-out tool.

2. I joined several local in-person events concentrating on supporting Ukraine and also on protesting against the corruption of truth and democracy in this country. I believe that the United States is shifting toward authoritarianism and we as a nation need to fight for democracy and the rule of law. So I painted a sign, packed my sketching kit, and went to join people who were expressing their opinion about gutting the United States and all it stands for by people whose main qualification is loyalty to one person - but not to the law, constitution, or country. 

Here are some images for you:

If you are interested in more ideas for how to move forward - here is an article that I found very useful: How *you* can protect democracy.

Three Years of War

This week marks three years since a full-scale invasion of russian army into a sovereign Ukraine began.  Three years ago we did not believe in what was happening. Three years ago we did not believe it could last this long. Three years ago my parents were living in their apartment in the center of Kharkiv and heard the first explosions in their city. My Mom was still working at the University where she started to work in 1963. She lived in this apartment all her life - since she returned with her parents from the evacuation in 1943 during World War II. Dad lived in this apartment since 1973. Because of health reasons, they could not go to the shelter when the bombing started. Kharkiv received a daily bombing during the first year of the war and continues to be pummeled to this day. My parents stayed home for as long as they could but as it was harder and harder to support them with food, medicine, and basic needs, as the power grid was targeted and electricity and heating became uneven, they joined thousands of people displaced by this war and eventually came to the United States on United for Ukraine Program.

In the last three years, they moved from one temporary home to another 6 times. Their beloved Ukraine was attacked a countless number of times. An unimaginable number of people died. Every Ukrainian lost someone, everyone was displaced in some way. And everybody wants the war to end and tries to do something - even from afar. My parents try to do something too - they pay their utilities as if they live in the apartment - to support the budget of Ukraine, they support friends and family members by calling, texting, and sending what little money they have, what little hope they can master. They keep Ukrainian language alive, they have Ukrainian flag on their walker and outside their window. They stay on top of all the news and never stop believing in Ukraine, and its right to exist and defend itself. 

Nobody wants this war to end as Ukrainians do. But submitting to the aggressor will not end this war - just delay of continued aggression.

The image below is a look at my drawn history of this war - through my parents. I started drawing them during our video calls when the war began. You can see all of these and read transcripts here: 

https://blog.apple-pine.com/2022/08/war-in-ukraine-guide-through-posts-on.html

Update on my Parents - Refugees from Ukraine - February, 2024.

Since my last update in November 2024, we found a different housing solution for my parents. It is more suitable for older people (wider doors for people who use wheelchairs/walkers, handles to help move throughout the apartment, and there is an elevator). There are more people of their age around - so more chances for connection though most of the residents do not have a common language. Still - people are caring for plants, playing chess, celebrating birthdays, and sharing benches - and you do not need a common language for many of those activities. 

My Mom has new hearing aids which help a lot with whatever language she is hearing. We are three more steps closer to getting her new glasses. She reads an art book with both French and English text for each drawing and enjoys finding discrepancies and sharing them with us. She stays in touch with family and friends dispersed throughout Ukraine and the world. And she writes in her diary.

My Dad plays chess every day - in the morning on his phone, in the afternoon - in person in their building. He continues to try all the new foods that cross his pass and if something tastes not exactly how he expected he adds some cayenne pepper to it - lately, I've seen him mix it into grape jelly, and orange juice and put some on the marshmallows. His new favorite vegetable is bok choy. His knees and back bother him a lot but we are trying some new meds and hoping that he will agree to go to physical therapy one of these days. 

Dad is not happy when I draw him lately - so there are mostly portraits of Mom - but I think I have an idea for an argument that I might present to fix this for the next update :)

A complicated start of my new sketchbook

I was hesitant to start a new sketchbook. Or rather I did not want the previous one to end. It was full of great moments. I started it in mid-October - it was a different era - the world was different - more hopeful, more reliable, with a different outlook - I miss that world. This sketchbook went with me on a couple of great trips - one on the other side of America, another on the other side of the world. It went with me on many drawing outings with friends and on some cool family hikes. It saw me through some hard days when only a tiny moment was spent drawing or only a tiny drawing could come out of me. So I was holding onto it quietly - I kept cutting sketches out of larger pages, taping and gluing them at the end - at the last few pages.

And then last week I went to draw with a friend and brought a single-sheet paper with me instead of a sketchbook, ready to add it (again) to my Sketchbook 158. As we drew, I talked about having a hard time finishing my old sketchbook and while I was listing all the reasons, I let go and decided to move on the very next day. Because there is no way to go back. And because drawing keeps me more hopeful and resilient. And because this different season means different tools and approaches are needed to shift my drawing practice forward. Plus I got super moved by looking at my friend's sketchbooks - they were living breathing stories with lots of color and texture and light and lines - and I knew that the world is better because of these drawings! And every time I look at great art I want to make some too and try a whole bunch of stuff that I kept "for the next sketchbook", "for when this is over", for "when I have a plan".

And so on the very next day, I made a little video weighing a new sketchbook and signing the number, and then I enjoyed drawing my traditional "what am I using now" tools on the opening page. After which I flipped the page and started on my experiment! It involved some monoprinting, a new type of ink and... it spilled all over and soaked my pretty first page - a disaster :) But such a pretty one :)

Thank you, Suhita, for sharing your amazing sketchbooks with me!

Here is my last sketch from sketchbook #158 during and a disaster reportage from the beginning of Sketchbook 159 :)