penpressionism

+ micron 005

Day 1 and Day 2. Portland to Peaks Island — “You’re not failing. You’re collecting data.”

Day 3 and 4 — Sebasco Harbor, Maine. “A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor.”

Day 4. Underway from Sebasco Harbor to Boothbay Harbor…

Seguin Island Lighthouse

Day 6 & 7 — Boothbay Harbor

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Staedtler Fine Liner pen and watercolor. Sommes Sound. Maine

With the pandemic, I haven’t been able to do much “true urban sketching”. During this trip, I learned that sketching from photos is not close to the experience of true “urban sketching”.

Urban sketching involves immersing yourself into a location and truly feeling the vibe of your environment. The people, the sounds, the architecture, the smells, the buzz of the city, the banter in the bar, the quiet wind blowing the trees.

The energy of the crowd, the fear of the blank page, my heart racing as I’m scanning the crowds of people considering who looks like they may be still for a few seconds so I can capture their impression, the frustration when someone walks away as soon as I start sketching them and I’m left with only the top half of their hat, the exhilaration and victorious feeling after I’ve taken the next subject’s face neck and collar and plugged it into to the gap that was left, the revelation—after I’m finished sketching—that I’ve been meditating on my surroundings for 25-30 minutes.

Sketching is not replication. Sketching is not perfection. Sketching is inviting uncertainty into a process. It is welcoming and encouraging uncertainty. It is taking risks and embracing the lessons that occur as a result of the risk.

the good ole ballpoint pen. it gets the job done. it provides this unique line character.

 

platinum carbon ink fountain pen in moleskine classic

platinum carbon ink fountain pen

Oak branch with platinum carbon ink

Bamboo twig, platinum carbon ink, watercolor

Corolla Light. Corolla, NC (Outer Banks)

Sketching old photos from Italy/Veneto trip

My daughter found a hummingbird in its’ nest. It’s now a member of our family…

Still have pens, paper, and the desire to sit and observe.

A little modified blind contour sketch can take the edge off.

 

 

Audience in awe of Dr. Hanmin Lee showing video of his elegant fetal surgical resection of a large cervical teratoma.

Cool Topics in Neonatology —Coronado, CA

platinum carbon ink fountain pen in moleskine classic.

french ultramarine blue, burnt sienna, winsor yellow.

Staedtler 0.05 Pigment Liner on scratch copy paper

Paperterie Saint-Armande handmade paper.  Dip fountain pen. Platinum Carbon ink.

Fabriano 140 lb cold press watercolor paper. Copic Multiliner 0.03.

Moleskin Classic. Staedtler pigment liner 0.05.

I attended a great demo on Saturday at The Blue Rooster Art Store.  Tiffanie Mang did a demonstration of a painting by Edgar Payne.  This demo was amazing and I was able to really grasp the process of painting with gauche and how it differs from watercolor.  I was hooked.  I picked up some gauche and put together a limited 7 color palette.  This was my first attempt at using gauche.  This was painted from a picture of the 47 foot Catalina, Onward, anchored in Exuma, Bahamas.

 

 

 

Hollywood. Los Feliz. Pasadena, CA. Chicago, IL. San Diego, CA…

Narragansett Bay is a 10 mile by 25 mile estuary east of Rhode Island. We spent 7 days on the bay aboard the sailing vessel Onward, a Catalina 470, with 4 adults and 2 toddlers.

We spent 7 amazing days sailing around with a group called The Corinthians. Imagine Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn dreaming of one day sailing around various harbors with their closest friends, making memories, and enjoying daily happy hours on the water. This is the Corinthians annual sailing adventure.

I’ve spent multiple trips sketching, painting, and documenting the amazing images and scenes that one finds by visiting a different harbor each day for a week while sailing.

I’m developing a bit of a formula on how to capture the best of these trips and immerse myself into that magical “sketch flow” place while on a boat with the crew.

I try to use the water we are floating in for the watercolor. I first stumbled into this by accident when I was sketching in an alley in Venice early one morning. The rain started as I was finishing the sketch and there were rain drops on my moleskine before I completed the sketch. What I initially thought was a problem became another learning experience while doing spontaneous sketches. As the moleskine paper ­— which doesn’t appreciate too much water— started to buckle a bit, I let some water slide off and allowed the paper to remain wet. I ducked into the apartment and added some watercolor pigment to the rain water on the page.

Back to Naragansett, the varying degrees of salinity in the bay offered unpredictable and uncontrollable interactions with the watercolor pigment. You can see this as tiny speckles in some of the colored areas in the sketches. About 2.4 billion gallons of freshwater enter the bay from rivers and other sources every day. This causes different concentrations of salt depending on the proximity to fresh water sources. The upper bay has an average salinity of 24 ppm while the areas further south nearer to the open ocean average about 32 ppm.

These sketches include impressions of early morning sunrise in Potters Cove Bight, multiple lighthouses around the bay, and multiple trips between various harbors around  Conanicut Island, Jamestown, Fogland harbor, Bristol, and Block Island. Some of the sketches were drawn in “real time”/ live as our boat was passing other boats and lighthouses on land.

Experimenting with a new/different pen — PIGMA, MICRON, 01, SEPIA.

 

Morning commute sketches.  Bus stop on Santa Monica Blvd.  Corner of Sunset and Highland. Coffee shop line, LAX.  Looking south, corner of Vine and Melrose. Church on the way to Ventura from L.A. Churches on the way to Hocking Hills in Ohio.

Riding BART, the yellow line from SFO to Montgomery St.  City Hall from the bar at the top of the Marriott.  The Ferry Building and Coit Tower just before sunrise.

 

 

 

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This is where this urban sketching adventure started.  At some point during 2013, I decided I needed to get back to my first true love – drawing and sketching.  I bought a moleskine classic sketchbook.  I got stuck in traffic on the way home. That’s how many days begin and end in Los Angeles. I sat on Santa Monica boulevard for a bit.  I stared at the ficus trees lining the sidewalk. I started sketching. I decided to scrap the pencil and eraser. I wanted to sketch without the   ability to go back and “fix” things.  I wanted to embrace whatever occurred without the pressure to decide continuously if corrections should be made.  I wanted to see every attempted line on the path to some unknown destination at which I choose to stop drawing. Most of the sketches in this sketchbook were drawn on location in Los feliz, Silverlake, and Hollywood.  One is a sketch of the San Francisco Chronicle building cut short when my hand became numb from the cold just before midnight.  A few are drawn from photographs from international travel from the past before I re- started sketching. I’ve seen some of the people in these sketches multiple times during my morning commutes.  There are multiple impressions of historic Los Angeles street lights that contribute as much to the urban landscape during the day as they do during the night.