Yesterday, a wonderful local artist, Jami Wright, gave a demonstration at our San Diego Watercolor Society’s monthly paintout. She showed us how to use a variety of tools, sponges, scrapers, brushers, and materials, salt, mediums, splatter, and sprays, to increase the feeling of texture in a painting. I had a lot of fun using these in this plein air painting of Miramar Reservoir.
This is a 13 x 13-inch gouache plein air painting on dark paper.
I sketched the two figures at the Wednesday figure drawing session, and then later added the background.
I did these during the warm-up and had several two- minute gouache sketches of the same model on the same dark surface. These two figures stood out as special because the way they overlapped suggested a connection between them. And they both seemed to show a bit of anxiety that I could build on in a more polished painting.
The model was barefoot, and when I was looking for a setting that made sense, I remembered some sketches I had done of beach volleyball, which I used as a reference. Because of the tension in their poses, I titled this “Game Point!”
I stood with plein air painters on one side of the lake, while a group of birders meandered along the other side. It was good that I began the painting with the birder in white and the strong reflections in the lake because the reflections, like the birders, came and went.
This is a 13-by-13-inch gouache painting on dark paper.
A friend who has a lifelong love of Volkswagen vehicles had a few of us over to paint. She parked several out on the driveway, and we had a fun few hours painting on a perfect Southern California spring day.
There is so much to see when you go birding along the San Pancho Beach.
The San Pancho sunset last night was particularly impressive with its orange sky and relatively calm sea.
While watching a sunset, my attention is usually fixed on the setting sun. Last night, I turned and looked the other way, and saw the village of San Pancho bathed in a golden light.
Deliberate Sketching 