There is something magical about palm trees and a night sky.
The artist who set up for our weekly Tuesday night art group had several photos of apartment buildings with laundry. I liked how cheerfully individualized each apartment seemed in the photo reference I used, and I tried to convey that feeling in my painting.
I used acrylic markers to draw the structure, then went back with gouache to paint the sky and parts of the building. I added the bird, telephone pole, and foliage for the fun of it.
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.
Deliberate Sketching 