Meanwhile, back at the Huntington...

Years ago, I did a project that was a mix of exhibit development and science illustration work for the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. I'm always delighted when their team gets in touch with me again for new adventures in art.

This time I was invited to mine their collections (rare books, cool old plants, fabulous sculptures, historic manuscripts, elegant furniture) and cobble together into a sort of fanciful patchwork quilt that would decorate the windows of their new entrance and orientation gallery.

The idea was to make it a sort of filagree pattern, that would be applied to the windows as a giant vinyl decal. I drew the images in Photoshop first, then converted the final draft to vector images that could be scaled up to fit the windows.



I haven't seen it in person yet, but these pics of the installation process are delightfully fun. (Image credit: Karina White.)



The Huntington's blog, Verso, wrote an article about the project with more fun photos. Fun adventure all around.

Spring, Springing

Portland trees are erupting with lovely blossoms all over town. I decided to challenge myself to an art experiment this weekend: capturing the beautiful pink cherry blossoms in the neighbor's yard using a unusual art tool...being the 16-month-old kiddo.

Step one: Admire the awesome flowers. (Wow, huh?)

Step two: Assemble non-toxic art supplies in the appropriate color scheme (in this case, a gray washable non-toxic marker, a custom mix of red and white tempera paint, a nice soft paintbrush, and a stack of cream-colored cards.)

Step three: Strategically hand art supplies to kiddo during a gap in the incessant going-down-the-slide practice and cross fingers...

Step four: Burst buttons with pride at how nicely that all turned out. Brag on internet, mail originals to grandparents.

Yeah, OK, it's not really that much different than the folks who dip grubs in paint and them them crawl all over the paper...But it's a fun exercise in selecting materials and introducing chaos! (Plus, it's so exciting to watch this grub learn how to re-load a brush with paint.)

Happy spring, y'all.

Brown and Brown

We rented a car last weekend and as surprised how easy it is to get from one end of the urban sprawl to the other--as well as to get out in the woods.

More of my current brown-on-brown phase is posted over at Urban Sketchers Portland, if you're curious.

Summer Sketching in Sellwood Park

It's such beautiful weather to get outdoors, slap paint onto scraps of paper, and heck, even nap on the lawn.

Here are a couple of the sketches I did in tempera paint on brown paper at the last Urban Sketchers gathering. You can see more in my post at pdxusk, as well.

Babykins, looking somewhat serious.

 

Kiddos on the swings

Slightly abstract interpretation of bright sky between tree branches

Two-tone sky: puffy clouds, doug firs

Like Oaks for Turkeys

Mount Pisgah Arboretum is gearing up for their famous Mushroom Festival at the end of October, and they've invited me to do the festival poster and tee-shirts again this year. The theme: turkey-tail mushrooms with a flock of turkeys wandering through the habitat.

Now, turkey-tail mushrooms like to grow on stumps and dead branches of oak trees. Since I no longer live near the gorgeous oak savannah habitats at Mount Pisgah, I headed up to the Hoyt Arboretum one gray and drizzly morning to wander through their fine collection of oak trees, in seek of inspiring oak compositions. Here's what I drew.

 More Mushroom Festival poster adventures to come!

Fruit Bats

Winter at the Oregon Zoo. On a cold and rainy day, the cave-like structure of the fruit bat habitat can not only give you protection from the wind and rain, but give you tons of delight, too. * Oregon Zoo en el invierno. La cueva artificial del hábitat para murciélagos frugívoros nos da protección de la lluvia y el viento, y también nos da tanta diversión.

Watercolor and ballpoint pen. * Acuarela y bolígrafo.

Even when the bats are still wrapped in their wings, not wanting to face the cold, they are delightful. And the complex layers of wings and legs all bundled up for warmth is a fancy puzzle! Bat origami. * Aun cuando los murcielagos están aún envueltos en sus alas, no queriendo meterse en el frío del día ya, me encantan. ¡Las capas complejas de alas y piernas que están envueltos para conservar el calor hace un rompecabezas interesante! Origami con murciélagos.

 "He's like a sloth! He's a really fast sloth." * ¡Es como un perezoso--pero muy rápido!

Pinus contorta

The wonderful folks at the Hoyt Arboretum looked up the location of their Pinus contorta specimens for me today. Nice to have the library of trees available in this town! * Que conveniente tener una bibliteca de arboles en nuestra cuidad! Los empleados del Hoyt Arboretum me dirigieron a las especiminas de Pinus contorta hoy.

Cape Lookout

Yesterday I grabbed 110 colored pencils; ten pounds worth of field guides to plants and birds and mushrooms; a sunhat and a sweatshirt; and I went out to the Oregon coast. Having soaked up some of those impressionist paintings at the art museum the day before, I was all set to sketch the landscape at Cape Lookout. * Ayer agarré 110 lapices de color; diez libras de libros de identificación para plantas, hongos, y aves; un sombrero para el sol; y un suéter para el frio, también; y viajé a la costa de Oregon. Haber admirado las pinturas impresionistas en el museo de arte el día antes me ayudó mucho en hacer bosquejos del paisaje en Cape Lookout.

The contrast between those stiff trees and the vague and delicate light of the ocean and the fog was very dramatic. * El contraste entre los arboles rígidos y la luz tenue y vago del océano y la neblina era muy dramático.

As night crept in, the sunset took me off guard: a big pink ball was floating in the middle of the gray fog, like a giant balloon that some child had let go. Incredible. * Al atardecer, la puesta del sol me sorprendió mucho—era una bola rosa en media de la neblina gris, como si un nino había perdido su globo rojo. Increíble.  

Last sketches from San Luis Obispo

My goodness, you can tell it's a good sketching trip when, a month later, you still haven't gotten all the scans posted! Here are some sketches that I did while exploring San Luis Obispo and Paso Robles last month--focused on historic buildings and neighborhood scenes.

Híjole, es obvio que dibujé mucho en mi visita a San Luis Obispo y Paso Robles: una mez ya ha pasado y ¡todavía no he compartido todos mis bosquejos!  Aquí hay algunos dibujos que hice al explorar la cuidad, enfocados en edificios y vecindarios históricos.

Elfin Forest in Morro Bay

While visiting Grandma in San Luis Obispo, I biked out to the "Elfin Forest" to go sketching one bright sunny morning. These oaks, while also very old, are much more compact and slow-slung than the trees at the Los Osos Oak preserve I had sketched the day before.

I wanted to hop off the boardwalk and crawl into the snug, shady spaces underneath these lovely craggy trees and spend the day there, listening to the bumblebees and staring at the patterns of the branches...alas that my time in town was so short! But I did get to admire the lovely fractal patterns of the estuary before I biked back into town.

Los Osos Oaks

While visiting my grandmother earlier this month, I took a bike ride to the Los Osos Oaks State Natural Reserve. I'm already a fan of oak trees, but this particular spot simply knocked my socks off--gorgeous grizzled coast live oaks that are estimated to be around 800 years old, and have a ton of character and expression in their branches.

There were so many amazing shapes to explore that I quickly realized it would be good to fill my sketchbook with little thumbnail sketches, to catch as many snippets as possible while I wandered around. In the margins around each mini-sketch, I've got notes on wildlife--lizard behavior, transcriptions of unfamiliar birdsong, etc. (Click on the image to get a zoomed-in version.)

Night Sky

Back in December, I was on a camping trip in the Oregon woods. The fog had cleared for a short time, and I did some experimental sketching of the Douglas fir trees silhouetted against the night sky. Dilute white acrylic paint called out the faint glow of the sky in contrast to the shapes of the dark trees.

I'd been playing with the idea of pursuing the ideas in this sketch more, but it was just simmering on the back burner for quite a while. Then, a colleague of mine at work, who worked at the museum's planetarium, announced that she was moving out of town. Clearly, the starry sky would be an appropriate theme for her going away card, right?

Revisiting and adapting the shapes from the earlier sketches, with gold paint-pen on black paper. The "boldly" caption is, of course, a Star Trek joke--boldly going where no-one has gone before, right?

For the final version, I hand drew the stars with a white colored pencil on the blue paper, stippling away in a coffee shop one Saturday afternoon. I carved the design of words and tree into a linoleum block print, and mixed a "nearly black" ink out of blue, purple, and green. The joy of sunny and dry weather in Portland--the ink dries faster that it would have in winter!

I printed a few variants on these, and they'll be wandering through the postal system over the next few days. My planetarium friend enjoyed her hand-delivered copy too--hers was extra special, with a hint of glitter. Yay.

Baobabs

The trouble with being a habitual sketcher is that you end up with a billion little pieces of paper with doodles all over them. I'm trying to go through boxes of old paperwork and recycle things, and I came across these pages torn from a work notebook, oh, like, 4 jobs ago? I was working at a botanical garden, and a researcher gave a slideshow of his travels through Madagascar. My notebook pages are covered with quick gesture sketches of baobab trees, of delonix trees, of moringa trees. The crazy swollen trunks, the Dr. Seuss-like squiggles of their branches.

So here I am, recycling, shredding, recycling, shredding, and it all grinds to a halt when I come across weird little doodles like this. They aren't precious, but they kinda are at the same time. Totally throws me off my sorting-through-the-paperwork stride.

Of course, the upside of being a compulsive doodler is that you find these things in boxes every now and then. Heh. 

(For the record, that was a February 2005 lecture by Myron Kimnach.)

Fractal Season

New Year's Eve was a clear, nearly-sunny day in Portland. We went for a long walk in Washington Park, and I couldn't keep from admiring all the amazing patterns in the bare tree branches. Fractals, fractals, everywhere! "I love it when trees do the math for me," I declared aloud as we squelched down the muddy trails.

Japanese Garden sketch

 When we wandered through the Portland Japanese Garden, at one point I sat down and tried to capture an impression of the branches, the balance, the lovely asymmetry. It's just a simple sketch, but it did get my eye better-tuned to looking at those branch patterns.

Chinese Garden sketch

New Year's Day saw us out exploring town in the sunshine again. The Lan Su Chinese Garden was closed for the holiday, but I enjoyed sitting on a sunny bench in the entry plaza, using a tube of watercolor to sketch a fabulously eroded rock with--you guessed it--a fancy pattern of bare branches behind it.

I omitted Bill's wheelbarrow here. Gotta pick your battles sometimes.

On January 7, I met up with Urban Sketchers Portland to have a group doodling-party at a member's art studio. The shed in the yard was framed by bare tree branches, and I tried combining ink and watercolor to establish a foreground/background effect. And, as you can see, I'm starting to tackle more and more complex branch patterns. It's still very sparse compared to the detail on the real trees, of course. (See more sketches from Jan 7.)

Now, as you can tell by my weird self-portaits-while-peeking-out-from-behind-the-sketchbook, I'm having some scanner issues nowadays.We recently moved, and have not yet discovered which box holds the oh-so-precious power cord to my lovely, lovely scanner. This has me in quite a tizzy, but it's good to play with options on how to frame one's images from a sketchbook, right?

I've treated myself to a membership at the Independent Publishing Resource Center, partly so I can use their scanners until I get my own up and running again. While most of my scans on January 7 turned out fine, the scanner did have a few moments of adding random crazy orange stripes to the page.

Oh, IPRC scanner. I think these orange stripes are signs of Yeti meddling.

While this makes me flinch in a lot of ways, it also reminds me of the work of Deb Rossi, who adds big "colorblocks" of watercolor over the top of her ink sketches. Maybe the scanner artifacts are a way to start exploring that sketching approach?

It would be prettier with real watercolor, rather than Photoshop.

Hmmmm. That's the joy of sketching in groups (and wrestling with persnickety equipment)--you can find yourself exploring all new ideas.