Recently I was at the venerable Claremont Hotel on the Berkeley/Oakland border for a meeting. It’s a grand old structure, mostly white, at the foot of the East Bay Hills.
I did make some pencil guidelines first on this one; that perspective was tricky!
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Saturday was the 13th SketchCrawl, and we had our first official East Bay Crawl. About 30 people showed up to sketch in and around the U.C. Berkeley campus.
The weather was outstanding, and there were lots of great subjects to draw. We met at 11:00am at the West end of campus near BART, and worked our way around and through various buildings. We had a brief meeting at 2:00, and then about 15 of us met up at the Cafe Strada at 5:00 pm to share coffee, sketches and tips. It was a great group of friendly sketchers. […more below]
The Life Sciences Building has T. Rex and Pterodactyl skeletons, as well as other interesting bones to draw. The Anthropology Museum was also open and provided sketching material, but I wanted to stay outdoors in the beautiful weather. I had forgotten how beautiful the campus can be, and I went to school there and live only 1/2 mile away! I will definitely be back there for more sketching soon.
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Last weekend was cool, but sunny. A friend and I took a hike in the East Bay hills, in the Sibley Volcanic Regional Preserve. From the top you can stand in one spot and see San Francisco, Mt. Tamalpais in Marin, and Mt. Diablo to the East all at the same time. That’s hard to do from the ground!
The park is the site of several small dormant volcanos and an old rock quarry. It’s a geologist’s dream. There are also at least four man-made rock and grass labyrinths. Here is a view looking down on one, with the Bay and Mt. Tam in the distance.
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Recently I was in Seattle on business and managed to sneak away to do a few sketches. The new Olympic Sculpture Park is beautifully situated above the water and brilliantly designed. It features stunning views in multiple directions and plenty of expansive space in which to set off the works from striking angles.
There was a sign saying that the Oldenburg was not to be photographed, but it didn’t say anything about sketching. 🙂 Some teenagers were admiring the sculpture but had no idea what it was supposed to be: I explained, but I don’t think they believed me!
The Pike Place Public Market is another interesting site full of sketching possibilities. It is a bustling place, filled with stands overloaded with prime specimens of every imaginable kind of food. Just looking at those vegetables will make you healthy! 🙂 Sadly, I only had time to sketch it from afar, looking down Pike Street.
Related Post: Produce Market
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The Bar CĂ©sar tapas place has a new location on Piedmont Avenue in Oakland. I finally got over there to check it out: very nice! They’ve got a whole wall of goodies, including these paella pans of various sizes.
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Classes and workshops solely focused on sketching are rare, but I love to take them when they pop up. Over time I have managed to take quite a few. Some are great, some are terrible, most are in between. However, the right class at the right time is a great boost to my motivation and resolve.
Last October I was lucky enough to take a wonderful workshop towards the “great” end of the scale, a three day intensive called Road Trip! Travel Sketching for Designers, taught by Richard Scott. The photo of me sketching over on the right was taken by Richard during that class.
Here are more sketches and a full report.
The next Road Trip class is a streamlined two day version in San Francisco this June. The workshop is not cheap, but I found it rich and inspiring: well worth it for me.
A word about other classes that are less than ideal; I often find that something important comes out of them too. I may meet someone interesting, get turned on to a new book to tool, or just get more focused on what I really do want to be doing.
Related Post: “Road Trip!” Workshop: a Review
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We have been having near perfect weather for several days: kind of creepy in February! I’ve been indoors at work though and haven’t gotten to enjoy it yet. Hopefully it will hold through the weekend.
The sunset tonight was spectacular.
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We recently spent an interesting day in Alameda, California with friends. Alameda, an island in the San Francisco Bay, was dominated by the Alameda Naval Air Station until 1997. It is now becoming a zone for light industry, but it still looks quite “base-y”. We started our day by touring the WWII aircraft carrier USS Hornet. I’m not a big fan of creations built for warfare, but what was achieved using only slide rules is indeed impressive.
We then went to the Hangar One vodka distillery, housed in an old aircraft hangar on the base. They “hand craft” vodka in large copper pots and have a tasting room with an incredible view out over the old runways (now closed as a wildlife refuge) to the bay and San Francisco beyond. We arrived just in time to taste the spirits and watch a hazy sunset.
Hangar One makes fruit flavored vodkas by infusing them with actual fruit (as opposed to flavorings, natural or otherwise).
My favorite is Buddha’s Hand; a lemony vodka with complex, delightful flavors in each sip. It’s made with a rather bizarre looking citrus fruit called “Buddha’s Hand”, which looks sort of like a bunch of carrots with lemon skin on them.
We finished our day with sushi then hot fudge sundaes: perfect!
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I always enjoy spending time in my favorite tapas bar, CĂ©sar, in the heart of Berkeley’s “Gourmet Ghetto”. It’s a foodies dream; the food is divine and the drinks superb.
It’s always packed in the evenings, but afternoons are calm and quiet. It’s also a fun place to sketch; this is the same restaurant where I did the tapas sketches that ended up on my note cards.
This sketch shows just one of the many wood lined pantries behind the bar. The sketch is done on half of a spread in my (reloaded) Pocket Moleskine, so it’s a small one. It still required a full glass to wine to complete, however!
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I have had some requests from folks who would like to see inside the three books discussed in my previous post.
Here is a sample page from each book:
Click on the images to see larger views, and on the titles for links to amazon.fr.
Créez et Composez Votre Carnet de Voyages:
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It was hard to pick representative pages, but hopefully this gives you a flavor of each. The first book is a bit more focused on traditional watercolor painting and also has information on making the book itself. The other two have looser styles, and include information on collage techniques as well as drawing and painting.
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One of the highlights of my Paris trip last June was the ongoing search for books on travel sketching (carnet de voyage aka carnet de voyages aka carnets des voyages). Books on how to keep such a sketchbook, as well as all kinds of travel sketchbook/journal reproductions, are quite popular in France and large bookstores have entire sections devoted to carnets de voyages.
I spent an entire morning in FNAC, sitting on the carpet, pouring through book after book. Pure heaven for me! And, although it was hard to choose I did end up bringing back eleven books. Most are travel sketchbook reproductions, but my favorite finds are the three how-to books shown below.
Click on the images below to see larger versions,
and on the titles for links to amazon.fr.
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Créez et Composez Votre Carnet de Voyages |
Créer son Carnet de Voyage |
Carnets de Voyages |
Luckily, one does not need an extensive comprehension of written French to understand these books; you can figure out most of the content from the pictures alone. They each have a different style, but in general include tips for
drawing, watercolor, collage and adding text, with emphasis on creating a personal record rather than an artistically impressive result.
There are few books written in English about keeping travel sketchbook/journals (but there are some; I’ll be posting about my overall favorites soon). Are these French books earth-shatteringly great? Probably not, but they are precious to me because they are not something I can find at home.
Update: See sample pages from these books in this post.
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| The Fireplace Mantle | |
| Today was SketchCrawl 12.5. SketchCrawl is series of drawing events conceived by Enrico Casarosa. Usually a date is named and groups get together all over the world in different cities to spend the whole day sketching together, then everyone shares their sketches online. A SketchCrawl is like a pub crawl, except with sketching instead of (or in addition to!) drinking. | |
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Today’s crawl was a little different though. The idea was to have a mini SketchCrawl (and thus the in between numbering) where everyone stays at home to draw. I couldn’t spend the whole day drawing this time, but did manage three sketches. |
| In the Living Room | |
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| In the Bathroom | |
People will be posting their SketchCrawl 12.5 work in the SketchCrawl Forums. There is also a SketchCrawl Flickr Group where you can find sketches from some crawl events.
Drawing for a full day is an intense experience. Doing so even when you don’t feel like it can yield some interesting, even positive, results. I am always completely wiped out at the end of such a day and others report the same. Such an immersion can really shake loose your drawing brain though and I highly recommend it.
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