Month: October 2020

Escape!

I would say that for the most of the last 6 weeks the weather has been crap. In the 90s-100s F is way too hot. We have low humidity here, so the heat doesn’t drain you as it does when it is high, but day after day, week after week, of heat, is not fun. Throw some smoke and foul air in there, and welcome to what I think is becoming the new normal. California is burning. Colorado is burning. I guess we are not raking the forests enough . . .

Yesterday, though, was the first cool day in a long time. It was overcast and rather dreary because the sky is just a single shade of grey instead of the single shade of blue. When the overcast burns off, there are clouds to be seen, and they are such a delight! I headed out to a local open space area, Wildwood, taking my Instax Wide with me. I used it to shoot a select few images. I used my phone, too, to send some pictures off to friends. Everything is faded and dried up, but many plants adapted to the area sport bright colors though they are also fading for the winter.

There are a lot of fire roads running through Wildwood with trails leading off into more rugged terrain. I seldom venture into those areas unless with someone else. Safety first!

The prickly pear cacti (cactuses?) are laden with ripe fruit – the pears – and they are quite delicious to eat! Using leather gloves, twist the red pear off the paddle or use a knife. Pack it into a bag of some sort to take home. When you get home, turn on your flame thrower to burn off all the spikes. Take your knife and slice – tasty! Some local markets carry the pears, as well as the paddles. The paddles are also tasty and edible, and once their spikes are removed, slice them up and then cook them. Cooked prickly pear paddles are called napales.

Photographing these critters can be a challenge as there are other cactus around, and none are pleasant to fall into.

The road curves around a hill and this is the view you get. Mount Clef is part of a ridge that forms the northern part of my city, separating the Conejo Valley from the Santa Rosa Valley.

This is an name-unknown shrub which borders trails and roads through Wildwood.

I hiked about another mile and then turned around. I always like to see where I have been and look at the same things from a different viewpoint.

Here, the Mount Clef ridge moving east.

Back on my road, looking south toward the Santa Monica mountains. The day is later, the sun lower, backlighting mountains and trees

The Instax Wide doesn’t perform well at times, but this little tree’s silhouette is so expressive – the twists of the branches against the sky always catch me when I walk past. Below you can see what the Instax missed and the the phone camera caught.

And home I went.

Instax Afternoon

This afternoon I finally got out for a walk – the weather was not in the high 90s by 10 a.m. It felt so good to be outdoors after nearly 6 weeks inside or in the shade, trying to keep from melting. In general, heat doesn’t bother me, but exercising and sweating in such temperatures gets to me, and it seems this year has been particularly intense. The only walks seem to occur at night, once the sun has gone down and the sidewalks quit sizzling. Our air conditioning ran non-stop a few days in a row, which is unusual for us, but that gives you a sense of the heat – but at least our humidity is relatively low, unlike the southeast.

I decided to play with my Instax Wide by FujiFilm. Normally I just take a picture here and there with my instant cameras but thought it would be fun to use it as the camera to record today’s wanderings. Thus, in no particular order, a few scenes from my afternoon’s perambulation.  Click on an image to move through the gallery.

A Lonely Road (Watercolor)

I decided to give A Lonely Road (Gouache) a try in watercolor as that was my original intention with the painting.

It was quite interesting to do so as I used the same paper I used for my gouache, but the paper had less tooth than my usual CP watercolor paper, being more like hot press, which is very smooth.  This was American Journey paper, which is very nice, and is somewhere between HP and CP for texture.  This makes a difference when painting with watercolors.

Once more I feel like my DOF is not working in watercolor.  I am not quite sure why, but it seems to be I lay down a color and then lay down more, and more, and even more for the distant objects.  Unlike gouache, watercolor’s transparency makes each succeeding layer darker.  At times a glaze of very thin color can pull a watercolor together, but not here.  The dark distant hills on the right suggest a spot of cloud shadow, and the brighter one on the left a bit of sunshine.  The sky suggests otherwise.  And it looks like there is a sleeping or dead sheep in the field on the right!

There are bits and pieces of this painting I like, and the colors really do evoke a rather damp day when autumn is beginning to set in.  The fact is, I find watercolor inherently more difficult than gouache simply because more pre-planning and strategizing than with gouache.  This why I enjoy watercolor so much – it is so hard!  The colors are just wonderful at times, and that is one of the joys of watercolor.  Gouache, while beautiful, when done with less water and thicker paint, doesn’t have some of the same light as watercolor

So, for the sake of comparison, I am lining up the value study and gouache from yesterday with today’s watercolor.  Click on the value study below to click through the three if you want to do some comparing.

Maybe a pastel should come along tomorrow?

 

A Lonely Road (Gouache)

I started out trying to do a more delicate painting, but I think that would work better in watercolor. Instead of delicate and lighter, the colors became thicker and darker, and it turned from a misty, damp, rather gloomy day to one which seems filled with a foreboding storm.

I decided to just paint and not try for realism and delicacy. I went for emotion.  Instead of applying paint nicely, I began to just slap it on directly from the color onto the paper rather than mixing colors on the palette. It was gloriously fun!

I used a 1/2 inch flat brush – nothing else. I rather like this splashing and letting go of things as I tend to be something of a prima donna and perfectionist – and this was like rollicking through the mud and muck!!

If I were to call this any “school” of painting, I guess Expressionism would be the closest I would come. The more I painted, the more I wanted to express a fierce and gloomy day portending rain and hail, or rain and hell.

Another value study, too.  Impressed?

Look!  I put in some sheep!