Tag: California

Study at Pt. Lobos

You could spend your life exploring and drawing and painting Pt. Lobos in the Monterey area. Here is a quick study in pastels. This was a particularly difficult one to do because of the nature of the medium – messy and full of fine dust!

The distant cliffs across the waters are seen through the trees. Unlike gouache, you cannot paint over layers as successfully in pastels. More layers mean less success, even when you use a workable fixative. In watercolor masking can help as well as the fact you work from light to dark, so darker watercolor can obscure lighter washes.

In the end, the sky was a messy mush up weirdness – the white scribbles were my solution to the problem, but oddly, it did help out in the end. The sky was a flat grey, and here it gives the same flatness of color that morning.

Malibu Creek State Park, IV

Note: to see this painting a bit larger, you will need to right click on it (PC) and open in a new tab to see it bigger. WordPress has a new editor and I am not quite sure how to get it to make an image larger when you click on it. Sorry!

More Malibu Creek State Park, but this time with a different twist. The water is there – in the form of misty air. In spring and summer the coastal fog rolls in, and the landscape softens as it recedes. It doesn’t bring rain, but the environment is adapted to live on the moisture. As well, the land is often green from the rains earlier in the year.

I tried to capture this with washes and glazes, working wet-in-wet as well as rewetting the paper and adding color. This type of painting takes a patient approach (at least for me) as you have to load the paper with a bit of water and/or color, and then test it for dampness if you want things to soften and blur. It is also a fun way to express very faint geological shapes in the mountains.

Finally, oak trees. I just love these trees! Here in California they are really twisty and spooky, unlike the more upright specimens in the midwest. This one in the middle of the plain is unusual, but it is there, alone and grand.

A Study from Vernon Nye

I decided to use a study by the watercolorist Vernon Nye.  He caught the back country of California perfectly – the hills and trees in particular.  It was a fun study and I liked it because it pointed out to me how deceptively simple the hills can seem, but they really are not.  The road, too, was another eye-catcher.  I have driven along a number of back-road highways throughout the state, and you feel like you are the only person in the world.  The perspective was a great challenge, too.  Altogether, a good study of something in my own back yard, and I can take what I learned into future paintings.

Last Year, This Year

Fire season has begun! Up the coast, along Highway 101, the first fire has broken out near Gaviota. The land is hilly and grassy, and rugged in areas. This makes stopping the fire more challenging, and when the winds pick up, it can travel so fast. We have been having a heat wave in the 90s F for the past few days – today is supposedly the last one like that in our area. Then, down into the 70s F, which is much nicer. I used to love the hot winds, but they have become more fierce and destructive over the last few years that they are more frightening than ever.

This photo shows what we can be up against. The new spring growth, becoming lush in our seasonal rains, changes to dry, dead tinder for a wildfire. The swath of grey is last season’s new growth.