Santa Barbara County – Ink, Yarn & Beer

Coastal Beach

Where I live there are so many wonderful beaches in our county, to the south, and to the north. Just pop onto Hwy 1 / 101 and off you go! Some are wide and flat, such as in Carlsbad, others are easy to get to even if they have cliffs, and others are quite rugged.

Santa Barbara County has a lot of really great beaches. When I lived there, I had a lot of favorites – Butterfly, Hendry’s, and Goleta Beach. This is a view of Goleta Beach facing north. It is very typical of this section of California – sandy beaches, friable cliffs, Mediterranean vegetation. The coastal range is often right at the ocean’s edge and can create some dramatic views from the shoreline. I really like our beaches!

The biggest challenge here was the water, both waves and the damp water on the sandy shore. Putting people in was not too hard – just a few blobs to make the blobs people shaped. The foreground rocks were a bit of a challenge – I wanted enough detail to make them believable but not too detailed. I am pretty pleased with the cliffs, distant mountains, and sky. Overall, I think this painting turned out pretty good.

Gouache, Strathmore Vision 140# CP paper, 9×12.

Lone Cherry Trees Along Figueroa Mountain Road

These two trees have long since vanished. I photographed them in 2012 in Santa Barbara County along Figueroa Mountain Road in the early spring. I thought they were a beautiful spot of color against the greens of the California hills, which in themselves, during a superbloom, can be covered in shades of lavender, orange, and gold.

I mixed together gouache paints – whites (zinc and titanium) and some ivory black with my watercolors. This allows for layers to be built and bits painted over, as in gouache, but allows for a bit of transparent and opaque. I’ve done this before and always find it is a lot of fun. Gouache, when thickish, is best with small paintings, but mixing whites with watercolor gets an effect like gouache but at a much lower price point.

The photo – linked from Flickr – is not an especially good photo, but I do feel it catches the beauty of these two trees. When I went back looking for them a few years ago I could not find them, so I am glad I have captured them!

Watercolor paint mixed with white and / or black artist’s gouache. 11×14 on Canson watercolor paper.

Carpinteria Bluffs

Another attempt at acrylic painting. This time I used a sheet from a Fredrix linen pad. I gessoed it and then used, initially, the Open medium with the paints, but I didn’t like the way it was working, and so switched to regular matte medium to dilute the paints. I tried to use the paints fairly straight out of the tube, blending with white and matte medium. The result was a fairly thick paint that behaved well.

The Carpinteria Bluffs are located in the southernmost section of Santa Barbara County, just above the border of Ventura County, where I currently live. Carpinteria was home for many years and always enjoy returning, especially in summer when the light shifts and everything has a glow of its own. Eucalyptus trees and other plant life make for a wonderful walk along the cliffs above the Pacific, and across the Santa Barbara Channel are the various islands that make up the Channel Island National Park. This might be San Miguel Island, but I can never remember which one is which!