December 2017

One of the projects for my watercolor class was to paint something for a holiday card. Usually I look for images of snow scenes, but this time I didn't find any that inspired me so I used a photo from our September trip to Mammoth of some aspen leaves. I just got up close to the leaves fluttering in the wind and luckily it came out pretty good. I also used the photo for the cover of a calendar that Maureen and I put together every year. I like my painting, but I think I like the photo better. I didn't end up using the painting for a card. Maureen found lots of unused cards from past years and used those rather than having another one printed.

Ron, my painting class teacher, likes to do lots of scenes with colorful trees this time of year. This class project was based on a photo of a river. Ron's demonstration painting emphasized the trees over the water, but I liked the river and tried to show more of the reflections in it. I didn't quite get what I wanted, but it was a good try.

Our fall color paintings nearly always include one with lots of white trunks of aspens or birches. For this one I again deviated from Ron's demo by emphasizing the bright yellow leaves instead of filling the space with reds and oranges. I didn't think much of this painting as I was working on it, but now that it is done, I think it is pretty good.

more October 2017

For the second week of class, Ron was still going over basic stuff for the new students, so I needed to come up with my own idea of what to paint. With memories of our recent trip to Mammoth Lakes in mind, I chose another of my mountain photos from years ago. In the nineties, when our sons were in their teens, we took them on a couple of weekend backpacking trips into 20 Lakes Basin, near Tioga Pass. It's a very beautiful place that's only a couple of miles of hiking after riding the shuttle boat across Saddle Bag Lake. I was a bit unsure that I could do a good job of painting it, but I dove right in and finished most of it in a couple of hours. I am quite pleased with the result.

In the third week of class, we started an autumn scene inspired by a photo supplied by Ron. I thought the photo was quite interesting, at least more than some of the other fall scenes that we have done. Ron said he chose it because Greg, one of the students, wanted to see a demonstration of painting rocks by scraping with the edge of a credit card. Unfortunately, Greg didn't make it to class to see it. I wasn't interested in any of Ron's techniques like credit card rocks or painting with a sponge. I did some masking for the leaves on the rocks and a few tree trunks, but otherwise just used brush and paint. I think it came out pretty good.

October 2017

I did one more painting last June, but didn't get around to showing it on this blog until now. One afternoon, I went out for a little hike in Garin Park here in Hayward, and I followed Dry Creek for a couple of miles. There was one spot where the shadows and reflections caught my eye, and I took a photo with my iphone. It was a complicated scene for a watercolor, but why not give it a try? I added the fish, but it wasn't exactly cheating because I did see some little fish in another part of the creek. I was afraid that it was too mixed up for anyone to get what it was supposed to be. Today was the start of the fall session of my watercolor class, and I showed it to my fellow students, and a lot of them liked it, so maybe it's not so bad.

As I said, today was the start of a new season of my watercolor class, and I needed an idea of something to paint. I chose a photo I took a few weeks ago when we were spending a few days at Mammoth Lakes. When we are there, we always go out to Hot Creek for a walk because it is such a special place. This time we chose to take a trail into the canyon a bit upstream from the hot springs, and as we started down, I shot a photo of this juniper. I think it was the clouds that really caught my eye, and I think I did them pretty well. A few minutes later as we were walking along the creek, the clouds grew more threatening, and we decided that we needed to get out of there. We found a rough trail out of the canyon, and made it back to our car with dark clouds and thunder. A minute or two later, on our way back to highway 395 when it sounded like rocks hitting our windshield. The hail was so heavy that the traffic on the freeway was either pulled over or going about 10 mph. After about 10 minutes, we drove out of it, and made it back to our cabin.

June 2017

My next class project was an ocean sunset with three catamarans in the distance. In the photo, I was attracted by a pink glow in the sky with some very soft clouds, and the reflection of the sunlight in the water. It looked simple, but turned out to be quite challenging and my painting fell far short of what I imagined it to be. But at least I tried to get more of the effects of the photo than Ron did in his demonstration.

For our last project of the season, we worked from another of Ron's photos, one of a man standing somewhere in Mexico. We all seem to be reluctant to paint scenes with people, because it is so obvious when they don't look right, but I am usually surprised that it is not really that hard to just paint what I see. At our last class, after finishing this painting, we had our usual potluck and then Larry, Cheryl, Lynn and I played some music to entertain the class.

One day out at the ranch near Livermore where we board our horses, I noticed this horse looking very stark black and white against the muted colors of an overcast day, and shot a photo with my phone with the idea of painting it. The horse is a gypsy vanner, a breed from the British Isles used to pull wagons. Most of this painting was done quite fast and loose, and I am quite pleased with the result.

May 2017

The most recent class project was a hillside with poppies and lupine. I don't know the location of Ron's photo, and he probably doesn't know either. It looked more like southern California than around here. Often, when I use masking fluid, I am not very happy with the results, so although the whole class masked out the flowers, I chose not to. It was a bit tedious painting the green grass around the flowers, but it came out all right.

In between class projects I've been doing some paintings from my photos from High Sierra trips of years past. This one was an interesting juniper tree near Bull Run Lake, off of Highway 4. Maureen and I made several weekend backpacking trips there in the '90s.

This one was at Crown Lake in the Bridgeport area. My friend, Gerald, and I spent five days exploring this country in the late '90s.

April 2017

On the last day of the winter session of my painting classs, the project was to do a quick painting of a photo of a bunch of flowers, but I had already done that the week before, so I chose to do something with a photo I took the previous summer. We had been spending a few days in the Big Sur area, and stopped at Nepenthe for a coffee at the cafe below the restaurant. I noticed this woman admiring the view and snapped a shot of her with my phone. Since we were having our usual potluck for the last day of class, I painted fairly quickly, trying to keep it simple with large areas of solid color.

For the first class of the spring session, I found one of my old photos from the mountains. Around 20 years ago, we were camped at Mammoth Lakes, and one day I hiked up beyond Crystal Lake to the top of Mammoth Crest. I was enjoying walking across this high plateau when this dead tree caught my eye and I got a photo of it. I thought it captured some what I love about this timberline country. After I had painted this one, I remembered that I had painted the same scene many years ago, so I dug out my old painting and compared them. Although my old one was not bad, the new one was much better, and I really like it.

While I was looking through old photos, I also came across an older one that I thought would be good to paint. One night around 1970, I drove up through Yosemite alone to Saddlebag Lake, and the next day climbed Mt. Conness, at 12,590 ft., the highest Sierra peak north of Tioga Pass. It was quite an adventure which involved crossing a glacier, crossing the bergschrund on a snow bridge and a bit of class 3 climbing on the face above it. I didn't have an ice axe or crampons, which would have been appropriate for the steep snow of the glacier, and on the way down I fell and slid quite a distance, luckily with no injuries but a few scrapes and bruises. As I passed the first lake below the glacier, I shot the photo that inspired this painting. The turquoise blue of the lake is typical of lakes below glaciers.

March 2017

Last May, and then again in October, we went to four-day riding and training clinics with our favorite horse expert, Chris Ellsworth. They took place at our friend Jody's place near Placerville, and Jody let us stay in her house there. She has become a good friend, and we see her nearly every day because she has two horses boarded at the same place as ours, and Rocky, her Tennessee Walker shares a pen with our horse, Zim. Rocky is a very friendly horse, and I enjoy seeing him whenever I go to get Zim. Jody has done plenty of nice things for us, so I did this painting of Rocky to give to her.

In my painting class, I spent a day working on my painting of Rocky instead of the class project, which was a little kitten peeking through a hole in a concrete wall. Then last week, I would have started on the kitten, but Ron had put out copies of a photo of some flowers to be used for next week's project, a fast, loose painting. Ron doesn't mind if we don't follow his schedule, so I went ahead and painted the flowers a week early. I spent about an hour on this, and I think it came out pretty good, considering the time spent.

February 2017

The first class project of the winter session was a lake at sunset with snow all around. I don't know where Ron got the photo or where it was taken, but it was a pretty scene, and I enjoyed painting it. In his demonstration, Ron masked out the snow, but I didn't, and found it fairly easy to paint around it. He likes to use a lot of masking, and I think it is partly because it makes things a bit easier for less experienced students. I find that I am not very good at masking, and I would rather not use it. When I started this painting with the sky and its reflection, I thought I had made a complete mess of it, but when I had done the rest, it looked pretty good. One thing I did different from Ron and the rest of the class was to add a blue cast to the snow, making my painting look colder than theirs. I like it that way. I feel that this scene should look kind of cold.

Next, we did a still life of apples from a photo by Ron. Once again, he used masking for the apples, but I didn't feel that they needed it. I just used it for a few white spots to make the apples look shiny. I think I did a pretty good job with this one.

Then we did a lion. I did use masking on this one to make it easier to paint the background as a formless wet wash. But then I didn't like my formless wash. I wanted it darker and with a bit more form to it, so I added a bunch more vegetation. I still didn't like it very much, but several people around me commented on how they liked it, so I continued on with the lion, and it turned out better than I expected.

January 2017

I did one last painting at the end of the fall session of my class. This was based on one of Ron's photos of some very colorful parrots. Most of the class only did the single parrot, but I included the two in the background of the photo because I liked the way they looked in the photo. It was fun to use all of the bright colors.

When the class started up again in the new year, I knew that there would not be a class project for the first class, but I didn't really have any good ideas about what to paint. I looked through recent photos on my iphone, and thought about a couple of them with dramatic clouds, but that sounded a bit difficult. Ron usually brings in a big pile of color copies from old class projects, and one of an old wrecked boat caught my eye. Ron said that he took the photo somewhere on Tomales Bay. I worked fast on this one and finished it well before the end of the class. Whenever I have gone a month or more without painting, I always feel like I need to do a throw-away painting just to get back into the feel of it. This time, although it's not one of my best, at least it's not a throw-away.