Hillbillies, squirrels, and the drought

"Hillbilly" heirloom tomato

Prismacolor colored pencils on Stonehenge paper

Between the drought and a pair of brazen black squirrels, it's been a tough summer for my vegetable garden. Everyone's tomatoes are late this year, and I think the vines are finally producing more tomatoes than the squirrels want. This is an heirloom variety called "Hillbilly". They are deeply lobed, and are gorgeous colors. This first one that I picked—before the squirrels got it—weighed in at around a pound:

The one I used for the model for my drawing seemed to ripen and change colors before my eyes:

There are loads of green tomatoes out there, just waiting to ripen; the fact that it's supposed to be 100 degrees here today should hasten that process!

Happy Almost-Summer!

S'more, Deconstructed

(click to enlarge)

I know that the calendar says that we have a month or so until summer officially starts, but in my mind, Memorial Day starts summer rolling. And since the Illustration Friday topic is melt, I thought I'd share this drawing from almost exactly one year ago. (See the original post here.) Have a relaxing holiday weekend!

A Summer Still Life

7" x 7", Prismacolor colored pencils 

on Canson Mi-Teintes pastel paper, Light Blue

(click to enlarge)

The other day, I was looking at some fresh blueberries on an enamelware dish and thought they looked like an old-fashioned all-American summer day. So I started this little patriotic piece—you get the "flag" composition, right?—deciding to use this blue paper because it reminded me of sun-faded denim or chambray. As a result, the whole piece looks a little faded—I like that.  I have a thing about that paper with blueberries; I used it this very same week three years ago on this blueberry sketch!

I kept accidentally smearing the red pencil into the white areas, and had to redraw them once before just resigning myself to pinkish stripes. I was originally going to have a bowl of blueberries, but changed the bowl to a plate for a more casual arrangement of the berries.

One thing I'm still deciding: does it look better showing  a bit of the paper (below) or cropped as it is above? Feel free to leave me your opinion in the comments.

Happy almost-August!!

Some set-up and WIP pics:

(I had blueberries everywhere before I was done.)

SunSugar Cherry Tomatoes

Hmmm. This is one of those pieces that didn't turn out quite as I'd envisioned. Maybe I should've used richer colors, or should add a background—I'm not sure. Things just haven't clicked: I even felt like the hot weather was affecting my pencils, making them waxier than usual! 

These little "SunSugar" cherry tomatoes are so beautiful on the vine—the way the clusters become a rainbow of color as they ripen. I wanted to capture that stage, as I've drawn fully ripe ones in the past. 

Here are a few work-in-progress pics. This time, I used an empty slide mount instead of my usual viewfinder that I've shown you before:

I decided to enlarge it to 5x the original little thumbnail sketch on the right:

The tomatoes continued to ripen and change colors as I worked—what a show!

As I look at this next pic, I'm thinking that I like this "unfinished" stage more than the final one. The negative space where the vine will go might've looked more interesting left alone."Food for thought" for the next piece.

Well, while there's nothing horrible about this drawing,

I think that I'll chalk it up as a learning piece.

(Or maybe I'll just have to add a background before it drives me crazy...!)

Beach treasures: Reductive drawing

I know that this doesn't look like my usual drawings, but here's the backstory:

I was down in Ventura a few weekends ago, and had a very successful morning beachcombing. My husband and I found four sand dollars in perfect condition! We went to a spot where all of the birds were hanging out, thinking that might indicate lots of goodies washing in, and it worked!

In my life-drawing meet-up, I've been doing some "reductive" drawings: basically smearing charcoal all over the paper and then "drawing" with a kneaded eraser. Since this was clearly going to be a rather monochromatic drawing, the method seemed to fit.

 Uh-oh....I knew right away that I'd made a big mistake not giving more thought to the size and placement of the sand dollars on the page. Clearly, the final piece would have to be cropped from this one, which was a disappointment, as I really like the rough edges of the charcoal-toned area.

But I had such fun, working quickly and loosely. And I love the texture of the charcoal on the paper:

But if you prefer my tighter, more detailed drawings—fear not! Here's what's on my drawing board at the moment: one of the sand dollars drawn at 2x life-size (I've cranked up the contrast to make it easier to see the lighter parts.) :

Happy Summer!!

A strawberry for a warm day

Prismacolor colored pencil on Stonehenge paper

(click to enlarge)

My red family of pencils is getting a workout lately. Maybe it's this almost-100 degree weather that has me thinking warm tones. (Wait, shouldn't I be drawing something like ice-blue flowers to cool off?)

Last summer, I bought these lovely strawberries from a street vendor in London. Rounder than the ones grown here in California; they reminded me of wild strawberries. Aren't they beautiful?

I've long admired the beautiful work of botanical artist Ann Swan, and whenever I think of drawing a strawberry, I can't stop thinking about her beautiful examples such as this one.  She's so much better at rendering the leafy bracts at the top, and the seeds—or "pips"—on my "model" weren't terribly prominent, but this is my homage to the talents of Ann Swan.

Oh, And here are a few work-in-progress shots:

preliminary sketch, ready for the light box tracing

The final burnishing is so much fun. I've been using Prismacolor's harder Verithin pencils for that step. Now, I think I'll go sit out in the shade and enjoy some of the leftover strawberries that didn't get to be models!

The Tale of the Abandoned Watermelon

Prismacolor colored pencils on Strathmore Bristol, vellum, approx 3" x 3"

Oh, it started out simply enough: The beautiful patterns in the rinds of the small, seedless watermelons at the grocery store were calling my name.

When I got home, I set up my "model" to do the base drawing. Sometimes what appears to be a simple rounded shape can be one of the trickiest to draw. A "flexible curve" is an amazingly helpful tool. I've had this one for ages, since my designer days, but you can find a similar one wherever art/drafting supplies are sold. You just bend it around until you have the curve you want, and then lay it on your paper and use it as a template. Nifty!

Then I did some not-so-pretty swatches to figure out how to achieve the colors in the rind. As you probably know, with colored pencils, it's all about layering. I often pull out some reference books for ideas. Three of my favorites for this are Botanical Portraits with Colored Pencils by Ann Swan, Painting Light with Colored Pencil by Cecile Baird, and Colored Pencil Solution Book by Janie Gildow.                   .

One tip that I learned ages ago (probably from one of those three books) is that a very light layer of Canary Yellow under the greens of a botanical piece will add a lot of light and life.

Well, at this point, I got overwhelmed. I was trying to do a life-sized drawing, and even though it was a very small melon, it seemed a bit daunting (and more than a bit boring) to fill in the whole thing. I thought, should I cut it in half to expose the center? Nah...the red center always gets all of the attention. I decided to sleep on it.

The next day, it dawned on me: my little botanical/nature heart series! A while back I started these as a way to explore textures in a small piece—almost like doing swatches. In the end, I had so much fun working on this, and I know that if I'd tried to fill in that bigger watermelon piece, I'd have gone a little nutso. I just don't have that kind of patience. Here's a little overview of the process:

Canary Yellow and Tuscan Red

adding Indigo Blue

Olive Green, Dark Green...and  a few other greens!

If you'd like to see the other hearts in this series, start here.

Happy watermelon-eating August to you! 

P.S. The last of my travel posts will be up shortly.

.

Sweet Summer Cherries

“Summer afternoon—summer afternoon; 

to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.”   

—Henry James  

It's cherry season in the Bay Area, and there's a stand in my neighborhood that sells some real beauties. On Wednesday afternoon, I bought a pound each of the dark red ones—I think they're Bing, but I'm not positive—and the Rainier cherries, and they're so sweet!! (It was a happy coincidence that Illustration Friday posted this week's topic of "sweet" just as I was putting the final touches on this drawing.)

I decided to draw the Rainiers, as a companion piece to a drawing of the red ones that I did last year at this time. When you see these in the market, they're often a bit bruised and discolored—their light-colored skins make them appear more fragile. I think they have a more delicate taste, too.

It's supposed to be warm and sunny here for the next week or so, and cherries are the perfect warm weather snack—it's a wonder that I got through this drawing without getting cherry juice all over it.

Here are some set-up and work-in-progress pics.  Please forgive the bad lighting and inaccurate color; I shot these at my desk with my iPhone camera since I just didn't want to get up and do the whole scanning thing. I was going to write a bit more about my process, but oddly enough, when I went back to last year's cherry drawing, I'd gone through it all in that post! Strange...

Have a great weekend!

Miss Rosa Bianca Aubergine

Prismacolor colored pencils on Strathmore Bristol, vellum

Here I go, personifying my produce again. I can't help myself—from the moment this beautiful little "Rosa Bianca" eggplant appeared in my garden, it looked just like a little face to me. It even has a human-sounding name, for heaven's sake! (By the way, isn't the French name aubergine far superior to the word eggplant?) This little gem gets its name from the fact that it's basically white, but gets streaked with red-violet as it develops in the sun. 

Maybe I've been watching too much "Masterpiece Theater", but I can't look at the way the green cap curls on the sides without thinking of those Jane Austen heroines' hairstyles:

I was tempted to draw a little face on my eggplant when I sketched it, but my portrait-drawing skills are woefully rusty—besides, I think it's more fun to imagine it, don't you?

A Tomato Family

Prismacolor colored pencils on Strathmore Bristol Vellum, 5" x 8"

When I was setting up this still life, it occurred to me that it looked like a little family portrait. So, the whole time I was drawing these tomatoes, I envisioned them as such: Mom, Dad, the baby next to its mother, and the two older children by the father—one refusing to sit up straight.

These folks were all born and raised in my garden: the "parents" are a wonderful heirloom variety called "Kellogg's Breakfast". They're a beautiful yellow-orange, and are fleshy, very sweet, and have few seeds. You'd almost think you're eating a nectarine—so delicious. The "kids" are "Sugar Sun" cherry tomatoes, also really yummy.

There's nothing quite like a beautiful still life. Here are two of my favorite still life painters:

Janet Rickus paints gorgeous, often whimsical, pieces. (I think that perhaps her sense of humor led me to create a tomato "family" with my own drawing.) Her work is hard to describe in words...you've got to take a peek here.

Abby Ryan creates a daily oil painting, usually an elegantly simple still life, and they're gorgeous. Each painting is then auctioned off on eBay. She collaborates with a potter, Jury Smith, who creates beautiful pieces specifically for use in still life paintings. Isn't that fascinating? And you can even watch videos of Abby painting on her blog and her website. It's a joy to watch.

I hope you'll check them out!

Illustration Friday: Suspend

Prismacolor colored pencils on Strathmore Bristol Vellum

In my garden, ripening blackberries are suspended from their stems, 

waiting for the birds—or me—to pluck them off. 

 

My blackberry plants are out of control—in a good way. They have razor-sharp thorns, and they grow like weeds, but I love them anyway. Maybe it's because I can never pick them without thinking of Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Peter Rabbit, in which Peter's sisters obediently pick blackberries during his misadventure in Mr. McGregor's garden. 

It's great to be participating in Illustration Friday...it's been a little while! I'm reserving judgement on the new format—maybe it'll just take some getting used to. (I'm not so good with change.) I hope to visit some old favorites as well as some new faces this week! (Update: After actually posting my first time in the new IF  format, I have to admit that it's nice to not have to make a thumbnail—even though I miss the "surprise" element of clicking on them—and the "sharing" capabilities are amazing!)