Happy (B)earthday!

I made this design for Earth Day. I put it on t-shirts and totes and stuff at my Cafe Press store.

"Where the heck have I been?" you may be asking. I know, haven't had time to blog lately. Well, I took a trip to Denver to attend an art licensing workshop presented by Jeanette Smith. I found it to be very informative.

While in Denver, I got to stay with my good buds, Max and Blackie (and their friend Jean.)


Denver is a pretty interesting place. It's an eclectic collection of cowboys, Christians, New Agers and artists. Since Jean's an artist, I got to meet quite a few of the latter category. It was snowing and 30 degrees the day I arrived, and then 78 degrees and blazing sun a few days later when I flew out. Spring is arriving there and we took a trip to the Denver Botanic Garden. They have a great collection of alpine plants, as well as a bunch of other interesting specimens. Here is one we liked for it's weird hairy foliage: European Pasque Flower or Pulsatilla vulgaris.


I also liked this little cactus flower, although the succulent building was way too hot for us to stay in for long.



Jean took me shopping to this great little store called 5 green boxes. They have a cool selection of home decor and other items. I got this beautiful pillow from Peking Handicraft there.


Since returning home, I've been busy getting caught up. Sunday I built a raised vegetable bed in my garden for my tomato plants, which seemed to have doubled in size in the 4 days I was gone.


This bed is really cool. It's made from a kit I found online from a company called Frame It All. You can buy the components at Home Depot too. The "boards" are composite plastic lumber. They are hollow core, which is lightweight for hauling up the stairs and they trap air so it warms up the soil. I want to get 2 more. The only bad thing is the labels are hard to remove.

Yesterday we celebrated my birthday by going to lunch at Bistro Jeanty in ...


...Paris, France? No, Yountville, Napa Valley, CA. Bistro Jeanty is really like a little slice of France here in California. I had the most decadent slice of ham and leek quiche I've ever tasted.

Today I bought myself a large bouquet of flowers.


It's nice to be back home again.



Happy Earth Day everybody!

Saving the Stages of a Painting

Once a painting is done, you forget what it looked like in the process. I thought it might be interesting to document the stages a painting goes through. Above is a photo of my watercolor setup.

Here you see the painting with the first light washes laid in. I usually work on the lightest and warmest colors first.

Now I have a few more washes of color added to the painting.

Here I'm beginning to add in some cooler color washes.

Once I've got the lighter washes in, I can start adding darker colors

Adding the black and the final touches makes the other colors "pop". Here's the final painting. (This last one was also photographed using only the sunlight. The lamps made the previous photos have a yellowish color cast.) Now I'm ready to scan this in and create some prints.

Ethereal Beauty of Spring

I've been driving by this gorgeous tree in my neighborhood covered with blossoms day after day and I finally remembered to bring the camera with me today to get a photo of it. Too bad it wasn't sunny this morning. It's completely glorious with the morning sun shining on it. It looks like it's lit from within.

While I was taking the photos, a man I recognized from the neighborhood stopped on his bicycle to comment on this tree. He said he thinks it has retained its blossoms longer this year because the weather has been cooler. According to him, it has been in bloom for almost 2 months. Anyone know what kind of tree this is? Please leave a comment.

This huge ceanothus bush is growing around the corner from my house. I've been admiring it for years. When I walk by it in bloom, the fragrance is heady. It's always buzzing with bees. The common name is wild California lilac. But it doesn't smell anything like the lilacs back east, which I miss so much. The scent is sort of, well, wild.

In keeping with my vow to "go native" with my garden, I planted a couple of what I think is the same variety of ceanothus in my back yard. This one is called Julia Phelps. As you can see, mine have a LONG way to go to get to the size of my neighbor's ceanothus. It might help if I cleared out all the weeds surrounding them.

I made a trip to the Haight Ashbury Recycling Center Native Plant Nursery a couple of weeks ago. One word describes this place...funky! It's smack in the middle of the recycling center, and the place fairly reeks of stale beer and garbage and there are lots of flies buzzing around, along with those folks who steal the recycling from the bins in front of your house. They have a cat who looks like she weighs about 25 lbs., (no lie...check the link...there's a picture.) Greg, who runs it, is so into recycling, that he makes these plant markers out of old aluminum blinds. He's the only one who seems to know where things are there. Greg has a garden a few blocks from our house, which is either an amazing display of native plants, or the abomination of the neighborhood, depending on your point of view. Here are the plants I bought there, yet to be planted in the ground. (Awaiting removal of the aforementioned weeds.)

Speaking of natives, here are a few of my California poppies growing in the front yard. Steve thought that they had volunteered, but I planted seed.

Foggy Morning at Ocean Beach

Tuesday morning I decided to take a walk on the trail along the Great Highway out at Ocean Beach, despite the fog. It wasn't too windy, so it wasn't too cold out there. I took this photo of our most common gull, Western gull, one second before it took off. The plumage on this gull is nice and fresh. It almost looks pretty.

This is my favorite house out at the beach. I call it the Mondrian House, for obvious reasons. There was a raven soaring over the house as I took the photo. You can see how the houses out at the ocean take a beating from the elements. There are some funky houses out there, as the residents are a collection of surfers, bikers and families, all living on the edge, as it were.

Someone must have collected these shoes on the beach and left them lined up on the cement bench just in case their owners returned to look for them. How thoughtful. It did make me wonder if the owners simply forgot that they had worn shoes that day or what?

I love the color palette here on this row of houses. It's one of my favorite things about San Francisco, how the houses are so colorful. It makes the city really pretty. The houses are attached, like ours is too.

This house stands out from the others, as it looks a lot older. It must have been built before the others on the block. I love all the Victorian details on it. But I wonder what's up with that left-hand window which is covered up?

A solitary Red-tailed hawk rested watchfully on this street light. She was there when I started my walk, and still there when I ended it, standing sentinel.

P.S. I forgot to write about this woman I saw out at the beach. She was reading from a piece of paper in one hand, had a Grande Nonfat Latte in the other hand, and she was listening to something on her ipod while power walking on the trail. Now that's what I call multi-tasking!

"Wild" Weekend

We had a sort of "wild" weekend. We went up to Glen Ellen and visited Jack London State Historic Park. Steve took this nice photo of a wall of a former winery on his ranch. It has a lot of lichens and stuff growing on it. We toured the House of Happy Walls, where London's wife lived after his death. It's filled with artifacts they collected in their extensive travels to exotic places like the Solomon Islands, the Yukon and Hawaii. This was pretty adventurous for the early 1900s. He also worked as a reporter for San Francisco newspapers and traveled to Europe, Yokohama, Vera Cruz and Korea. London did a heck of a lot in his 40 years of life.

We also watched Into the Wild on DVD. This film tells the real life story of Christopher McCandless, who ventured out on his own into the Alaskan wilderness in search of ??? This Sean Penn directed film is based on the book by Jon Krakauer. It's an intense, touching and disturbing story. I loved the soundtrack by Eddie Vedder. (Isn't someone's birthday coming up...hint, hint.)

This morning there were a number of cool birds in the birdbaths as I was making my tea. I just love these Townsend's warblers. They are hard to capture in a photograph, as they are very small and flitty birds. They don't hold still for very long.
The Santa Barbara daisies look nice in these photos too.

Artist's Rep Loses All in NYC Crane Collapse

Video of Richard Solomon talking about the losses.

I heard about this crane collapse on the news last week, but I just heard that Richard Solomon's office was destroyed. He represents many fine illustrators. He explains in the youtube video that a lot of artwork was destroyed in the accident. Scary. Luckily, he and his staff were not there at the time of the collapse. This emphasizes the need to have off-site backups of your work.

I've been wanting to plug my favorite font site: My Fonts. They have this cool feature called What the Font? You can scan a piece of type and save it as a jpeg and upload it to their site and it will figure out what font it is for you. I love this, since I lack the patience to discern the subtle differences between some fonts. To me, it's like trying to identify the different species of Empidonax flycatchers. Too much work.

Hoodies at Stow Lake

Went up to Stow Lake this morning to see if I could photograph the Hooded mergansers that have been hanging out there lately. This gopher was poking out of his hole, sunning himself. Taking a break from destroying the park plants.

Here is one of the male Hooded mergansers swimming along with his crest puffed up.
This one hauled out on a log to sit in the sun for a bit.

Here's a coot coming up to check out the hoodie.

I got one nice shot of the two males at once. They were both diving and swimming around a lot, so it was hard to get both of them in one shot. I saw one female, but she didn't come over to this shallow area where I could get a close shot.

I like the sun on this male with his crest a little down. They were folding their crests down in preparation to dive for food, making themselves more streamlined.