Rentenaar Rd Sauvie Island

Spring has arrived and hunting season has ended on Sauvie Island, which means I can go into the wild life areas to paint again. Here are 3 watercolor studies I did on Sunday.

7″ x 10″ watercolor

7″ x 10″ Watercolor and ink

9″ x 12″ watercolor

Office Chair

The work on my studio is complete and I’ve been trying to get back to where I was before.  I had a glimpse of something I wanted to work toward, while working with Jordan Wolfson in August and I’m trying to find my way back to that.

Here are some recent studies.

14″ x 18″ charcoal and watercolor

14″ x 18″ mixed media

11″ x 14″ oil on  panel

More studies

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10″ x 12″ oil on linen panel

This painting above is the same one from my last post, but taken a bit further.

6″ x 6″ oil on linen panel

These others are efforts to leave the reference behind a bit and lose myself in what it is I’m drawn to in the scene. They seem a bit self conscious to me, like I’m pushing them for no good reason. Like I’m faking it. Of course, I am faking it, at this point.

6″ x 5.5″ watercolor, ink and water soluble crayon on paper

New Page of Paintings from Ireland

I got a new scanner that is better able to scan slides than my old one, so I spent some time scanning slides of old paintings and added a new page of work I did in the late 1990s inspired by a trip to western Ireland. There is a link to the page on the right sidebar and you can get to it by clicking on the image below.

watercolor 7″ x 10″

My wife and daughters and I all remember this trip fondly and none of us have been willing to let many of these paintings go. Most of them are hanging in our house.

Gone Sketching

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5″ x 3 1/2″ watercolor in sketchbook

Since attending the First Urban Sketching Symposium, a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been spending most of my available time drawing rather than painting. I hope to get some painting done soon.

Please check out the Symposium blog and Flickr site for more about that amazing event.

You can also see some of my latest sketches at my other blog -> Sketchbook Meditations

Centennial Mills

Centennial Mills from NW 13th and Raleigh

This is the closest I’ve gotten to painting recently. I’ve been doing a lot of drawing though, some of which can be seen on my other blog.

Salt

I’ve been spending more time drawing than painting lately. I’ve been re-inspired by one of the people who first turned me on to sketching, Russell Stutler. He has an amazingly wonderful site.  Something new there, since last time I visited, is his book on sketching. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in urban sketching.

I’ve been working on reducing my blood pressure without using drugs. For about a year, I was taking a drug to control my BP and it made me sick, coughing and tired all the time. When my Dr recommended I switch to another drug that would slow my heartbeat, I decided to see if making some changes in my life could eliminate the need to take BP drugs. I’ve increased my cardio exercise and tightened up my diet. The biggest change to my diet has been a drastic reduction of salt. My BP has gone from around 140/90 to around 115/65 in about 3 or 4 weeks. I don’t know if it’s related to the BP drop or perhaps the increased cardio, but my resting heart rate has also dropped several beats as well.

Thanks to the wonderful painter, Kathryn Law for the inspiration and information to do this.

Studies

I’ve posted a few sketches on my other blog but I’ve been so busy trying to keep my job and take care of other personal things that I have not had time to paint.

I read a post by Armand Cabrera on his blog Art and Influence about the value of doing studies. Here are a couple of studies I’ve done recently trying to get the hang of gouache.

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Foggy Sunday Morning Sketchcrawl and Tagged

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The Steel Bridge

5″ x 8″ ink and watercolor in Sketchbook

Click here to visit this site on Google Maps

I went on another solo sketchcrawl today in foggy Old Town Portland. This is the top of the Steel Bridge, (the same bridge I painted from below, a couple of posts ago).

I started the morning with breakfast at one of my favorite spots, the Bijou Cafe, where I did the sketch below.

Inside the Bijou Cafe

3 1/2″ x 10″ ink and watercolor

Click here to see this site on Google Maps

I usually get down there pretty early in the morning and sketch as the vendors setup for Saturday Market for a while then head across the river to SE Main near Water Ave for one more sketch from my truck (it’s a little cold sitting outside).

I5, the Hawthorne Bridge and KOIN Tower

5″ x 8″ ink and watercolor

Click here to visit this site on Google maps

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Tagged

I was tagged recently by Celeste Bergin, check out her blog at Celeste Paints. Celeste is a founder and one of the primary organizers of the Portland Plein Air & Studio Painters. Unfortunately for me, their paint outs are on weekdays when I’m working.

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The rules are:

1. Link to person who tagged you
2. Mention the rules
3. List 6 or 7 unusual things about yourself or quirky but boring, unspectacular details about yourself
4. Tag 6 or 7 other bloggers at the end of your post and comment on their blogs to let them know they’ve been tagged

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The 7 unusual things I’ll list here are jobs I’ve had over the years:

1. For 2 summers, while in college, I worked as a drawbridge tender on 2 railroad bridges. It was pretty spooky leaving there at 11 PM at the end of my shift.

2. I completed the first year of a 2 year Machinist Apprenticeship.

3. I worked for several years as a cook in restaurants in Delaware, Pennsylvania and Eastern Long Island, NY

4. I apprenticed as a Handmade Papermaker with Douglass Morse Howell, who made paper for lots of famous artists.

5. I worked for oil paint manufacturer Robert Gamblin of Gamblin Artist Colors.

6. I had a landscape contracting business for 16 years.

7. I once worked for a day tuning waterfalls at a convent in the Columbia River Gorge.

OK, at Frank Gardner’s urging, I lied about one of the jobs I had. See if you can catch my lie.

I really don’t think anyone is left untagged at this point so I’ll just list 7 artist blogs that I find especially enjoyable and inspiring.

Juilan Merrow Smith

Steven Goodman

Frank Edwards

Eric Jacobsen

Donald Yatomi

Lli Wliburn

Nico Muhly (composer)

Scott Conary

OK, that’s eight, I can’t help myself. Here’re some more artists whose work I love:

Timothy Horn

Alex Kanevsky

Jennifer Balkan

Heather Horton

Marc Bohne

Kate Lehman

David Shelvino

Christine Lefuente

Connie Hayes

Under the Steele Bridge

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8″ x 5″ ink and watercolor

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Centennial Mills Water Tower

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5″ x 8″ ink and watercolor

Inspired by the Urban Sketchers.

This is an old Landmark on Portland’s waterfront. It’s scheduled for redevelopment and, although I’ve been told that the developers are committed to preserving it’s character,  I’m afraid of what it might become. I really love it in it’s decrepitness (is that a word?)

The covered area in the right foreground is used by the horses of the Portland Mounted police.

Glacier Concrete Tank

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4″ x 8″ ink and watercolor

It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to do any artwork. The renovation project is nearing completion and I hope to be back at it on a regular basis within a week or two. Today I was able to do this sketch from the apartment of a friend who has a fantastic view of the Wilamette river.

I appreciate the encouragement I’ve received over the past couple of months, from comments and emails.

btw, I started another blogger blog as an experiment and have posted the occasional sketch there.

A Few More Scans from my Sketchbook

Click on the images for a larger view

5″ x 8″

3 1/2″ x 5″

3 1/2″ X 7″

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Bird Rocks PA

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6″ x 8″ oil on panel

Second day at the coast. I hiked down to a beach that’s only accessible, at high tide,  from a trail through an incredible rain forest  of giant twisted Sitka spruce and hemlock. It was another cloudy day and I had this stretch of beach to myself most of the time.

I find that painting in the open air makes the paint act differently than in the studio, so my project for the day was paint consistency. To get the look I want, I have to build up a substantial layer of paint to paint into. When painting PA, I’m limiting what I take with me to mainly the primary colors and I only use OSM for thinning the paint. I know some painters use the paint as it comes out of the tube with no medium whatsoever. I played with that today, trying different consistencies of paint, painting thinner paint into thicker and visa versa.

Here are a couple of warm up sketches I did in my sketchbook.

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Airport Sketches

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photo from window of airliner somewhere between TN and TX

I had to make an unexpected trip to Tennessee last week and spent a lot of time waiting in airports. These three sketches were done in the Portland, OR, Knoxville, TN and Dallas/Fort Worth airports. It’s much easier to find a comfortable place to draw what’s happening on the tarmac in the smaller airports but the larger ones are more exciting visually. Their organization is more complex and difficult to grasp.

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CLICK TO ENLARGE

The sketches are all ink and watercolor in a 5″ x 8″ handmade sketchbook. The paper is Twinrocker handmade paper that I’ve been a little disappointed in but it may be my tools and techniques that are not that compatible with the paper.

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Willie

8″ x 5″ ink and watercolor

This is my daughter’s dog. She’s away at college. He looks like a puppy but he’s really getting quite old, 15 or 16. That one eye is blind and he’s mostly deaf, except at dinner time. My daughter picked him out at the pound, when he was 5 and she was about 8. His papers said that he’d been an outside dog and was not good with cats but he’s never complained about sleeping in my daughter’s bed nor chased our cat. He likes to wear one of his ears flipped back. He blew his knee out, a few years ago and needed surgery and, although he spends most of his day in slumber, he still has a little bounce in his step on his walks.

goauche and ink

I’ve been very busy with work and haven’t had time or energy to do anything but some sketching. I’ve enjoyed trying to learn a little more about goauche.

Corner of NW Broadway and Lovejoy

This is another quick sketch, testing out papers. This is a piece of Arches Text Wove/Velin Arches that was sent to me by a fellow Sketch Journaler, Roz Stendahl to try out.

watercolor ink and gouache

It wets more readily than the handmade paper put it is quite a bit less substantial and buckles a lot when wet.

I also did a little more testing with Noodler’s ink and it does seem to run on the Twinrocker paper I just bound into a sketchbook. I checked their website and they say that it should be waterproof on cellulose paper. The paper is cotton rag so should be cellulose. I’ve written them for advice.

Watercolor Paper test

I splurged and bought some handmade paper from Twinrocker Paper Mill to make my next skectchbooks. Although I like to paint with watercolor, I don’t really know what I’m doing. After I made one sketchbook, I wanted to try the paper out so I did these little sketches of our dogs on some leftover scraps.

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Watercolor and ink on Twinrocker Handmade paper

I was a little disappointed that the paper seemed to resist the watercolor more than I’m used to with the Fabriano Artistico I usually use. Maybe this is the way good watercolor paper is supposed to be. I seem to remember that you’re supposed to wet the entire paper before painting on it, which I did not do. Since I work back and forth with ink and watercolor I’d rather not have to do that. If any expert watercolorists happen to see this, I’d appreciate it if you could enlighten me on this.

The other thing I wanted to test was if the ink I use would be waterproof on these papers. I use several kinds of inks including Noodler’s and Platinum Carbon in my fountain pens. For dip pens I use Calli and Dr Martin Bombay India ink. I like to be able to paint back over ink lines with watercolor. Some inks depend on a chemical reaction with the paper to become waterproof and the reaction depends on the content of the paper. The testing I did was also a bit disappointing. Most of the inks ran when I painted over them, some worse than others. My testing was not very thorough so I still have hope that I can find a method that works for me.

View across the broadway bridge

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6″ x 8″ ink and watercolor

I like to do little watercolors like this as birthday cards for friends. Unfortunately I put this one off til the last minute and now that it’s posted I see that the river bank is a little off kilter.

I stole this composition from a painting I saw recently of a different bridge in Portland by Lli Wilburn. Her painting is much better, btw. My rule for stealing is, always steal from someone better than myself.

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interior with dog and velvet chair

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6″ x 6″ ink and watercolor on paper

A quick sketch. There are some obvious problems with it but I’m trying to get going again after an interruption.

bricks

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Self Portrait as a Brick

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I’m falling in love with this brick. I think this is another self portrait.

Clayboard experiment

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6″ x 6″ gouache, watercolor and inks on clayboard.

6″ x 8″ watercolor and ink on gessoed board

I was experimenting with water media on non-absorbent supports.

I’m not sure what to make of this yet.

Centennial Mills from Broadway Bridge – Portland

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5″ x 8″ watercolor and ink

Centennial Mills began operation as a large grain milling and processing facility in 1910 when Portland was the milling capital of the northwest (from portlandonline.com).

It’s now scheduled for redevelopment.

Twilight Garage

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7″ x 9″ watercolor and ink

Inspired by the nocturnes painted by Stephen Magsig, I wanted to try a twilight scene. I used a little gouache here and there and sometimes loaded a dip pen with watercolor for fine colored lines.

Dock at Newport

5″ x 7″ watercolor and ink

Dry Dock revisited

5″ x 8″ watercolor and black and white ink

I posted a sketch of this scene a while back that I did on site. This was done from the earlier sketch and photo. Although the crane is interesting, what draws me back to this is the red plastic netting at the end of the platform.

5″ x 8″ sketchbook page watercolor and ink

I’m feeling the warmth of the sun on the warehouse wall as I listen to the blowing wind and rain outside my studio.

Portraits

I haven’t posted anything in a while but I have been working. I’ve been painting portraits but haven’t produced anything I like yet. I wanted to do a series of portraits of friends and family and, naturally started with family since they were handy.

I wonder if anyone uses live models for portraits these days. Having someone else in the studio while I paint is very distracting for me and I always worry about the model and feel like I need to entertain them and make sure they’re comfortable.

It seems like maybe starting with people I’m attached to, especially my wife and daughters, was not such a good idea because I’m too invested in a likeness and a painting that they won’t hate.

This is a sketchbook page of some studies.

5″ x 8″ watercolor, ink and gouache

Osa on Mandala

Scared dog – gouache

5″ x 8″ goauche and ink

Our dog has fear issues, can you tell? She was rescued from a bad situation and is very fearful in unfamiliar situations – like my studio.