Sketchcrawl 14 sketches

I had the pleasure of being a part of sketchcrawl 14, which was a benefit for Emergency, an organization to help the civilian victims of war. I also attended the auction they held the next day. I was outbid on most of the art pieces I wanted to buy, but was very happy to win my bids for some very nice artwork by John Hoffman and Evelyn Hahn. I had a great time all around and you can't find a nicer and more creative group of people!

The first of these two sketches was done just before the sketchcrawl to warm up. I was very happy to find out that someone had bought it at the auction. The second was done during the crawl at Koit Tower in SF. I was blown away by the quality of the sketches from other artists on the crawl and I came to the conclusion that I need to practice sketching to improve my speed and to learn to create more aesthetically pleasing quick sketches. My sketches have always tended to be just studies for more extensive projects and I haven't focused on making them artful in themselves. Hopefully next time I'll come up with more I want to post.

Painting with Friends in Morgan Hill

I went painting in Morgan Hill with some old SJSU friends: Noah, Jackson, Dela, Nikki, Kendelle, Scott, and Jules. I managed to paint this old building in downtown. I'm finding architecture a bit of a struggle to create in plein air, but I plan to keep working on it. I think the secret is to treat it as shapes and colors just like anything else rather than try to do an architectural rendering in such a short time.

More paintings...

I did some outdoor painting in the Berkeley hills with Noah, Jackson, and Daniel last weekend. The top two pieces are what resulted. On the first piece I had the challenge of simplifying enormous amounts of visual information. It was pretty difficult and I learned a lot from it. For the second, my painting of the hillside was pretty dead and wasn't going anywhere, so I took inspiration from Noah's recent pushing of his artwork and decided to do the same with this one, taking it in a whimsical direction. I don't think I'd ever done anything quite like that before. The third painting was done the next day in my own backyard.

The last two paintings are the same ones from my previous post, but with more work added to them. I thought they had a lot of potential as pieces to put in the gallery, but felt they needed a bit more pizzaz. For the dirt road I brought out more of the colors in the shrubbery and developed the shadows more. I originally created the Monterey coastal cliff image just to practice rendering the rocks and didn't pay much attention to the composition at the time. As such, I felt the composition was too blandly horizontal and lacked a focal point. I added some opposing mass to it in the form of the kelp forest and added some interest with a cute little sea otter. I think people visiting Salinas/Monterey will like that. How can you resist one of those cute little fellas?