visiting an Oakland landmark

Went with my girls to see the Oakland Ballet & the Oakland Symphony perform the Nutcracker at the Paramount Theatre. The theater is a fabulous example of art deco. Above are some rough sketches from the walls in in the lobby and the theater proper.

Memory sketches done during intermission. The set designers did a great job of carrying the art deco theme onto the stage. After a while I began to look, not so much at the dancers themselves, but the negative spaces  highlighted by their moves. 

My next LIVE appearance!

On the off-chance that you are in the Bay Area this Thursday, I will participating in the California Academy of Sciences craft fair. The Craft Fair will be held on Thursday, November 29 in the Forum gallery (2^nd floor above the café), inside the Academy. The sale will go from nine o’clock am to four o’clock pm (9:00 to 4:00). I will have cards, buttons, the latest issue of Toast, and will be signing copies of my field guide, Golden Gate Beach Wrack.

Golden Gate Beach Wrack makes a great gift!  You can also order it here: http://hotfromthetoaster.com/fieldguide.html

no *@$^*% turkey, thanks

We continued with our no-turkey Turkey Day tradition of eating Dungeness Crab. By the time I thought to sketch, there wasn't much left. :) Thus, I turned my sketching skills to something less edible - 

We finished off the meal with pumpkin pie (from pumpkins I had slaughtered myself) and pecan pie. Yum!

Then today we had a lovely drive to Cow Girl Creamery in Point Reyes Station for a picnic of cheese, bread and fruit. The weather was lovely and though I drug my supplies everywhere, as the only driver, I didn't get much of a chance to sketch. I have a head full of pretty sights and a yen to paint in my studio, which is what a vacation is for if you ask me.

The Bear Bones

Posted this image over at the From the Stacks blog for the latest Illustration Smackdown. This fuzzy wuzzy smackdown I took on (unbeknownst to me until yesterday) the great Tracy Irwin Storer, founder of the UCDavis Zoology Department, author of California Grizzly, and the man who did the sketches of Monarch. Monarch was the last of the California Grizzlies whose image adorns the California state flag.

Election Night USA

I have worked Tuesday nights for at least the last four years. In 2008 I started what might well be a sketchbook tradition - Draw a map of the USA and spend the 4 hours on the reference desk (between questions, of course) filling in the "winning" colors. Due to time zones and all, the map does not get completely filled in for a day or more. However, there are updates below......

letter writing is awesome!

I have totally gotten back into letter writing. Seriously. I write 5-10 a week. Letter writing is fun. I get to send paper "hugs" to friends & family I haven't seen in a while. AND the best part is that often they write back!!! While I was working long hours yesterday, no one gathered the mail at our house. I found the pile this morning. Underneath the scads of election mail I had not one, but three letters waiting for me. My friends are AWESOME! Thank you for making this Tuesday a much better day. :^)

what baseball has done for me lately

It has been quite some time since someone offered me money for services in a bar.
While at a conference earlier this week, I wandered into the Mucky Duck with a colleague to watch game seven of the Giants/Cardinals series. I'm not a baseball fan, really, so I was doing what I always do in these situations. I pulled out my sketch book to draw. I was trying (and mostly failing) to draw the batter in his batter's helmet while he shifted, adjusted and the cameras kept switching to other angles. My sketches were a little pathetic, but I suppose when one is confident enough to draw in a bar, some skill is assumed by observers.
One of the waitresses came up on my blind side and said, "oh my god, you draw? Do you want to draw my daughter? I'll pay you."
Within moments of my half-mumbled, "sure" she was back with a stack of really nice photos of an adorable blonde ~2yo. I sifted through them as my companion alternated between yelling encouragement to the Giant at bat and gushing about the child's extreme cuteness.
I selected the photo that showed the child's happy personality and set the others off to the side. I started in pencil to be certain that I had proportions correct. Errors in drawing people are noticeable in a way that an error in drawing a spiny lobster is not. We as people look at other people all of the time. Whether we realize it or not, simply by interacting with other humans we have internalized the basic measurements between facial features and have an inatate sense of "rightness". We judge a portrait by how well the artist placed the nose, mouth, eyes in relation to each other.
Once I got the basics down, I came back in with ink, shading, tweaking. The light in the bar was not ideal, but I was able to shift along the bar toward the kitchen and borrow some illumination. 
Additional challenges: happy baseball fans pounding the bar. The waitress bringing people over to look at the drawing in progress.
I took several bad photos with my Blackberry before signing the bottom. I carefully ripped the portrait out of my sketch book and handed  it & my card over. The waitress was thrilled.
At the end of the night, Giants world series bound, we fled the odd live music. Our tab for 4 drinks and food came to less than $20. All for a sketch. Works for me.

greetings from Monterey!

On day two of my recent conference, I played hooky and spent the morning walking to and from the Monterey Bay Aquarium. The public biking/walking path runs along the water front. I saw many harbor seals on the rocks, sea lions, sea otters, brown pelicans, canada geese, hermeen gulls, CA gulls, western grebes, pied-bill grebes...and other shore birds I couldn't readily identify. I had a relaxing morning collecting fish faces and talking to kids about drawing as I painted the horn shark. Have sketchbook, will travel!

what i'll be doing next week..

summer in a jar

One success from this week: taking the tomatoes & yellow zucchini from our garden, adding the onions, garlic & green peppers dropped off by a neighbor, plus a few store bought carrots and turning it into a case of salsa. I make it without heavy spice. At first this was because my kids were anti-spicy-anything, but now it continues because I found it to be more versatile After all, you can always add spice later, but you can't take it out. As is it can be added to the rice cooker, used as spaghetti or pizza sauce and as traditional salsa. Hooray for gardens!