A Saturday Sketch

Like most, I love spring. The weather is warming, the light grows warmer too, and flowers are bursting with color. It's a great season for plein air work, regardless of one's medium. Many Saturdays I join the sketchers group for a few hours of outdoor drawing and painting. Our group is predominantly watercolorists but several are pastel painters and at least one sketches in colored pencils. 

Around Des Moines there are abundant locales for sketching. In winter and early spring we've spent profitable times in Waterworks Park and across the road at Gray's Lake. The Botanical Center on the bank of the river is another favorite. But this week we went to another park, the big greenspace that surrounds West Des Moines' public buildings, in particular the Library. There's a small, graceful lake and sculptures here and there, but at the end is a beautiful footbridge. I sat on a bench at the end of the bridge and sketched. 

"Footbridge at the Library," wc and ink on paper, 6x8

The Yellow Umbrella

"The Yellow Umbrella," oil on panel, 9x12, private collection

Although much of my work lately is rural landscapes, I retain a strong interest in cities. Cities are where we live, mostly. Cities are living, growing organisms, fed by us, the inhabitants. 

In "The Yellow Umbrella," the setting is the financial district in New York. The yellow umbrella of the title is a common sight in Manhattan, part of a yellow and blue color scheme of a well-known hot dog company. I painted the majority of this in a monochromatic palette but chose to emphasize the umbrella and a few soda cans as if a bar of sunlight has found its way onto the cart.
 

Texture

Putting texture into a drawing or painting can be a difficult task. When drawing, especially, texture is most commonly added by altering one's marks. That is, smooth line or rough line, continuous line versus interrupted lines, and so on. 

"Mailboxes," ink on paper, 11x14

"Malboxes" is a pen and ink rendering of a line of rural mail boxes along an overgrown rail fence. In this drawing the challenge was to represent each material--wood, metal, foliage, etc--realistically. That meant employing line and shape, mostly. The darkest areas were inked with a brush but the majority of this drawing was done with a dip pen. 

Notice that the lines follow the contours of the mailboxes. The posts and fences called for a different approach to emphasize the cylindrical nature of the posts and flatness of the planks.
 

Japanese Maple

I had a chance to visit the Better Homes and Gardens demonstration gardens in downtown Des Moines today. The gardens are a part of the former Meredith campus (now Dotdash Meredith) where the magazines shoot garden features and so on. The gardens, being commercial working space, only admits visitors a couple of hours weekly, on Fridays. The various parts of the demonstrations include microclimates of sun and shade, areas displaying garden designs and even small vegetable areas. 

"Japanese Maple," watercolor and ink on paper

Today the Japanese maples at the northern end of the gardens were spectacular. At midday the sun catches the tops of the impossibly-red foliage so that it seems to glow with an inner fire. I sat on a bench in the sun and sketched one of the maples. It's probably thirty years old, with gracefully branching limbs and twigs below and that bright red umbrella above. 

There is simply no way that dull pigments can reproduce the exhilarating, almost neon color of these trees. The best I could do was indicate it.

Side Street

There is a section of the city known as Sherman Hill because a brother of the famous Civil War general lived there in the late 19th century. The area is dotted with Victorian mansions and apartment buildings. Here and there on well-traveled thoroughfares you find small businesses that have seen better days. This is a former drugstore that has been everything from a New Age shop to a trendy bistro. 

"Sherman Hill Scene," ink and wc

This painting from last Saturday started as a fairly careful graphite drawing. I inked it, then added watercolor.

Scary Rooster

Sorting old ink drawings today I ran across this pen an ink drawing of a truly scary rooster. When I was a boy in Oklahoma we had one of these birds who would chase me all around the chicken yard. That eye!

"Rojo," pen and ink wash on paper

Practice

One of the disciplines many artists follow is simply working every day. Daily work means daily practice of whatever art the person pursues. A musician either plays a gig daily or simply runs through various parts of his repertoire. A writer sits in her desk chair and writes; a drummer drums; and so on. 

In my own art practice, I use various strategies to hone my work. For one thing, daily digital drawings and paintings are an ongoing constant. But there's a risk of growing stale if you do the same things over and over, so I also do watercolors (my Saturday group), graphite and ink drawings, and sometimes other media like metalpoint. Variety makes a difference. 

Here's a recent graphite study with chalk highlights. As is often the case, this is a head and face, snagged from an online reference. It's about 8x6 on toned paper.

Hoff, "Head of a Man," graphite and chalk on paper

 

Rainy Day

Across the boulevard from Gray's Lake is Waterworks Park and a beautiful arboretum of spring flowering trees. Last Saturday the sketch group went there to draw, but the weather wasn't very cooperative. Just as I drove over there the rains came and continued for the entire time. You can't really do watercolor in the rain, of course, so this particular 8x10 was started and finished in the car. 

"Rainy Afternoon in the Arboretum," wc/ink on paper, 8x10

The watercolors used here seem bright but in comparison to the intense color of the trees they're quite dull. There are avenues of flowers above brilliant green grass. I was hampered in this particular work by a near lack of water, and no way to replenish. That means the paint was applied pretty thick, for watercolor.

Water and Stones

Water is becoming one of my favorite subjects. Especially interesting to me is moving water in all of its forms, from ocean tides to ripples in a puddle. Clarity or murkiness is another feature of water that I find fascinating. And so on.

I've painted water on the spot, outdoors, and recreated it from reference photos. Obviously, painting moving water en plein air is tougher, at least for me. An important lesson from an old teacher is "don't try to paint glass [or water]. Instead paint what it does to the things behind it." That is, clear or transparent material like glass or water distorts and alters the image of whatever it covers. In "Streambed" (painted outdoors) I tried very hard to be aware of soft, blurry edges and reflections in the water. The stones dotting the stream made great, solid counterpoint to the moving water.

Hoff, "Streambed," oil on panel, 6x6

Unlike "Streambed," there have been quite a few works in my past that showed the actual bottom of a stream. "Mountain Stream" is a relatively large studio work, created from imagination and several photo references. In this one my interest was showing convincingly how a stream of water could be reflective, transparent, and refractive. The stony bottom of the stream was a great challenge.

Hoff, "Mountain Stream." oil on canvas, 18x24

Finally, in "Bottom," was the challenge of showing varying color, value, and transparency of moving water. This work is from a personal photo of a crystalline stream in far southwest Virginia. 

"Bottom," oil on panel, 12x16