Inspire Oakland Billboard

I was excited to find out last night that my billboard design for ODALC’s Inspire Oakland program won 2nd place. You can expect to see it on a billboard soon.

For my design, I decided to focus on the view from Arrowhead Marsh located in Martin Luther King Jr. Park near the Oakland Airport. I imagined viewing the distant skyline from the air. Some artistic license was used in bringing the buildings much closer.

Watercolor was used to paint the view in a stylized way with bright hues, and I allowed the distant downtown to blend into the bay and marshland below. I created a second painting of my hand lettered text, and the two paintings were brought together in Photoshop.

Oakland Watercolor Painting

This is a new watercolor which I am using as the main image in a graphic arts assignment. I am working with it in photoshop to combine it with lettering I hand painted on a separate sheet.

The Personality of Typefaces

This hand lettering project for my design class took many thumbnails and rough revisions before I painted the final projected. Hopefully the final project says something about my personality, since that was a major point of the assignment.

When I get some extra time I plan to create a vector version from the final version which I can use on my website and resume.

Two More Watercolors & Some Quilted Portraits

Three watercolor paintings I did earlier this year will be an exhibit at the Cinema Place Gallery in Hayward:

The Watercolor Show 

Jan. 10- Feb. 23, 2013 

Reception Fri., Jan. 11, 5-7pm

Here are a couple more watercolors I did for my class.

The technique for the first painting was to emulate the texture that Andrew Wyeth used in his paintings. This lantern and the foreground rocks have texture added to them from stippled paint, sanding, and lots of drybrush. This is my husband’s favorite so far this year. I like how most of the painting turned out, but wish the water hadn’t gotten so muddy looking, and I’m not sure about the brown rocks.

The second painting we were to use Turner’s technique of picking paint up after putting it onto the paper to lighten areas. This is a view of Lake Chabot in Castro Valley from an overlooking trail on Fairmont Ridge.

I found a couple of unfinished quilted works I started seven years ago.

 The face on the first is from two pieces of fabric. The face is drawn on with a Pigma ink pen. The shapes and lines are all traced from a photo of Camilla when she was about six years old, but somehow it didn’t end up looking like her very much at all. The part I like best is stalk of succulent flowers I added almost as an afterthought because the bottom seemed to plain, but they never quite seemed to fit with the rest of the image. This one is nearly done except the edges are unfinished. I expect it will stay this way unless I decide to cut it up and use the flowers from it on something else sometime.

I decided to use the same photo as a starting point for a second try. This time I cut all the shapes freehand and went wild with the colors. Maybe too wild. It got put in a drawer at this point and it was forgotten until I dragged it out a week ago. Camilla likes this one, so I decided to see what I could do with it. I’ve added some more fabrics around her since this photo. I’ll post more photos when I see where it takes me.

Watercolor Portrait Completed

When Camilla was two, we were vacationing in Colorado. This watercolor was done from a photo taken on that trip.

The technique for this assignment was glazing, meaning many layers of very watered down transparent layers laid one on top of another to build up the color. I like the results, but didn’t enjoy the process, so this will probably be the last painting I do entirely in glazing. I have used glazing in a limited amount in other paintings where I need to change or darken a color. It also worked nicely to get soft color changes in the face.


Here is a detail of the in progress quilt started last week.

Completed Teapots

More color has been added to the teapot shadow painting.

I was thinking about keeping the background rather plain. But my instructor liked the pattern on the cutting mat that was sitting behind the still life in the reference photo. Square tiles seemed boring. So I considered what kind of pattern I might quilt if I were designing a quilt, then invented a wallpaper pattern.

The foreground seemed week after I painted the back, so I added a wood grain tabletop.

Shadow Shapes

My instructor liked the second Echeveria painting that I brought to class last week. His only suggestion was to darken the lower right corner a little more to keep the eye from wandering off the bottom of the painting.

The first Echeveria turned into my gesso experiment. The experiment wasn’t very successful in its outcome, but now I know how watercolor will combine with gesso. It is difficult to get even washes or dark colors. It might be useful to add texture to part of a painting, especially in a collage. It doesn’t seem to be a good technique for covering large areas intended for watercolor.

I picked a photo I took of teapots a few years ago for the next watercolor assignment. I chose it for the shadows, because for this assignment we are supposed to paint the shadows first, and then lay the color of the objects on top of the shadow painting.

I thought I was done with the shadow painting, but looking at it now on the computer, I see several areas I need to make darker. I can also see now that the pots have changed shape somewhat from the original. Oh well, they still look like pots.

I’m a bit worried about getting muddy looking colors when I lay down the yellow on the front pot. I should do a test to see if I want to change its color before I paint it.

A second Echeveria

Here is the second attempt at painting this Echeveria. I don’t know if this is looser than the original painting, but I have managed to float more color into the washes.

I’ve been thinking about trying to combine watercolor with quilted fabric, and bought some gesso yesterday with that thought in mind.

Having two paintings that meet the requirements for the current assignment, I thought I might add gesso to parts of the original painting, and give myself permission to play. Now where is the gesso? I have misplaced it somewhere since yesterday afternoon. I have looked through the house. Perhaps it fell out of the bag in the car? Or perhaps it never got put in the bag at the store? I will likely find it the minute I give up on finding it, and go buy a second jar.

Echeveria Watercolor

My second succulent is complete. I fussed with the colors and values so much trying to get it just so. It turned out reasonably like the photo, but the finished painting seams overworked to me.


I admire watercolors with looser strokes and broad washes, and so I decided to try the same composition again.

I had trouble in the first painting with a large orange area that seemed out of place. I spent a fair amount of time trying to tone it down, and fit in other smaller orange tinted areas. So I started with yellow this time, so I could distribute it early on. The yellow seems a little prominent right now. I think it will become a little less noticeable after I go back in with darker pinks and purples.

Completed Watercolor

The first of my completed paintings for a watercolor class at the community college:

This is an Aeonium hathorii. The assignment was to complete a painting using isolated wet washes in each shape. I have a second succulent close-up picked out for a second painting done with a different technique.

Eddie's Rooster

“Luck blossomed from the first. A dusty Rhode Island red rooster who had wandered too far from his own farmyard crossed the road and Eddie hit him without running too far off the road.”

(John Steinbeck, Cannery Row, chapter 13)

In Steinbeck’s book, the chicken ended up in a pot of soup with “a sack of carrots which had fallen from a vegetable truck, half a dozen onions which had not.” I have put the truck far enough down the road to give him a second chance to leap out of the way.

Merry Christmas!

Working on Perspective

The perspective rules I had known about weren’t allowing the car to look like it was driving downhill. I learned yesterday to raise one of the vanishing points for slanting objects. The proportions seem off a little, but I think I won’t let it bother me in the interest of getting the painting done on time.

I will scale my drawing on the computer to fit the composition, and then trace it onto the watercolor paper to save the step of redrawing it again.

“And then Eddie driving, they backed up over the rise, over the top and turned and headed forward and down past Hatton Fields.”

(John Steinbeck, Cannery Row,chapter 13)

Lee Chong’s Model T

Our final project for watercolor class is supposed to be based on something we’ve read. I’ve chosen a passage from “Cannery Row.” This is a value study for part of the painting. I have been working on redrawing this truck so it has the correct perspective to fit in the final composition.

“The body of the car was so battered that its next owner cut it in two and added a little truck bed.”

(John Steinbeck, Cannery Row, chapter 11)

Completed Again

There were a couple things in this painting that were bothering me too much, so I made a couple of fixes. The middle line on large pot is now following the curve of the pot better. And I’ve darkened the shadow near the bottom behind the lavender vase.

Still Life Completed

My watercolor still life is completed. Looking at it smaller on the computer is a bit like stepping back to view the painting as a whole. I immediately saw a couple things that I would change if I were in love with the painting. Not being totally in love with this one, I am calling it done.

Classroom Still Life

We are all painting from this still life in my watercolor class. I didn’t like how the candlestick was dividing the composition in half, and hiding most of the grapes, so I scooted it over in my drawing. I need to darken the shadows, and add some detail to the large pot and the bottle. I’ve printed a greyscale copy of my painting, so I decide what to do with the background.

Figs for a Crow

I composed my latest quilt on watercolor paper, and then enlarged it onto fabric to make a quilted version. The quilted version is finished. I have started painting the watercolor version. I plan to build up the darks, and add some purple to some of the figs. Here is a detail shot of the in progress painting.

Art Quilt Show & Watercolor Class

A new art quilt show has recently opened at

Cinema Place Gallery

1061 'B' Street

12-4 Wed & Sun, 12-8 Thurs-Sat

Most of the pieces are from SAQA members. I have three pieces in the show. I was there last week. It is a nice space, and I was impressed with the quality of the work displayed. It will run until November 12th. I will be going to the reception tomorrow night, which will be from 5-7pm.

This photo is a sampling of what I have been doing in the watercolor class I’ve been taking.

I have no great masterpieces yet. Most of our paintings so far start with copying the instructor’s sketch, so we have a starting place to practice techniques. I would rather do more original work, but am happy working this way while we are still learning techniques. Having the basic composition already planned does take the pressure off of coming up with subject matter. The top left sheet with two landscapes on it are my own compositions. I am learning to plan ahead to preserve the whites, since watercolor is transparent. I think learning watercolor will make me more aware of value in other work as well.