Hot Air Balloons and Vintage Cars

It takes a LOT to get my family excited about getting up early on the weekend and getting out of the house early in the morning. Today was one of those days. Every year, Wings of History Museum in San Martin, California has an Open House. There are free tethered balloon rides, free rides in planes and helicopters for kids between the ages of 8 and 17, lots of vintage cars, old pumps and machinery, and beautiful old planes.

These sketches are from when we waited in line. An all-volunteer team runs the museum, and we met so many really friendly balloon pilots. Jeanne Anson is a pilot who used to live in the area, now lives in South Dakota, but comes back every year for the open house. She overheard us wondering how a balloon comes down and explained how it all works, and then showed us pictures of her gorgeous balloons called watermelon Wine and Dragon Moon. Yes, all balloons have names: The bright balloon in the sketch below is named Rubik, and the one in the foreground is the Re/Max balloon that we rode up in.

Our balloon was piloted by David Wakefield and I chatted with his daughter and granddaughter, both part of the volunteer crew that helped hold down the tethers  and basket while people got in and out of the basket after each ride. 

My daughter was old enough to go on a helicopter ride after the balloon ride, but my son wasn’t, so he and I hung out and I sketched the cars nearby. Here’s my Ford Model T and Mustang sketches.
I could have stayed and sketched all day…there was old machinery, vintage planes, and so much more- I didn’t even get to sketching the planes at all- but we had to head back home for the kids soccer game. Still it was a morning packed with fun sketching and so many nice people to chat with.

You can see all my sketches from the morning here on flickr.

Art Vista 2013: Los Alamitos Elementary School

Every year, my kids school, Los Alamitos Elementary School, has an annual show of the art the kids create all year round. I get to be ‘visiting artist’ and set up a little table with my sketches and sketchbooks. My favorite part is sketching all that’s going on at the show.

Here are a bunch of quick little sketches of kids at the piano.
I watched Hiroko Sasaki, a visiting artist, create pages and pages of beautiful calligraphy on rice paper with India ink.And then there’s all the hands-on crafts for kids. My two favorite ones from this year were ‘Spin Art’ (always a favorite with the kids) and ‘Making Oaxacan Animals’.

On last sketch, of the show. Floor to ceiling displays of the kids’ art. I love the self portraits best of all.

My current sketchkit

So many of you write in and ask what tools I work with, so I thought I’d post them here. My ‘studio’ lives in my bag, and is relatively compact:

- A Windsor and Newton Travel sketch kit. I use Artist Tubes (also Windsor and Newton) to refill the pans. 12 colors. I always wish I had more, but there is something nice about mixing my colors and not having a zillion pre-made shades that I use.
- 2 little bits of sea sponge jammed into the empty spaces in the box. Great for wiping brushes and little cleanups. Super absorbent.
- My most used brush is a Cotman series #6 brush. Sometimes I also use a #8 or #10 brush, and very rarely, a #4. I have a couple of fancier Kolinsky sable brushes and while they hold paint beautifully, the Cotmans hold up much better to my not-so-gentle handling.
- Extra water. Always. The ONLY problem with my travel kit is that the water bottle built into the kit is miserably small. Ideally, I’d love a compact container with 2 wells for water so I could switch to the less muddy water halfway through my piece. Any recommendations?
- Pencil. Derwent 4B. Sometimes a 6B. I usually work directly with pen, but every once in a while I will roughly sketch out a layout with the main perspective lines drawn in.
- Eraser. I love my white eraser. And somewhere in my sketch bag is always a dirty little balled up kneaded eraser.
- Sharpie Extra Fine Pen. Not Ultra Fine. That works completely differently and I MUCH prefer the Extra Fine one. I always have 4 or 5 of these with me.
- The one bit that’s missing here is my sketchbook. Currently I’m loving my Stillman & Birn Beta series books. I use the wirebound ones. But I’m toying with using the Zeta, which is a much smoother paper for super-quick sketches.

Big Island, Hawaii, The classic Hawaiian side

This flower stall is at the Kona Farmers Market. I have never seen a flower stall so packed with gigantic blooms.

The Lifeguard Hut at Kahalu’u Beach Park. How could I NOT draw something that is such a vivid shade of orange? 

My big regret at Kahalu’u Beach is that there’s no way to sketch while you snorkel. What an incredible sketch the giant corals and tropical fish would have made! So I sketched the snorkellers instead. With their funny-looking, bright colored breathing tubes, they almost look like bright little fish bobbing in the bay.

Traditional double-hulled Hawaiian boats on a beach near Kona.

And finally, a classic hawaiian beach: long stretches of white sand and loads of beachgoers at Spencer Beach.
Houses built on stilts remind you that you are in Tsunami country. I had to race against the afternoon rain clouds that came down from the mountains to get this sketch done. The bright splashes in the foreground are bougainvillea in every shade possible.

I saved my favorite bit for last. I love the unbelievably bright color and the intricately layered effect of the vegetation in Hawaii. We stayed at John and Jae’s Sugar Shack in Kona. Their amazing gardens are where I made the sketches below. To be in their garden is to land right in the middle of a Henri Rousseau painting.

To see ALL my sketches from Big Island, Hawaii, go to this complete flickr set.

Big Island, Hawaii, The Jurassic Side.

Yes, Hawaii has great beaches (and I’ll come to those in my next post). But my favorite part is the tropical vegetation. The lush, neon green mosses and drippy ferns. Things that grow, rot and regrow all at the same time. I sketched these fiddlehead ferns and mosses while hiking through trails with huge vents spewing sulphurous steam on the rim of an active volcano. To be in Volcanoes National Park on the Big Island of Hawaii is to be transported back to a time when the Earth was young and just forming. You could almost imagine dinosaurs walking through here.

Halema’uma’u Crater as seen in the daytime is huge, impressive and creates a vog all day long. This is the crater sketched from the Jagger Museum, the closest point form which it can be viewed. It is so pitch dark (and cold) once night falls that I couldn’t sketch it, but it is incredible to see the volcano transformed at nightfall: the molten magma, only a couple of hundred feet under the rim, lights up the sky above it in orange, red, and pinks. We stayed at the Volcano House in the Park ( stay there if you ever visit, it is worth it just for the views) and could see the blazing volcano from our room through the night.

Here are my kids, all strapped into their booster seats, ready to drive out to a trailhead.

And this sketch is from the town of Hilo, on the wetter side of the island.  You could plant just about anything here and it would grow into a tree overnight.

All the classic Hawaiian beaches are on the other side of the island, but we did visit a black sand beach called Punalu’u, with gritty volcanic jet black sand. I spotted my first Hawaiian green sea turtle here. He (she?) looked so beautiful, catching some sun on the black sand.

Sunny Day by the Ferry building

I was in San Francisco on a rare sort of day- sunny and warm enough for me to sketch outdoors. Here are a few sketches from my day.

The bluest, clearest sky and Coit Tower. The tower is the recognizable part of the view, but my favorite part is the colorful homes on hill.

Since it was close to lunchtime, I headed towards the Ferry Building. But I just HAD to stop and sketch it first. Maybe I was just hungry, but I wasn’t sure the first one worked. So I came back and did another one after lunch. Not sure which one I like better now, but it is interesting how totally different my take on the same view was, a couple of hours apart.

 

The ferry building is always full of people eating, but most places have their lunch crowds and then it gets less crazy. Not so with Blue Bottle Coffee. The crowds never thin out here. Two sketches from Blue Bottle Coffee. Funny how I ended up with 2 of everything that day.

One last ‘set of two’. When it’s warm and sunny in the city, everyone is happy. Except the cycle rickshaws that ferry tourists around. Everyone wanted to walk, so I got to sketch the rickshaws as they waited for passengers.

My Many Indias. Part 6: Goa, Malvan Coast and goodbye India, I’ll be back!

Goa is where I “go back” to when I go to India. It is where my parents live. I know, lucky me! There’s the incredible surf and sand bit that everyone visits Goa for. But here’s some of the less seen parts, the ones I like best.
Goa was a Portuguese colony from the 1500s to 1961, and everywhere across the state you will see fine examples of the architecture: from the grand churches of Old Goa to beautiful Portuguese homes like the one below in Fontainhas, a neighborhood of Panjim that most resembles the Alfama in Lisbon.
This is the main Church in Panjim city. I think whitewashed buildings, a clear blue sky and coconut palms are as picture perfect as it gets.
Littler chapels are everywhere, like this little one near my parents home.
And here is a view I sketched form my parent’s balcony, but really it could be a view anywhere in Goa: Palm trees, golden light, and whitewashed little homes with  terracotta tiled roofs…
A couple of hours drive north of Goa is my dad’s mango orchard in Deogad. He grows Alphonso mangoes. I wish I could describe the taste. There is nothing that quite compares to the experience of eating a sun-ripened Alphonso mango, wit the juice dripping down your forearms and off your elbows. And no, having eaten a different variety of mango will not help you imagine what it tastes like. To go to the farm in the winter, like I did, is to look at the beginnings of the fruit, little inch-long mangoes and to imagine what they will be in a few months…
More sketches of other things that grow around the farm:
One last day, spent on a beach on the Malvan Coast. Going to Malvan reminds me of the Goa I remember as a kid: empty beaches, fishing boats and clean sand. I sketched this first piece in the early morning, as the fisherfolk brought in the boat with the morning’s catch. They pulled the boat on the sand and then rolled logs under it to help move it up higher on the beach.

This next sketch is at midday in the blazing sun, when no one is foolish enough to get out to sea. Just the glare on the ocean would blind you. That was our last day before we packed up and headed back to Bangalore, to catch our long, long flight back to San Francisco. Thank you for having followed my 4 week adventure. Blogging it like I did, over 2 weeks made it feel like I was still on vacation.

If you have the patience to look through all 120 sketches, they’re here on flickr.