Kauai, first impressions

It’s been 17 years since I last visited Kauai, Hawaii. And it’s nice to see that not much has changed.

Here’s an ‘at the airport’ sketch at Oakland airport, where we boarded our flight to Kauai.

First impressions? I knew I’d love the mountains and cliffs, but I’d forgotten about the wild chickens that are everywhere: How could I? They never let me forget them through the rest of the trip.

They did have competition, sometimes. From the nēnē or Hawaiian geese. Unlike our local loud, honking Canada Geese, these geese had a really gentle, almost polite call, and they came and inspected my sketchbook one day. I tried grabbing a second sketchbook and doing a quick capture… All I got was this one tagged goose, then they left…

This was the most laid-back vacationing I’ve done in a long time. No real plan for the day, lost of time to sit around and chat, collect plumeria.

Eat shave ice…( After a pretty tough hike along the Na Pali coast on  a super-hot day)

And then maybe swim a bit…

The most challenging bit of sketching in Kauai was the color: those skies, those seas: such unreal color, it was a struggle to do it all justice. This is one of my first sketches, and I thought it to be way too quiet and subdued a capture of the place and the vegetation.

My first response was to go looser and let the colors mix and do their own thing. This is the view from the first place we stayed in, on the north shore. It was a steep drop down from the cliffs where we were to the reef below.

More from Kauai coming up soon.