Today after my trip to the pet shop…it was so gorgeous I had to swing by the Clarence Nature Center and then the Clarence Escarpment. The temperatures climbed to an unseasonable 63degrees or more. I had a hard time finding much to draw at the Nature Center, I think I was distracted by the awful noise from all the construction trucks! It was deafening especially because I was still nursing a headache…it didn’t improve believe me.
I found some interesting tracks to draw and some beautiful hawthorne branches. I walked around the path and spooked two white tailed deer.
Next stop was the Clarence Escarpment, now there’s a little jewel! The Escarpment is on Greiner Rd in Clarence just East of Goodrich Rd. You pull into a little paved area and just walk down the slope. There’s water held at the bottom of the escarpment (cliffs) where you’ll find waterfowl in breeding season and other assorted critters.
I found a wooden railing to sit on and sketched using my micron pen. I pulled out my field watercolor set and did a tiny sketch of the shadows in the woods. It’s a relatively peaceful place here, you can hear the traffic a bit but you can also lose yourself just looking, drawing, listening, smelling and hearing. I say hearing because as I stood very, very still drawing the burrs…I heard a splash right near me and I saw a muscrat running along in the tiny stream! I let out a big “OH!” in surprise and it scared him, he dove under the water and disappeared!
Some local kids have found a good use for the ice as long as we have it, can you see the hockey net on the ice? It’s not a deep area so at least it’s safe for play. I can never resist the heads of the ferns, fascinating.
As I painted with my field watercolors, I dropped the lid to my jar off the wood deck I was sitting on. Thank goodness the water was frozen, as I reached down to retrieve it, I got caught up in finding the most interesting forms in the ice! There is frozen life under that thin shelf of winter.
For a great list of LINKS to parks in the Buffalo area visit my Nature Links page, also links for lots of Nature Sites and Blogs from all over the world!
Well, as you gather from my title, it is cold outside today! The past two days it’s been in the ‘teens’…today only 10 degrees F. But it’s been awhile since I did some outdoor observations so I threw my little 5 1/2″x 81/2″ sketchbook into a gallon ziplock bag and three micron pens. NO playing with color today, I knew it’d be too cold to get into that, especially with wearing big gloves and my water freezing!
I mostly drew with a .02 micron pen, wearing huge mittens! I forgot my flipback pair that my English friend encouraged me to wear, so I was stuck with the big, cumbersome old leather pair of mittens that I wear when I do barn chores in the winter. I should post a picture of them so you could have a laugh…they have duct tape around parts because of wear! haha…
So, about my drawings, the first was a small clump of weeds by the barn with snow on top of them. It was really beautiful, even the colors were nice. Then I walked over to the garden where my flowers are all standing dead but looking interesting with their bareness of form. I especially liked the Black-Eyed Susan’s because they were almost like abstract black dots against all the white.
Then I used my micron brush pen, which I think is a bit dried out, but that can be a good thing. I sketched the Blue Spruce and some trees next to it very quickly. I was running out of space here. So then I flipped the page and did a very quick rendition of a group of trees that I like to draw in the summer. I used the brush pen again for that. Oh a side note here, I’m always trying out new things..today it was an old thing. I had a pair of battery operated heated socks that I pulled out of the closet. The kind that you put a huge D cell battery in the top side of the sock, I wore them today but I think they don’t work! Well they’re old, I have a new pair still in the wrapper, I plugged them in when I got back inside and they seemed to work, so next time I’ll have to try them out. They’re not the most comfortable as the battery jams against your leg if you’re wearing tall boots like I do. I’ll have to test them again to see how they work.
On Wednesday, Feb. 13, I asked my friend Sue if she wanted to come exploring Como Lake Park with me. Yes, it was cold but we both have a love of the outdoors and Sue isn’t afraid of a little snow! I even brought my snowshoes hoping to give her a lesson and get in a little snowshoe time myself, but the trail was too uneven with huge slabs of ice from Cayuga Creek. We drove through the whole park to see what was there, it’s pretty much a ‘picnicey’ type of place, not too many trails, but then we are visiting in winter and need to find out more. We explored one trail labeled “Boy Scout Trail” and I have a picture of the sign here. From the time we started out and returned it was only one hour, we didn’t get to do the whole loop, our toes were getting too cold and we started having thoughts of hot cocoa!
There are many views at this park, where I could see I’d like to teach a landscape painting class and my nature sketching classes. The creek is great and reminds me of my walks to the Susquehanna River where I grew up, except that was MUCH larger than this creek!
You can see I’m drawing with my small sketchbook, my bag is slung across my shoulder mailman style so I can get at everything easily. (Sorry the picture is dark). My small camera is attached to the strap, as is my sandpaper block, a compass, and a tiny bottle of pepper spray! Ahhmmm yes ladies, you should be carrying this or something like it when hiking, and try to never hike alone, there are too many weirdos out there, yes I’ve met some! You can see on my sketchbook page, I started by drawing a square in the center of the page. I stuck a post it note in the back of my sketchbook to use for tracing a perfect square. It’s fun to add some design elements to your pages sometimes. You can then draw whatever you want to highlight in the box, and fill around it with little sketches, notes, tracks etc. I decided to sketch behind it a view of Cayuga creek looking south, you can see this view in the picture of me looking straight across the creek. Remember it’s cold, and even wearing flip back mittens (as my friend in England recommended!) I still had to draw very fast. Especially when hiking with a friend, I feel more pressured to ‘hurry up’.
I found a Hawthorne tree and noted several birds that I heard. At the end of our walk, I heard a loud woodpecker call, we stopped and watched for awhile and then saw a big Pileated Woodpecker fly out through the high branches! It was exciting! Perhaps the large, fresh woodpecker holes I took pictures of, were from this one? Here’s a link for Como Lake Park with how to get there and picnic info etc. http://www.erie.gov/parks/como.asp (if link doesn’t work, I’ve listed it in my links column to the left, under Buffalo nature links.)
At around 7:30 this morning I was making my coffee in the studio. My studio looks out over fields and faces east, so I usually get great views of the sunrise. I grabbed an 8×10″ sketchbook and my oil pastels and did a quick little landscape while still in my pajamas! Hey you gotta do it when you can and gorgeous sunrises don’t stick around!
I first quickly laid on light greys for the clouds shapes because the wind moved them so fast. Then I built up the greys and blues and added light blue for the light parts of the sky. With oil pastels it’s hard to get a very light blue so you have to add lots of white. I put the blue on very light then rub white on top and smear it with my fingertips. The heavier you put oil pastels on, the nicer it is to blend, but you have to plan ahead. It’s not like blending paints, you can’t really go back and alter colors very much. After the sun broke through the clouds it was too hard to look at, so I worked on the ground and trees to finish it.
I scanned the colors I used for you to see them alone.
Today, I felt a great urge to be outside, the weather was terrible for painting and drawing but actually not bad for a nice cold hike! The air was fresh, the wind steady but not too strong, and Ginger was very excited to go for a run. I used permanent ink fine point markers, no pencil for sketching and even tried out my watercolors. I must be crazy on such a cold day but I really felt like capturing some of the colors with some quick watercolor sketches. You can click on pictures to see the pages of my sketchbook close up or the photos. On the first page we had made it to the ‘maze’ an area of my land that I cut like a maze, and Ginger found something. I could tell it held great interest for her, it was scat (droppings) from I think a fox. Now don’t get grossed out, but any naturalist would record and study it, so I did. It was very full of hairs, probably from the rabbit it ate.
Then I did a quick study of the open field, mostly to capture color, not detail. Detail would be almost impossible in this cold wearing the huge, stiff leather gloves I had on! A flock of geese went over…I tried to catch them through the trees, and some lichens growing on stick in the icy water of the lane.
I think artists should show themselves in their environment, here I was, thoughtful, studying the land…umm freezing! ha! You can see I’m wearing my heavy coat with rain coat over that, wool hat, big gloves. I kind of like the little sketch of my big old ‘sister’ oak tree on the second page of the sketchbook. I’m looking across the field, where there’s the red barked bushes in front.
The third page I had frozen fingers by this time, you can tell by the loose, quick grasses I did. I also show a photo of how I held the sketchbook, palette, watercups and brush. In my hand of course, I also had picked up several ‘treasures’ to take back to the studio. I’m going to design a better way to hold a few brushes or pens, and the water. I was constantly on the move and this was too hard to handle with the gloves and weather. Did you notice the sarcastic note I wrote on my sketchbook about drawing with frozen fingers? At the end I was aggravated with struggling with my watercup lids so I just dipped my brush into the icy water at my feet. I tried not to swish it in where it was muddy and as I painted, it really was cold enough that I was getting icy crystals on my paper! YES, time for cocoa!
The last page of the sketchbook was done in the studio, I took more time to work from some of the ‘treasures’ I brought back. I drew most of it with a permanent fine point marker with no pencil sketch first. When you do this, it helps to make some little marks where you think your line will go before you commit to a solid drawn line. Pay attention to negative spaces especially on things like the center weed, it helped me to look at the spaces between the stems as I laid it out. Hope you enjoyed coming for a hike with me today at Long Lane Farm! ps. I drank two cups of cocoa to thaw out!
This is an oil painting I did in early November. We’ve been having a mild fall, pretty dry, so I didn’t have to wear mud boots in my field! The painting is 6″x 8″. Before I did this one I completed the small oil sketch of an oak tree (4″ x 6″).
This little ditty I did outside, while bundled up in snow bib overalls, boots with wool socks, down coat, wool hat, scarf over half my face and leather gloves. I did the painting (6″x 8″) with Oil Pastels that I cut in half so I could fit more in my little field kit. Do you know how hard it is to paint/draw with a one inch chunk of crayon while wearing bulky gloves and fffffrrrreeeeezzzing to death?? I actually worked as quickly as possible, laying down some outlines for the shadows and other shapes with pale grey, then drew in some shadow and tree color so I could finish it inside later. I took some pics with my Canon 20D…even looking at those later, you can’t see the colors in the tree as well. That is why it’s so important to work from life!
This is a watercolor sketch I did just before the sun came up over the horizon. It took me about 30 minutes…I laid on the background sky, trees and field, then the forground trees. It’s on the pale side, I was working on sketch paper, not heavy enough to mess around on. My objective was to practice with my small kit for field work. Once the sun came up, I couldn’t work on it because it was just too bright to look at.
I painted this 4″ x 6″ oil painting on an early November day, sunny, cold and gorgeous. I have updated this post with photos of the day out in the field, please see below.
"Oak Tree"
The great thing about painting or drawing outside, en plein air is what you observe…hear, see, feel, smell. This day it was the visit of the bees and teeny tiny spiders. It sounds creepy but when you’re used to treking around in nature you learn to just observe the critters for what they are and do, and not get ‘creeped out’!
Burnt Umber sketch with bee
So as a wasp kept landing on my painting and easel, I figured it was interesting. I took pictures of him of course.This shows the first stage of my painting, I used a ‘wipe off’ method here; you paint Burnt Umber on the masonite board and brush it out so it’s a medium value. Then you ‘wipe off’ with a rag and your finger or a brush, the areas that are lighter. It’s like sketching with value, it’s very freeing as you won’t try to catch details you just look for the big shapes and wipe them out. If you don’t like it you brush it back on, easy! Then you lay in darks and bring out shadow shapes with more burnt umber. I have my board attached to a piece of cardboard that has clear tape covering it. There is another small canvas ready to go next to it and they are both attached temporarily with ‘sticky tack’ or ‘blue tack’.
spider on easel
Then every time I started to paint, a tiny spider would appear hanging from the brim of my baseball cap, I’d lift him off with his thread of silk and put him in the grass, then another would appear on my easel. My guess was they were ‘sailing’ on their threads down from the beautiful oak tree.
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Today after my trip to the pet shop…it was so gorgeous I had to swing by the Clarence Nature Center and then the Clarence Escarpment. The temperatures climbed to an unseasonable 63degrees or more. I had a hard time finding much to draw at the Nature Center, I think I was distracted by the awful noise from all the construction trucks! It was deafening especially because I was still nursing a headache…it didn’t improve believe me.
using my micron pen. I pulled out my field watercolor set and did a tiny sketch of the shadows in the woods. It’s a relatively peaceful place here, you can hear the traffic a bit but you can also lose yourself just looking, drawing, listening, smelling and hearing. I say hearing because as I stood very, very still drawing the burrs…I heard a splash right near me and I saw a muscrat running along in the tiny stream! I let out a big “OH!” in surprise and it scared him, he dove under the water and disappeared!
