Manzanita

I am posting the progress of my Manzanita project on Instagram and decided I should post it here also. 

This is 3 days progress, about 10 hours of work. I observed  the tree over a nine month period, sketching, drawing, doing color  and value studies. Then came hours of drawing and improving and another full value study. Finally transferring to good paper. The tree lives at U.C. Berkeley Botanic Garden

I am using a palette of Caran d’Ache Pablos, Aubergine, Indigo, Dark Carmine, and English Red with some CD Luminence comparables, Perylene Maroon and Russett. Burnishing with Faber-Castell Ivory and Irojiten Cedar Wood.

“The International news gets worse and worse, & still I sit and paint leaves. I feel like those Chinese artists who, in ages of great barbarism and unrest, painted images & wrote poems in which metaphor described the tragic events around them so that the message was passed on to later ages in a simple, cryptic fashion. A dying leaf should be able to carry the weight of the world”….Rory McEwen

ASBA Conference 2016, Pittsburgh, PA 

Too much to write right now about what a fun conference this was and what a great city Pittsburgh is. We got to see the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation’s 15th Invitational Show which was really exciting. Artists from around the world were represented and it was quite amazing to see all their work. 

In addition as usual we were able to attend workshops given by a wide variety of botanical artists. We met and talked and traded ideas and worked together. It was a delight to meet artists from around the globe. I talked fabric with Deidre from Toronto and painted mushrooms with my friend Cissy from Santa Cruz and sketched with Judy Brown from Virginia. 

Here are some samples from the workshops I attended:

Margaret Saylor taught Painting Mushrooms, Creating Browns. I cheated (with the teacher’s permission) and used colored pencil.

Gaynor Dickeson came from the UK to teach Crab Apples in Colored Pencil.

Lara Call Gastinger took us to the Pittsburgh Botanical Garden to do
outdoor sketching.

Art in Spain

Some thoughts and pictures from our recent trip to Spain and Morocco:

art-in-spain Click here for more patterns.

 Pattern in Spain and Morocco

ASBA Conference in Denver

We just returned from four  wonderful days in Denver, meeting with our fellow Botanical Artists, taking workshops and visiting the beautiful Denver Botanical Gardens. An exhausting, creative time was had by all. I took a graphite workshop from Robin Jess and learned some new colored pencil techniques from Libby Kyer. Nancy did a full day session with Colored Pencil Artist Susan Rubin. We had fun visiting with Wendy Hollender and Ann Swan who gave a great techniques demo the first day of the Conference. There was a lovely Small Works exhibit which has become a regular feature of the Conferences.

Nancy Wheeler Klippert enjoying the gardens in her new hat.

ASBA (The American Society of Botanical Artists) holds a Conference every year, hosted by a different chapter in a different city.  Next year the Conference will be held in Miami. Every three years the Conference is held in Pittsburgh, home of the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation at Carnegie Mellon (2016.) In 2017 the ASBA Conference will be held here in Northern California at Filoli Gardens hosted by the Northern California Society of Botanical Artists. 

Our  friend and fellow botanical artist Andrea Wolf invited us to see the Chihuly installation at the Denver Gardens at night. It was quite spectacular but equally beautiful during the day.

Alcatraz Florilegium

The Tuson Cactus and Succulent Society have published an article on Florilegiums with a special focus on the Alcatraz Florilegium. Here is a link to the pdf. http://www.tucsoncactus.org/pdf_files/October14.pdf