Hillsboro Plein Air Paintout - downtown

While I was painting in downtown Hillsboro on the second day of the paintout a reporter for a local paper stopped by to take some pictures and ask some questions. I didn't think much about but a couple of different people who take that newspaper brought me copies of the next issue of the paper, showing me painting. Then today some pictures of the various artists were published on Flickr here.



The Flower Seller
oil on board
8" x 10"

We were in central Oregon last weekend; the following sketches were done in my little Moleskine book which is slightly smaller than 4x6 inches:

A view across the river from Greg's Grill where we lunched.

This view of the Deschutes River was done on the riverband at Lava Island Falls. The reddish brown is a large lava flow from ancient times. The forested land in the region is mostly lodgepole pine.

My husband and I enjoy visiting the High Desert Museum south of Bend. The best part of the living museum is the grounds surrounding the buildings with trails, forests, and a rather new replica of a pioneer farm, complete with a hand pump, a wash tub with scrub board, a garden and a corral made of 'found' timber. All the little kids were enjoying playing house: pumping water, watering the garden, washing clothes in the washtub and then hanging on the line to dry. I remember when that was a chore rather than an interesting activity to do in an interpretive museum.

The view from our balcony at Sunriver was looking out over the golf course which is dotted with small stands of pine trees, with some of the Cascade mountain range in the distance.

This view is looking across Sun River toward Mt. Bachelor in the near distance.

The Sketchbook Project - Forests

FORESTS

This is one of those shots taken from the passenger seat of my car, driving down the highway at 60 miles an hour. Surprisingly the shot turned out okay, at least for the Sketchbook Project. I cut it in two to fit across the spread and then extended the lines and colors, with a little insert taken within one of the coast range forests.

                              

Ecola State Park - The Sketchbook Project

For this next spread I chose a photo taken from Ecola State Park.

After attaching the photo to the page with a tape runner (double-stick tape) I extended the scene using Derwent Inktense pencils, Caron d'Ache watercolor crayons, and ink.

Then I used plain water and a soft brush to moisten the marks and blend the colors.

The Sketchbook Project -Gray Days

I'm participating in The Sketchbook Project (click on the icon in the sidebar to read more.) and have been mulling around ideas about how I want to proceed. The papers in this 5" x 8 1/4" Moleskine are so thin that actually drawing on them as they are is out of the question as far as I'm concerned and there's not a great deal of time left in the year to draw on every single page. So. I decided to follow Marge Malwitz's lead and glue some of the pages together to create fewer, thicker pages.

What glue to use is the big issue with lots of the people who are working on this project. At MakenArt there's a long post about which glues and pens work best but I didn't read it until I had already experimented with gel medium, YES! paste, and a UHU gluestick, resulting in some badly wrinkled pages. I'm not worrying about that because I'll be making collages on the pages.

I find it so intersting to follow Marge's Creative Process that I decided I'll document my own process for you.  The title I chose from those available is "If you lived here". I'm enlarging the title to "If You Lived Here... Oregon". I'll use my own photos of various places I've been recently in Oregon and extend the photos with drawing and journaling since that's what I do.

My first 2 pages have to do with people's idea that it always rains and is cloudy and gray here in Oregon. It doesn't rain all the time. In fact the rain this week is the first we've had in Portland in 2 dry months. But one CAN count on bits of most days at the coast being overcast.

I happened to have the perfect sheet of gray washi so I cut that to fit and used 3M's 77 spray adhesive to glue it to the page, along with bits of blue washi to indicate the promise of blue skies.

The text under the pictures reads

Some say

it's always gray

here at the western edge

of the USA.

Often - yes, with a gentle mist.

But not always...

See there...

a hint of blue.