When I first started my health and wellness journey, I walked. I walked around my city. I walked around parks. I walked at the mall. But pretty often I stopped at Salem Willows. Frequently just called “The Willows” around here. I’d stop there and walk from the free parking lot around the Willows and sometimes around Winter Island. It’s beautiful and the history is pretty nifty.

As I work to rebuild my knee strength I need those easy walks again. So I decided to head back to the start. The Willows features some really beautiful scenery and safe paved walking paths. So I walk a bit and look for a spot to make some en plein air images.

I’ve been a bit obsessed with Dead Horse Beach for years. It’s the name but when I first visited the beach there were pieces of old stuff from around The Willows. That stuff- mostly weird poured concrete with rebar embedded in it has greatly worn down over the last 25 years.* But the interesting scenery remains.

The process for these images is pretty simple- walk, find a spot to draw and paint, look through the viewfinder, sketch with pencil, add watercolor, let it dry a bit, add pastels, colored pencils, etc…

The above images were the first in this series. I realized that I was pretty focused on realism here and not my usual vibes. I was getting frustrated that my watercolor travel palette has only 9 colors and that I only carry a handful of colored pencils. 

Again realistic colors, but a bit of a push for myself to use purple and dark blue in the shadows. I had to push myself to ignore watercolor advice I’d gotten over the years to build up layers. I leaned into adding in some teal colored pencil and white paint marker.

In this image I pushed myself more. The retaining wall (the curved piece that spans the page) is yellow ochre in real life, but I didn’t have yellow ochre on my palette. I did have yellow and blue and red oxide. I used what I had to get the value and shadows. It’s cool and shadowed and the tide line is darker. The trees have deep darks and bright yellow highlights. I used some pastels to add in some of the real colors. This one feels like I’m getting there, even if the sketch isn’t great.

This one I really pushed the colors of the watercolor sketch and then added in more soft pastel than I have previously. I’m really trying to get the vibes. More purple for the shadows and I like the layered sky. It feels the way the sky did that day- hazy with distant clouds.

This one feels more like vibes not realism. Yes it’s based in the reality of what is there, but I definitely mashed up what I saw into something that feels like the view. I’m not sure that makes total sense, but in this image I was really pushing the colors and the shadows. More purples in the shadows and more lighter lights. It took me a bit to get the correct colors for the distant tree line, but I feel like the green gray color is a good one to get that distant hazy look.

Up until this image all the images have been 6x9inches this one is 8.5×11 inches. FOr this one I didn’t intend to add pastel I meant to leave it just black and white. I started off with a black water soluble gel crayon and a water brush. I added in white with chalk. Simple. Pretty effective. Then I wanted to add in some blue for the sky so I added in Neocolor 2s  and used water to blend them. I liked how the color worked with the brown paper** so I decided to add in pastels. I REALLY like this one.

Each morning when I go out to walk and make art I feel like I’m hitting a new milestone with how I’m capturing the scene.

*I just realized it’s been 25 years.

** I’ve got to do a whole post on this paper.

I recently inherited a lovely little 6x8inch pochade box. It was hand built in 2014 by a dude named Douglas Smith.

The box is compact and has been used sparingly. The artist tended to work much larger than 5×8, but if you’ve been here a minute you know I LOVE working around that size.

The box arrived well built and in great barely used condition.

But if you’ve been here a minute you know I’m not going to use anything straight out of the box. I made a few changes.

First I attached a swiss arca tripod mount. (Similar to this one.) 

Then I used 2 friction hinges to update the hinge situation. It arrived with 2 cute brass hinges and an arm that holds the easel section upright. I wanted more versatility in angles. They were easy to install and look okay. They aren’t as pretty as the original brass hinges. I probably could have installed just one hinge in the middle and left the original brass hinges, but through that would look funny. The friction hinges have mixed reviews. They are perfect for this kind of install- they aren’t hidden so they don’t need to fold back flat on themselves and the friction is adjustable. Yes they are plastic and metal would be better, but these were cheap for a lot of them.

The box arrived with a simple and nice enough handle. It’s got brass attachment points and a plastic handle that moves. I will be replacing this with a small strip of nice heavy duty leather in a dark brown shade. 

I immediately cut down some chipboard to fit into the wet panel and painting area of the box. It will hold 6 pieces of chipboard with watercolor taped to the center area. In my case I’m attaching watercolor postcards. After all I still have 200+ cards. I suspect I could tape up to both sides of the panels and double the number of painting surfaces. In the end i went with one card per board since I will be working mixed media and don’t want to take a chance that I damage any of the images I’ll be making.

In packing the pochade box I’m figuring out what mixed media I want to include in the box itself and what i want in a separate pack that I can easily bundle with the pochade box. Currently I have 2 different watercolor palettes and a handful of colored pencils. I think I need to add in some oil and chalk pastels. I’m also bundling up a sketchbook pack that I’ll detail here soon.

During one of my last few videos I mentioned thumbnail sketches and how they are useful for developing a final art piece. Today I went to the beach and since my knee is still in a brace and I am hobbling around* I decided to park my butt on a beach blanket** and make some thumbnails.

I decided to do several different types of thumbnails or studies:

Notan– A thumbnail that ONLY looks at black and white. That is the darkest darks of the scene. You can sketch all the darker areas in black if you want.Not the greatest Notan ever, but got an idea of the bands of dark and where the lightest lights are.I added a few too many details for this to be a true Notan thumbnail.

Value– These have a range of shades of gray PLUS black and white. Value thumbnails can also be done larger in what is called a study.I used dark and light green to get different lights and darks.

Color– a color thumbnail looks at a range of colors in the scene. It may or may not take value and tones into consideration. These can also be done as a study. This color study captures some of the colors here.

It is important to differentiate between a thumbnail and a study. A thumbnail should be small, not much larger and 2 or 3 inches on the longest edge. While a study may be much larger. Some folx who work very large might make several larger studies at 8×10 inches or even larger. A study is almost always smaller than the final piece.This is a mixed media color study. 

It is important to make your thumbnails and studies in the same aspect ratio as the final piece. I have had several images that I’ve created the thumbnail and sketches in a 3×4 ration while I’ve ended up making the piece closer to 2×3 or 1×1. The image never quite works properly when I try to translate the image from one ratio to another. It can be done but I like to keep those ratios close to the final piece.

Materials used in these:

• Blackwing Pencil and Muji 2mm Clutch Pencil
• Black water soluble gel crayon
• Various watercolor boxes
• Colored pencils
• Chalk Pencils
• Neocolor1
• Sketchbook
• Pochade Box
• Watercolor postcards

A few things I realized here- I’m sticking to attempting to capture “real” landscape colors which is not my favorite. I really need to get back to “my” color sense when it comes to landscapes. I like the mixed media the most on cold pressed and rough watercolor paper.

The thumbnails are especially helpful when I am not sticking to fully depicting reality. They help me organize what is there to something more interesting on the page.

Thumbnails– help me explore the scene and start figuring out the composition in a quick way that doesn’t waste a lot of paper. To me, it is thinking on paper. These are done on cheap paper because I make a lot of them. I fit 4 to a page but I might make 8 or 12 of them before I find a composition I like.

Studies– solidify that thinking into what might be what the final piece looks like but might be discarded. They further evolve the value and colors and composition of the piece. The color and value interact to move the eye around the image. When I make a study I can decide if I want to go further with the image or not.

I’m talking about these in the sense of a painting but I use a similar set of thumbnails and studies when I’m making prints. Especially if I’m doing layers of color. So even though I’m discussing painting I’m using painting as a general fill in for other forms of art making.

*I screwed up my knee on a eBoard that wasn’t even turned on. I’m feeling a lot better. Range of motion is better but still painful and stiff. I’m several weeks out from riding my bike and will likely need to wear a brace for the rest of the summer. I have a referral with an orthopedist at the sports med place associated with my DR office.

**It’s really a polyester tarp IMO. There are dozens of these sorts of super lightweight tarps all over Amazon sold as “beach blankets.” But when you get them they are polyester tarps. This is the one we were using today and I liked it well enough. This is the one I keep in my bike bag when I’m on longer rides and know I’ll be stopping for a snack or coffee outside.

We had severe thunderstorm warnings for my area last Sunday. I had been getting the alerts on my weather app for the whole day. We felt the wind pick up and my phone started to buzz with warning about wind and lightening. I ran around the house closing windows and was closing the window on the street side of our kitchen when I saw the wind start to change.

The wind started to rip branches off the tree in front of our house and they started to swirl upward. I quickly closed the window and told my wife we needed to get into the basement. We were headed down when we heard a loud bang.

After the bang the noise of the wind changed and when I looked out it was pouring rain straight down and the wind had all but stopped. And the tree in front of our house was on the sidewalk.

Several things happened all at once- a window shade snapped up, four sections of the neighbor’s fence exploded outward, the other neighbor’s porch was pulled away from their house, a metal barrel was blown into our old car, and the tree fell. All this when tornado force winds howled. It was a cacophony of destruction.

We were lucky. The tree fell away from the car. It missed the power, cable, and phone lines to the house and it didn’t touch the street lines either. Our roof is fine, as is our chimney. Our porch is still attached to the house.

The wind pulled some of the aluminum capping away from the trim. I think a section of fence his the new car because there is a small dent on the rear driver’s side door. There was a scuff that wiped off on the passenger’s side door from a trash barrel that blew up my driveway.

​On one side of us, one neighbor lost 4 sections of fence. On the other side their roof is trash, their 2nd floor porch ripped away from their house and has to be rebuilt, and one person lost their car though many more were dented and damaged. One house was damaged by a tree falling into it.

There’s a section of my regular bike route where trees are broken in half and others are just gone.

That said the morning after the city had removed the tree and by the time I returned from work they had cleaned up and patched the sidewalk.

A few days later whatever is left of the Weather Service confirmed that we’d had a microburst event

​The story in 3 images:

I have an art post but have been preoccupied with this and a few other things, mostly the DayJob.

During my last foraging walk on the beach I found a large chunk of what I thought was a nice brown rock, I am always looking for brown rocks. Burnt umber is one of my favorite colors. It turns out the brown rock was a chunk of steel coated in a thick rocky coating of rust and sand.

Awesome. I collected it.

I washed it clean of surface sand and salt.

Then I smashed it with a hammer to roughly coffee bean sized.

Very satisfying.

Of course I did not take a single picture of any of these steps, though I did accidentally take a picture of the rust blob through a rock identification app.

​From the hammer smashing part I then followed the same steps as brick- it got run through 2 steps of coffee grinder- one at french press size and again at espresso size.

I ended up having to let the french press sized particles dry on a plate for a few hours. When the rock is too damp it binds up the grinder- even when I use a drill to expedite the process.

I process my rocks damp to cut down on dust, but there is a fine line for too little and too much water.

My pigment isn’t dry yet, but the yield was pretty low especially when compared to brick. But then I think everything will pale in comparison to the yield of brick. The color so far is a nice deep brown.

Carbon black paints deserve posts of their own so I’m writing a post with some details. I read an artist bloviating that lamp black is an inferior black for ink and paint, and honestly I couldn’t disagree more.

I’m starting this off by writing about lamp black. If you are familiar with sumi or India ink you are familiar with lamp black.

You create lamp black pigment by creating some sort of smokey incomplete burn of a burnable material. That black soot you get on the bottom of your pans when camping? Technically lamp black. I’ve seen a variety of videos on making lamp black- one guy makes it with fat wood he orders online. Most folx use an oil lamp.

I make mine with a simple oil lamp using strained used cooking oil. My lamp is made of a glass jar with a tiki torch wick held in place with some titanium bar stock I had on hand. The wick needs to be held in place and this can be achieved with any sort of metal wire. It needs to hold the wick in place while not pinching the wick. If the wire pinches the wick too much it will starve the flame and the flame will attempt to jump below the pinch point creating a possibly fire hazard.

Anyway, you want to create a sooty incomplete burn so you want to make sure that the wick is technically too long. Mine is about an inch too high.

In my glass jar I put used cooking oil. We collect our cooking oil in an old can for disposal and I took some of this oil, strained out chunks of food and water and poured it into my jar. The wick starts to pull the oil up quickly. I let mine sit for about a half hour to get it fully saturated. While this was happening I found a few supports to hold a metal bowl over the flame. The flame needs to hit the bowl to gather the soot.

Then you wait. The bowl should be turned periodically so that the metal doesn’t overheat. If the metal gets too hot, the soot won’t stick. I burned about an ounce of oil and collected a teaspoon or two of lamp black. It is best to make lamp black outside in an area protected from wind but is also well ventilated.

The lamp black scrapes off the pan with an old business card or clothing tag pretty easily. I scraped mine into the middle of my pan and then dumped it on my glass mulling surface. In order to get it to stop blowing everywhere I attempted to spray it with water. The spray shot soot everywhere. What a mess.

The lamp black is slightly greasy and the particle sizes are extremely fine. They clump together to form tiny lightweight little floating pieces that leave a greasy mark where ever they land.

Lamp black (and in my experiments all types of carbon black) requires the use of a degreaser for it to mull properly. I used rubbing (isopropyl) alcohol, but I’ve read about folx using vodka. I suspect that soap would work as a rewetting agent as well as a degreaser for proper incorporation. I used a smaller amount of watercolor medium* than usual and ended up adding more and using plenty of water to mull it. Mulling was short and sweet once I added in the alcohol.

I have read that you can reduce the amount of grease/oil in your lamp black by heating the soot up until it glows red hot. I did not find that this reduced the grease/oil when I tried it.

It does not require levigation to remove large particles, there just aren’t any.

Lamp black gives a very low yield of the most delightful deep rich black I’ve seen. From the amount of lamp black I collected, I created 1 half filled full pan of color. It also dries up into near nothingness with cracking. This might be a issue with my particular watercolor medium but I’ve only had issue with cracking with some of the colors I’ve mixed.

It’s hard to describe this lamp black watercolor- it’s deep it’s dark it’s rich and even. It rewets wonderfully and has a lovely flow. It’s that inky black I look for when I think black. It’s a perfect deep dark. 

The downside is that it is SO DAMN messy. The stuff flies all over the place and when it lands and is touched it leaves a greasy dark mark. It requires a spray to get it cleaned up, and good god if you use a rag that has any lamp black on it, you smear it everywhere.

This mulls so easily it’s virtually not needed. Once the degreaser is added it really does mix into the medium with ease. I think I could easily mull directly in my small mortar and pestle. I will say that once it’s on my glass it is such a small particle size that it sinks into the frosted areas and won’t come out easily. I lost a lot of the pigment to the mulling process. Which is why I want to mix directly into my mortar- I will lose far less to the surface area.

Making lamp black isn’t hard but it is a pain in the arse. The real question is if it’s distinct inky black color is worth the mess and for me it is.

*The watercolor medium deserves it’s own post.

I started watching videos about primitive pottery  making years ago. There is something very soothing about watching someone dig up mud, strain and sift it to make a pliable clay, then turning that clay into pottery. I suspect that if I lived in a more rural location I’d have a kiln in my backyard and I’d be raku firing pots.

Instead I live in a city where my mini Solo stove knock off gets the side eye.

The primative pottery making led me to videos about making my own ink and paint from foraged stuff like leaves, fruit, berries, and walnuts as well as rocks.

I started my foray into making my own paint by visiting a beach I love and picking out some softer rocks that I could break with another rock and left marks on harder rocks. I then brought that home and broke them into smaller, coffee bean sized pieces with a sledge hammer.

Very therapeutic. I highly recommend the process.

I then used a variety of means to crush those pieces down into smaller pieces and smaller pieces until they were little more than dust.

I started out with a mortar and pestle. Then used a whirly coffee grinder. Then an old magic bullet blender. I’ve settled into an old manual coffee grinder with a stainless steel conical burr. I attach the manual coffee grinder to a drill and use power to grind the stone to espresso sized dust. I have not tried the coffee grinder with harder rocks, only an ochre. The whirly coffee grinder has been ground DOWN by harder rocks.

This gets dumped into my mortar and pestle for a final pass before the wet portion starts.Upper right are my own pigments. This car is mostly painted with my own rock based pigments!

The next step is levigation. Basically using water and swirling to get the heavier particles out and only the finest particles into a slurry that will then be strained through a coffee filter.

​Levigation removes not only the largest particles but stuff that won’t grind down and contaminants. I end up losing at least half of the ground up rock to levigation.

Anything that gets levigated out ends up back in the mortar and reground with the pestle. I want to get every drop of potential color out of the grind as possible, but I also don’t want to spend days doing it. Honestly, one could go a little wild with the crushing, grinding, and levigating. I’ve decided that I’m going to lose a fair amount of potential pigment no matter what I do.

I’ve made a wide variety of colors of paint from a variety of rocks. Some are very interesting- a pink from a pink rock, some stuff that looks a lot like raw sienna and some stuff that looks a lot like yellow ochre. One of my favorites is from a few chunks of brick I found next to a very old building. It made the most lovely red brown color.

The most recent exploration is into carbon blacks, which I think deserves a post of it’s own. It’s a delightfully messy project where I’ve made lamp black and my own charcoal. I really want to make my own compressed charcoal sticks from sticks and twigs from my own yard and from my various hikes and bike rides.

A word of caution, when grinding down rocks or charcoal or processing lamp black, wear a mask. A good mask too. I’ve been wearing a N95 and feel like I should probably invest in a good respirator. Rocks can contain a whole load of things I don’t want to breath in, but also dust particles of any kind are not great for lungs, so I shall always wear a mask and eye protection.

More pictures soon, I’ve been really bad at taking photos of this process.

I’m stalled on the 300 Vehicles project. I lost steam on it over the last few weeks due to work being pretty nutso. Work has pretty much evened out but I’m still stalled out.

The work issue is compounded by the fact that I still have not heard back from the gallery about getting the gallery space at the end of August. Part of me is wondering,  “Why bother?” The other part of me is looking for alternative locations to show these pieces.

I am also focused on my paint making and pigment hunting. Pure pigment powder from a brick.

Too many interests and not enough time!

Tomorrow I have to attend a graduation pretty early and I suspect that I’ll be one of the first people there. The location of the ceremony is in a neighborhood so I should be able to wander around and do some drawing while I wait.

As much as I’m in a funk and stalled out on this series of images I’m committed to finishing all 300. I’m currently sitting comfortable at 200.

Completing 200 images is an accomplishment, but I really want to finish all 300.

I have the Yart Sale coming up and I kind of want to have the vehicle images at the Yart Sale, see if they sell. But if they do then I won’t have images for the show if I get the gallery spot. A catch-22. Also frustrating.