Katura's Sketch-blog

Went camping in the countryside for the long weekend...painted this little scene of the surrounding trees after we got the fire started for breakfast.

Being new to Oregon, I haven't made the acquaintance of many of its wildflowers yet. Actually spent a good chunk of the weekend reading the official plant list of the local arboretum (much of which is still dedicated to wild species), and looking those plants up in all my current field guides to see which books are actually *useful* in this neck of the woods! And yesterday I was pleased to run the field guide from the other end--found these lovely flowers blooming under a stand of ash trees, and took a little break to sketch them out and then run them down in the field guide the best I could.

It's a cinquefoil for sure, but not sure on the species--doesn't quite match any of the leaf shapes in my current field guide. (The leaf that's the closest is a species that's shorter and shouldn't be at this elevation, hmph!) I wonder if they ever hybridize? Gorgeous flower, one way or the other.

Flew on a trip out of the Eugene Airport a few weekends ago. The airport actually has a nice little art gallery beyond the security gates; after perusing the work on display, I did this tiny thumbnail doodle with my watercolor pencils.

Was visiting family up in Washington a few weekends ago. On the bike ride from the Bainbridge Ferry out to the town of Poulsbo, we saw some really gorgeous spring flowers on the roadside, including this critter that I'd never seen before:

Happily, my sketch had enough details that I was able to identify it when I got back home--it's a gorgeous salmonberry, Rubus spectabilis, a native to the Northwest. Hurrah!

I have some catching up to do in my blogging! Let's go back in time a few weeks to the Slowpoke Sketch Walk...It was a lovely day, about a dozen people came out for it. We practiced doing thumbnail sketches to map out the lights and darks in a sketch, then got very immersed in the wildflowers.

This Saturday I'm leading my second sketch-mosey at the local Arboretum. Come on out if you're in the neighborhood. The wildflowers will be popping!

I went to my first volunteer work party at Mount Pisgah Arboretum yesterday. We were removing false brome, an invasive grass, from the forest understory. Not only was it fun to hang out and share stories with the other volunteers while we used our saw-bladed "hand sickles" to cut the grass out of the soil, but I found all sorts of wonderful critters living in the duff. This critter was the most exciting discovery of the day:



I found it scurrying around in the soil after I lifted out a big clump of grass roots--it first tried to burrow away, but then just held perfectly still (a sketcher's dream). My guidebook at home pegs it as a forest spider wasp, Priocnemis oregona/ It's a parasitic wasp that hangs out in shady areas of leaf-litter, looking for burrowing spiders that it paralyzes with its sting, then lays its eggs on. Wow. Very much a miniature tarantula hawk (same family of wasp, similar glorious iridescence, though this one has metallic blue-black wings and a red abdomen, sort of reversing the t-hawk colors).



The other dangerous forest resident we found was, of course, poison oak. I know how to identify it when its leaves are out, but it was great to get a lesson in recognizing the bare stems in early spring as well. (Distinctive yellow-ochre tint to the wood, sharp angle of the pink-tipped buds, hint of vine-like behavior...) We'll see if my new observation skills mean that I won't have a rash break out over the course of the next few days.

(Pardon the mud stains on all these drawings, by the way--proof I was working, not just doodling. *grin*)

Fun little comparison I did recently, showing the stylistic difference between stippling (dots of ink) and parallel-line shading. This is the lower tooth of the Archaeohippus specimen I've been working on.

Just for fun, I've started a blog of science illustration happenings here in Oregon.
Go, Guild of Natural Science Illustrators!

http://gnsioregon.blogspot.com/

Took down my art show at the Lane Community College science building this morning. I'm always amazed by how quickly and easily shows come down off the wall, considering the countless hours of hard work that it takes to get them up!

To fill the "promo" space on the home page of my website, I'm officially announcing the new chunk of my portfolio that features Human Beings. It's brand new, so I'd love to get your feedback!

A friend of mine sent me a link to a seminar that the wonderful poet Luclille Clifton is doing in New York. Coincidentally, I just scanned a few pages of the sketchbook I was using when I had seen her at a west-coast poetry workshop a few years back. Thought I'd share the doodles I got from that day!

Fossil horse teeth still progressing. The team decided to "zoom out" on one of the rows of teeth so we could see the whole skull (or what's left of it, anyway) in the same shot. This image shows how I took the first small drawing of the row of teeth and spliced it onto a bigger sheet of paper so I could show the rest of the skull at the correct scale. As you can tell by the abrupt cropping of the graph paper in the image, the drawing is now too large to fin on my scanner!

But luckily, for a mere 10 cents, the photocopiers at the local library can shrink 11X17 images down to a much easier-to-handle size. I'm *highly* entertained by how many different flavors and eras of technology end up coming in useful in projects like these.

Yes, it's now on the shelves! The "Buzz" issue of Bitch Magazine features my illustrated article on bug sex as gender revolution, nestled right into the centerfold (appropriately enough). With a topic like that, people are bound to sit up and take notice--and I'm proud to learn that the author of the Sally Forth comic strip gave me a shout-out on his blog this weekend. Yay!

I will mention, however, that attentive naturalists will notice a strange mutation in the very first illustration of the article. My concept was to have two flies mating upsidedown, as if they were perched on the ceiling--but rather, to have them perched on the title of the article itself. Cute, huh? 

<( Read more )

This was a fun project--we're having a "Tweed Ride" here in Eugene, and I volunteered to do the promotional flyer for the event. It's a good example of how multi-media my working style has become; the original doodle (on the left) was done in Photoshop using my graphics tablet, then I printed that out and taped a sheet of vellum over the top so I could paint the almost-final art in ink with a brush. Scanned that back into the computer, did a little clean-up, and put in the lettering (which was then given the "tweedy" look by drawing over the top of the letters with the stylus again).

I had a lot of fun researching this one; stole the pose from a famous Mucha poster, but replaced the model with a fashionable gentleman cobbled together from many of Leyendeker's illustrations. Part of me wants to draw it over one more time to make it even tighter...but no, must spend that time on the more important projects in line!

I was in a meeting at the Arboretum that involved walking the grounds with our site crew. Man, what a great opportunity to learn what the emerging wildflowers are! Jotted down these very fast sketches on the margins of my meeting notes--and lots of these baby wildflowers were in my "one small square" post previously, so it's nice to know what it was I was seeing there.

LOTS of projects in full swing right now; need to take time to post more of them!

Went to Kris Kirkeby's "One Small Square" drawing workshop at Mount Pisgah Arboretum this afternoon. About six of us spent some time sketching outdoors in the rain (a pleasantly gentle drizzle, not too cold!) then came back indoors to keep expanding on the drawings. I hardly ever continue a drawing when the subject matter isn't right in front of me, so it was good practice to extrapolate and generalize in a way that gets the point across without making "wild assumptions" that might not be true.

And my goodness, the layers and layers of leaf-mulch being lifted up by new leafy sprouts of spring...what a complex architecture is under our feet!

Remember that horse tooth project I was starting many months ago? Recently got good photos of the original fossil to augment the plaster cast I've been looking at, which helps a ton. Much easier to see what is what with a little color on my side. Also have the definitive list of which angles I need to draw, so launching into this 15-million year old Archehippus' upper jaw with renewed interest.

(Vocabulary practice! "Labial" is the side of the teeth that is closest to your lips/inside of your cheeks; "lingual" is the side closest to the tongue; "occlusal" is the side where the teeth grind up against each other. Isn't science fun?)




I have this theory that I have to do most drawings three times before I get them "right." This one is likely to be 5 or 6 times, because every time I think I've figured out the abstract pattern of enamel swirls on the occlusal surfaces, I look up and see a new detail...! But I have a good book on tape to keep my company while I stare at the little guy. (Summerland, a sort of baseball fantasy-adventure?)

I hosted a "Slowpoke Sketch Walk" at Mount Pisgah Arboretum last weekend. It was a cold but thankfully dry morning as the 10 of us hit the trails and explored the oak savannah and the incense cedar forest with sketchbooks in hand! Great fun, hope we can arrange to do another one soon. Next weekend I'll be taking the "One Small Square" drawing class with Kris Kirkeby at the Arboretum--more info here.

Also gave a short presentation to an illustration class at Lane Community College earlier this month. Alas that I was too busy chatting to take any photos or anything. Great group of students, really dynamic mix of ages and interests. I went over some of my works in progress and we talked about pricing art and preferred sizes for graphics tablets and all sorts of great stuff. I forget sometimes how exciting life in in a classroom, you know? So many minds all going so fast!

We went to the Axe and Fiddle in Cottage Grove last night to see a sort of neo-old-timey band called the Conjugal Visitors last night. I had forgotten to bring a sketchbook, so here are some genuine napkin-sketches of the band for your amusement.


The trouble with napkins, of course, is right when you start to get the shading going nicely, the paper shreds under the pressure of the pen. So the next napkin adopted a more spare, geometric style.

Earlier this week I was painting a pair of houseflies, and it was great fun to do all the bristly hairs at the end of the painting. Since the lamp-black watercolor wasn't achieving the richest blacks in the shadow areas, I figured I'd just scan the art into the computer a little darker than normal. Almost a clever plan...except that it took me two solid hours at the computer to carefully get the background back to white while preserving every teeny tiny delicate hair on the flies.

But that meant I got to catch up on the recent episodes of This American Life that I had missed. Streaming internet radio is my favorite invention EVER.