Solstice Canyon

Well, a belated Happy 4th of July to all those celebrating. Hope everyone had a relaxing day off. We lazed about the house, watched neighborhood fireworks from our balcony, and finished the evening off watching "Miss Potter" which I very much enjoyed. As a children's illustrator, I'm somewhat mortified to admit that I think I've only read one or two of Beatrix Potter's books, although I adore the illustrations. We have a book that's a collection of a few stories, but I think I'd like to get the entire collection in the small format in which they were originally printed. I think I'll add it to my Amazon wishlist...

Still no new art to show - hope to be back with some soon. So I'll post some pictures of this past weekend's hike. The beginning of the trail in Solstice Canyon (Malibu) was paved and followed a spring-fed stream. The scenery was nice, but kind of ho-hum - nothing we hadn't seen before. After a while we came upon the ruins of the Roberts' house and things started getting interesting. The house was just about completely gone, but patios and portions of walls and a ridiculous number of fireplaces dotted the landscape:












Just beyond the ruins, and upstream, the creek consists of a series of multi-level rock-pools and small waterfalls decorated with maidenhair fern. We decided to boulder-hop our way upstream to see what we could see.












After a long walk along the creek took a couple different side trails both of which traveled up out of the canyon and along the mountainsides into dryer terrain and sweeping views of the land and ocean.












We traveled back down into the canyon, boulder-hopped a portion of the stream that we hadn't seen yet and then, exhausted, took the next opportunity we had to get back onto a level trail to head back to the car. I'd love to go back after some rainfall - some people we ran into said the water level of the stream used to be significantly higher in the past and that there used to be really great swimming holes all along the creek. There's also supposed to be a 150' waterfall at the end of a different trail - maybe we'll come back some day for that one!

Castro Crest

I'm busy working on illustrations for a magazine assignment right now, so I don't have any art to post this week, but as usual, we did go hiking this week and I have a few pictures. We tried to go to Solstice Canyon in Malibu. I figured a park along the coast would be cooler than inland and a canyon would be shady, so we could avoid the heat that we've been experiencing here in the valley. When we got there, the parking was completely full so we left, unsure of what to do. We remembered that the trail head for Castro Crest was at the end of the road we were currently driving. So after a long, winding, and slightly harrowing drive high up into the mountains, we ended up at Castro Crest.

So much for avoiding the heat. Just a little ways inland from the coast and it's significantly hotter. We arrived around 2 pm, so the sun was pretty brutal for a good part of the hike. I think the trail we hiked was a segment of the Backbone Trail which runs through Ventura County and Los Angeles - really long! The first portion of the trail which is a slow decent to a canyon appeared to have burned within the last year or two. The undergrowth was growing back, but the trees were blackened. From certain angles, you could see the bark peeling off the trees and the white wood underneath looked almost like silver in the sunlight.
























The trail crossed a dry meandering creek-bed several times. We noticed a lack of wildlife. We didn't see as many lizards as usual at this park. We did see three small rabbits on our way out, though. Perhaps they become more active late in the day when the sun is going down.

If the sign-posts were accurate, I think we did about six miles all in all. Exhausting! We went and got some Jamba Juice and kicked back at home for the rest of the evening.

Escondido Canyon & Two Quick Sketches

After fighting with mediocre photo-importing software, we broke down a got a card-reader so I could finally post some pictures. These are from last week when we went hiking at Escondido Canyon in Malibu:
Escondido Canyon in two words: poison oak. A lot of the parks around here have quite a bit of poison oak, but Escondido seemed to have the mother-load. That aside, the scenery was very pretty and chock full of wildlife! We saw two California Mountain King Snakes (the red, black, and yellow ones that look similar to the deadly coral snake, but are actually harmless!), another type of snake, and two deer. We were only a few feet away from one deer as it made it's way across the side of a hill.

The trail repeatedly crosses a meandering creek and ends up at the 150' Escondido Falls which is the highest in the Santa Monica Mountains. There wasn't much by way of water at this waterfall perhaps because of the severe drought we've been experiencing... It was more of a trickle.

This last picture is of the falls, but it's probably hard to tell since there was so little water. It'd be nice to go back just after some rain to see how the falls might look during a more typical year.


Now for the sketches - these are just a couple of real quickies drawn up from some old thumbnails in my sketchbook:













A little ACEO and a simple Christmas card. I'm not so sure about the card, though. I think "Santa Moon" looksa bit creepy...

The Woodland Post

We got the verdict from our insurance company by the end of last week, and 'Sophia,' our Jetta, is a total loss. So this weekend was all about car-shopping. The last and only time I'd ever been car-shopping was right after college graduation and my Dad handled pretty much all of it for me, so this was a really new experience for both myself and Chris - I don't think he'd ever bought a car before... I guess there are some people out there who enjoy doing these kinds of things, but unfortunately I'm not one of them. It just seems like a big headache with all of the research and then bargaining with sales-people and waiting around for the paperwork - ugh. I was a bit surprised that the salesmen were surprisingly low-pressure, but then when we got into the finance office, the pressure to get an extended warranty was unbelievable. We ended up with a brand new Honda Civic - hope it was the right choice. Needless to say, I hope this car lasts us a long time, so we don't have to do this again any time soon. Now we just need to name her...

On to the art - Here's a sketch I did last week and will probably start painting tomorrow:

I'm not sure where the idea for this one came from. I remember sketching the thumbnail for it about five years ago when we were visiting my in-laws at Christmas time. I think I was trying to come up with ideas for a promo card at the time. Every time I'd flip back through my sketchbook, this one would catch my eye and I'd think, "I really need to paint that some day." So I'm glad to finally get around to it.

I don't know what it is with me and birds these days. Seems like half of the paintings I've done recently feature birds. I guess I just really like painting birds. Go figure.

Wheat Wife Finished

No hiking this week, sadly, as our car is still very much out of commission, but I did finally finish up my "Wheat Wife" painting:

I was going for an earthy look, but I feel like this turned out a bit more drab than I had intended. It was the sort of image that was really cool in my head, but on paper it's just a bit lacking. I had problems with the contrast between the snow and ground. The ground should be really dark from the dampness of melted snow, but it looks too high-contrast if I darken it, so I left it lighter than it really should be.

All of my little old ladies seem to end up looking the same. I guess I should try to diversify.

Well, at least I've got this one out of my head and down on paper. On to something new!

No New Art Yet, But Another Hike...

I don't have any new sketches or paintings to post this week, but we did go hiking this weekend, so I guess I'll post that. I really could just blog about hiking, given how much of it we've been doing these days. On Sunday, we drove over to Arroyo Sequit in Malibu. We took Westlake Blvd. for a good part of the drive which unbeknownst to us was a long series of hair-pin turns and certainly not for the weak of stomach.

Signs at the beginning of the trail warned of this being mountain lion country. We didn't see any mountain lions, but we did see a lot of speckled lizards and one horned toad. The trail itself was pretty short, about a mile and a half plus a brief detour.

It was so quiet there. You could hear the wind blowing through the pines - one of my favorite sounds, reminiscent of my childhood.

The trail afforded lots of great, sweeping views of the valley and mountains in the distant, as well as some huge satellite dishes. The detour close to the end of the trail led us to a paved which actually went right up to the dishes, which appeared to be the property of AT&T. It's always so strange to be surrounded by nature and then stumble across something very much man-made and very high-tech - seems so out of place.

Another odd aspect to hiking in LA is that we live in this incredibly dense, heavily paved urban jungle, but if we drive for twenty minutes or so, we're suddenly in the middle of nowhere. Driving through the mountains really feels like back-country where there might be a pocket of houses or a small town, but mostly wilderness. I can almost forget that I'm really right, smack in the middle of one of the country's largest cities. It really is quite strange when you think about it.

We were planning on doing a much longer hike at Chesebro Canyon on Monday, but we decided to get into a car accident instead. It really was unfortunate - we were barely two blocks from our home when we all stopped short just past an intersection and ended up in a three-car pile-up. We were the sandwich car and took the most damage. We'll probably have to replace 'Sophia.' My husband is sad - she's been a good car for a very long time. Fortunately, no one was seriously injured. We were all walking around, talking coherently right afterward, although we were all badly shaken up. We both woke up feeling really sore today. Hopefully, we'll feel better soon and get the lack-of-car situation figured out this weekend. Dreading car-shopping...

I guess I should try to get some painting done today so I actually have some art to post next time!

Rockets & Art

Whew! It was a busy weekend. Saturday evening, we learned that the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (NASA - http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/) in Pasadena was having their annual open house this weekend. So somewhat spur of the moment, we decided to go. It was pretty interesting although we didn't really get to spend a whole lot of time there as we were planning on going to an art show in the afternoon. Looking through our photos, I'm realizing we don't have any pictures of the rovers! So, the best I can do is the command center and a clean room:












I know the pictures aren't great. Command center was really dark and we were shooting through super thick glass to capture the clean rooms, but it's the best we could do in the circumstances.

The clean rooms were probably the most interesting part to us since it's very much behind-the-scenes sort of thing that you normally wouldn't have a chance to see. Chris (my husband) was in heaven shooting pictures of all the heavy industry on the campus. He works in video-games so having reference photos of all kinds of interesting places is really useful to him. It's always entertaining having to explain to people why he is shooting pictures of fire hydrants and dirty brick walls!

We left JPL around noon and headed down to Beverly Hills for the "Affaire in the Gardens Art Show." I'm intrigued by art shows where the artist actually sells physical art since this is something I've never really done before. I'm so tempted to try this sometime, but then I wince when I think about the over-head involved in such an endeavor. Not only would I have to produce prints and merchandise, but I'd also have to fork out some cash for the display boards and tent. And then if I didn't sell enough... well, that would be disheartening to say the least. I guess it must be profitable for some artists, but certainly not all artists, right? One thing that I do notice when I attend art shows is that there really aren't any children's artists present. Would that be a good thing or a bad thing? My work would certainly be unique in an environment sans other children's artists, but that still doesn't mean it would sell. Just something to consider for the future I suppose....

I'll put in a plug for my two favorite displays:

Gabe Leonard - beautiful paintings (http://www.gabeleonard.com)
Vicki Banks - very cool and clever animal sculptures - lots of ravens. She doesn't appear to have a website...