vacation photos – Daily Fiber

Sunday Sketch Colored Pencil

Posted on January 12, 2025January 12, 2025 by Laura Kate

For today’s sketch, I wanted to try to draw a photograph of a sunset that Bill took during our trip to Italy several years ago.

This is the view from Medieval Assisi, which sits on a hill well above the surrounding landscape. He had shared it with me during our joint “100 Day Project,” back in 2023. I had never quite finished making 100 pieces of art out of Bill’s photos. This one I had wanted to turn into an art quilt. I had even done a fabric pull in anticipation.

It seems like an impossible task when I think about it now. But the first step is always to get a good drawing, from which to make a pattern. For this drawing I used graphite and colored pencils.

There’s no way for pencil to get the lustrous glow of a sunset the way a photograph can. But I did manage to render the shapes reasonably well.

drawing

Sunday Sketching – On the Pond

Posted on August 13, 2023August 10, 2023 by Laura Kate

By now I have looked through all of my photos from the July trip and selected some for use in my art. Today I want to study this image of my husband and brother in a rowboat on the pond at brother’s property.

The picture as is tells the story of enjoying an early morning on the pond in July. I wanted to simplify the scene, focusing on the men, the boat and the pond. Using the photo editor, I re-framed it, increased the light and applied a filter, to reveal this.

I like this low-value image a lot and can visualize how I would paint it. But first I wanted to look more closely at the values, and also practice sketching the subject. So I took out all the color and zoomed in on the boat.

Now it’s perfect for sketching in graphite.

This was a fun and easy sketch. I’m inspired to move on to watercolors.

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Resurfacing

Posted on May 28, 2023 by Laura Kate

It’s been a long and eventful two weeks. No arts or crafts were done in the interval. I think I’ll just post some photos of our trip to Alaska.

The Westerdam

Seattle in our wake.

View from veranda

Mendenhall Park from the visitor’s center

https://www.fs.usda.gov/detail/tongass/about-forest/offices/?cid=stelprdb5400800

Hubbard glacier

https://www.nps.gov/wrst/planyourvisit/yakutat-and-coast.htm

Beautiful Sitka

More mountains surrounding Sitka. We are on a whale-watching excursion.

Potlatch Park in Ketchikan.

https://www.experienceketchikan.com/native-american-totem-poles-1.html

After returning to Seattle, we rented a car and drove to Olympia. The following day we hiked in Millersylvania State Park, Tumwater, WA

https://www.parks.wa.gov/546/Millersylvania

This trip gave us so many experiences and created beautiful memories. It was well worth waiting three full years to finally go.

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Vacation in St. Louis

Posted on March 25, 2023 by Laura Kate

Hello, I’m back home after a spring break trip to St. Louis. While I’ve done a bit of knitting, I am way behind on the 100-day project. My knitting will be detailed on Monday. For now, I’d like to share a bit of what I saw at the St. Louis Museum of Art.

Fortunately for me, the museum has a very liberal policy on photography. And while it is not huge (we easily viewed nearly all of it in a 2-hour span, despite the presence of a 4-year-old in our group) it has a very nice collection. Lots of it is American art. I was able to photograph a handful of works that impressed me. Here are some examples.

In the American gallery, 19th and 20th century paintings:

Loved the depiction of light on the water in this gorgeous oil painting.

Georgia O’Keefe – my perennial favorite painter.

Moving on to sculpture – first, an ancient Chinese stone carving of Buddha

Next, an 800-year-old carving of Christ.

This sculpture was commissioned by the museum and fabricated from local limestone.

And finally, as fiber artist, I couldn’t leave until I had seen some examples from the collection.

I have a lot of free time in the up-coming week and so expect to re-double my efforts to make art. Check this space in a few days for the next installment of 100 days of art inspired by Bill’s photographs.

drawing

Sunday Sketching: Value Study

Posted on August 28, 2022 by Laura Kate

For over a year, I have been ruminating over an idea I have for an art quilt. It is inspired by our trip last year to Teddy Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota.

For those not familiar with the park, it is known for what’s called the Badlands. These are sedimentary rock formations that have been eroded away, displaying the different layers almost like a layer cake.

Here is an example of what I’m talking about.

The timing and circumstances of the trip were counter-productive to getting any good photographs. It was high noon in mid-July. I had no idea how hot it could be in North Dakota during the summer. To compound things, the whole western edge of the United States was on fire last year. We were about a thousand miles away from the smoke and yet haze covered the entire sky and dampened the light. Nearly all the color was washed out of the scenery. No shadows. No highlights.

Here is my best photograph in the park that day.

To get a suitable reference photo of the overlook, I resorted to the Internet. This photo was taken by Mike Hanson. It is 2017 and it must be a sunset view.

Bill added the segmenting lines so that I could scale it up to size I wanted. Using the grid method, I transferred the major shapes to paper and sketched a value study.

Very well pleased with the result, I moved on to the fun stuff: selecting a color scheme and swatching it out in watercolor. I chose a split complementary scheme focused on orange, with blue-violet and blue-green as the complements.