I'm In Barcelona... Now What?

I don't promise to do much posting from Barcelona. I brought my old iBook, which is slower than a snail, and my iPad, which, for mysterious reasons, refuses to connect to the internet, except for the built-in Mail.

But the main reason is that I haven't been painting that much. First I had to get my bearings, then I bought some paper but I don't like it (entirely my fault -- one is supposed to like Arches rough paper but I don't, only I didn't know it!) Worse than that, my Moleskine watercolor sketch pad has only a few pages left, and I can't find another one...

Excuses, excuses... I know.

I tried painting in situ but found it too intimidating. I must keep trying, because that's the whole point of suffering through a nearly 24-hour trip under inhumane conditions. Otherwise, one may as well copy photos from the web.

But I did paint this scene from the safety of my tiny balcony, away from prying passers-by. The narrow house is very similar to the one I live in; it's about 10 feet wide, and it's typical of most houses in this part of the old town.

So I took a photo of my sketch and here it is.

(Those are only the top 4 storeys of the building. On the ground floor there is a bakery that makes cakes with photographs on them (honest!), and the second storey consists of a highly modernized façade that is mostly glass.)

Sketching Practice

I've been looking for a difficult subject for my sketching practice.

I had settled on some shaggy mane mushrooms: yesterday I noticed that the recent rains have brought them out, and I was going to go and pick some today, but first I was going to sketch them.

Shaggy Mane Mushrooms

This is what they looked like last year.

Their scientific name is coprinus comatus; they are sometimes referred to as "inky caps".

They grow in the same spot every year, and luckily nobody is interested in them, so I get to pick as many as I want to eat.

The mycologist who guided the mushroom hunt that I wrote up earlier gave me a good recipe for shaggy mane mushrooms: (1) Pick them very small; (2) Cut them in two lengthwise and freeze them on a cookie sheet; (3) Bag them and store them in the freezer. OR: Cut them in two and sauté them fresh. P.S. Never mix shaggy manes with alcohol; that's a toxic combination.

However, it's been raining all day, and the rain is no good for either occupation.

Camera Bag. Pen and Watercolor on Moleskine Sketchbook

So I looked around and settled on my camera bag.

I sketched it directly in ink in my Moleskine Notebook. There's something liberating about drawing in ink; knowing you can't erase forces you to really concentrate, which helps to turn on the "R Mode" that Betty Edwards describes in her book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.

I applied watercolour (Maimeri Payne's Grey). The white dotted lines are from a white gel pen. I worked quickly.

It's a bit off, and the camera didn't render the grey well (it's kind of bluish in reality), but it was very good practice and I like how it turned out -- free and loose, as un-photorealistic as possible. I like the way drawing in ink forces you to leave your corrections there, for all to see.

Click to enlarge, if you like.