I recently met up with my Art Peeps (local artist friends) for another morning of plein air sketching—this time at Tucson Botanical Gardens. The TBG grounds were decked out with lots of festive holiday decorations; my favorite one was this cactus menorah. I loved TBG’s creative use of grafted cacti with yellow and red tops to symbolize the menorah’s candles and flames!
In case you’re wondering how much of this art I completed on site, the scan below shows the stage of my art after I returned home from TBG. At that point I’d completed a pencil sketch of the menorah and had penciled in my title, signature and border. I also drew the cacti and top of the metal poles in pen.
I stopped working at this point at TBG not because I ran out of time, but because I knew my next step would involve masking off the areas where I would paint the cacti, poles, blue lights, and border of the art, using the masking tools I described in my The (Art) Ghosts of Christmas(es) Past post 2 weeks ago. It’s a lot easier for me to do masking in my studio rather than out in the wild! 😉
One of the most valuable lessons I learned in one of my watercolor classes was the importance of thinking about the steps necessary to create a specific piece of art and then planning the order of those steps before starting to paint. In the case of my menorah art, masking off certain areas enabled me to quickly paint the background without needing to carefully paint around the cacti, poles, border of the art, and especially the blue lights—and then more easily paint each of those individual areas.
Thanks so much for your fine art look at our holiday season that we get to experience in so many wonderful ways. Thank you! All the best to you and yours, now and all the days ahead.