Flax Art Store - New Oakland Location

Flax Figure Beside "F" for Flax

Glow Mask Kits

FLAX art store has moved to Oakland!

Yes! The new Oakland FLAX store is great. Fully stocked, easy parking, beautiful big building, great selection of items AND really, really good sales people. We sketched (and shopped) there yesterday. Stop by and see for yourself.

Chateau Montelena's Cabernet Vineyard in Calistoga

With the 40th anniversary of the Paris Tasting coming up next month I thought I’d post some of my sketches of Chateau Montelena. As the story goes, on May 24, 1976, a wine tasting took place in Paris that changed the world’s view of California wines forever. The 1973 Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars S.L.V. and the 1973 Chateau Montelena Chardonnay from California won first place in a blind tasting. I sketched this under a shady oak at the far end of the property looking back towards the Chateau. 

Bone Room Sketches

Iguana - Get it While You Can!  Only $350..

Spider and Antlers

Evening at The Bone Room

There was lots to sketch at the Bone Room in Berkeley. Everything from skulls to moths and more. See Ceiny and Micaela's sketches below.

The amazing Bone Room

Always something wonderfully curious to be seen here! 

The Cane Toads were an all-over, even brown color, sort of like chocolate milk.
 Somehow, they looked a bit mean! Maybe the taxidermist saw them as a bad thing!

There were two skeletons, this one had an attractive coon hat! I tried sketching it in just one hour, a rather daunting task, and, I ran out of paper by the time I got to his feet. Shaded/colored in Photoshop.

The Bone Room

A fixture in Berkeley for over 20 years, The Bone Room is closing its retail store but continuing to sell items on line.  We went to sketch during its final days on Solano Avenue.  Selling bones, fossils, insects and other natural history items, the store is more like a little museum.  As their website says, it's "a place to contemplate items that embody the intricacy, beauty and real wonder of nature."

The rough texture of the alligator skull is amazing.

Loved the Davy Crockett hat on the skeleton

All sorts of curiosities at the Bone Room

Whole Sketch at Whole Foods

Grocery stores are great places to sketch. Lots of subjects, from produce to shoppers. The shopping carts can be used as mobile easels and another plus is that you can get a little shopping done whole you sketch! We met at the Oakland Whole Foods for our monthly public sketch night. Besides having beautiful produce and floral departments the store has their parking lot on the roof so there are great places to sketch the surrounding neighborhood and some interesting views of the store from the top entrance.

Barnes & Noble

I’ve always loved the old Rosenberg’s Department Store building located at Fourth and D Streets in Santa Rosa. Built in 1936, the structure is the most significant example of the Streamline Moderne style and was the tallest building in the city. Santa Rosa's government approved demolition of the store in 1994, but it was subsequently saved when bookstore chain Barnes & Noble leased the space. The building was placed on the National Register of Historic Places on December 29, 1994.

Today was a bit too cold and rainy for sketching but I stood under an awning to keep (mostly) dry.

Sketching For The Birds

two of our sketchers Susan Ford and Carrie McClish were part of  an extremely-well-organized flashmob of bird lovers making chalk art at dawn on the sidewalks of downtown Oakland. The idea is to draw attention to downtown Oakland's Heron Colonies in the trees overhead.
 
Golden Gate Audubon  convened its second Eco-Art Flash Mob: Chalkin' it up to Compassion for Oakland's Herons! Bay Area artists, help us save Oakland's herons by showing up at 6:30 am (yes, dawn) in downtown Oakland to draw Black-Crowned Night Herons and Snowy Egrets all over an entire block of downtown right by where herons are actively nesting. The chalk art reminds the whole neighborhood to protect and help these remarkable birds raising their family in this urban setting.

Photos of the event can be seen here:
http://photos.mercurynews.com/2016/04/06/eco-art-flash-mob-helps-protect-nesting-birds/#1

I'm not much of a chalk sketcher so I sketched the sketchers.

In and around the Cheese Board

This great collective, selling wonderful cheeses from around the world, and making yummy, creative veggie pizzas, attracts so many enthusiastic customers we looked for quiet spots to sketch.
Emelia's Flowers, right next to Cheese Board, has been selling flowers since 1995.

I've always loved this simple, elegant stairway entrance to Walnut Square, off Vine Street. The original Peets Coffee is still here, and in this view you can see Twig and Fig, which specializes in custom letterpress printing.

We ended the evening at Books Inc, where author Helen MacDonald was giving a reading and talk about her new book.