Molly Hashimoto

Student Work from Watercolor Wildlife Class

This is the work of student Barbara Broderick from my Watercolor Wildlife and Birds class. She worked with specimens from the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture and with photographs to create this exciting page of sketches.

Mary Yakushijin used a fresh watecolor approach on this page--quite appropriate for small active birds with quick movements like nuthatches.

Student Art from Yellowstone

My Seattle student Susan Hamilton traveled to Yellowstone National Park last summer with her family. This quarter in our class on composition and values, she did a fine watercolor painting of a Yellowstone thermal feature. Notice how she used salt to portray the crust in the thermal pool.

Student Sketches from Burke Museum Bird Specimens

Last week I borrowed specimens from the Education department at The Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture for my Watercolor Birds and Wildlife class in Seattle.  
 

These are just a few photos of the work students did in class. We'll continue with the specimens this week, and learn how to incorporate birds into a larger landscape.

Artists at the Redmond Library

Yesterday at the Redmond Library I met a great roomful of enthusiastic patrons.  I was there to talk about Artists in the National Parks, a program I am presenting at several King County Library branches. I brought my favorite books and shared artists' stories with them. It was very much a hands-on program, so I showed my journals and demonstrated some quick-sketching watercolor techniques that I use when I'm outdoors, painting on location in the national parks, and other wild places.  I appreciated the chance to meet other people who love wild places and making art inspired by those places. Many thanks to Andrew McClung, the Redmond Library reference librarian who invited me, and to all the folks who attended.  I am so grateful to you for your energy and attention yesterday.  I'll be offering the same program at Maple Valley, Lake Hills, Lake Forest Park, Algona Pacific and Federal Way libraries in October and November.  I hope you can join me!

Canary Spring, Yellowstone

I have been finishing up several of the plein air sketches I began at Yellowstone. Here is a view of Canary Spring, one of my favorite places at Mammoth Hot Springs. While on location, my students and I worked in the following order: we wet the sky area and blotted out cloud shapes, used a bit of masking fluid for the dead trees in the spring, painted Mt. Everts and mountains beyond, and used a wet-into-wet paintng approach for the spring itself.  Back at home, I intensified the colors on the spring, painted in the black trees, and sponged out the vapors.

Yellowstone Badger Sketches

To create this two page sketch in my watercolor journal, I borrowed badger skulls from Jeff Bradley, mammalogist at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture. I also used my Yellowstone photos to paint these quick sketches of badger heads. I found I didn't have quite enough information to do the full bodies; the badger was crouching in the grass and I couldn't see much of his legs and lower body, but I had fun just focusing on the portraits. I found myself thinking about Beatrix Potter's illustrations of Tommy Brock, the notorious badger, in The Tale of Mr. Tod.

Gunnar Widforss in Yellowstone

 
This year one of the highlights of visiting the Yellowstone Heritage and Research Center was getting to see this painting of the Mammoth Hot Springs Terraces by Gunnar Widforss. He was hired in the 1920s by the visionary National Parks Director Stephen Mather to paint in the national parks.  Widforss's work hangs in the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite, which is where I first learned about him.  He is also well-known for painting at the Grand Canyon. This is a detail of the painting we saw at the HRC.  He used watercolor, both transparent and gouache in this remarkable interpretation of the Mammoth terraces. Many thanks to Vi Gardner for taking this non-glare photo of the painting.

Student Art from Yellowstone

On our drive home from Yellowstone this year, we stopped at Jack and Kelly Oates' home in Missoula.  We enjoyed the delicious lunch they had made for us while delighting in their view down the Bitterroot Valley, and got a chance to browse their amazing library of art books. I met the couple at last year's Yellowstone Association Institute's Pleasure of Plein Air seminar. I have been keeping a very lively correspondence with them since then, and Jack has shared a few of his sketches with me. He and Kelly were at Yellowstone in September, and this is Jack's sketch of Old Faithful Inn.  An architectural wonder faithfully captured!

The Hoodoos, Yellowstone

On our drive back from Norris, we stopped at the Hoodoos in the part of the Park called the Silver Gate, because of the light-colored rock formations. Here is Lisa Whitwell, my Yellowstone Association Institute assistant. She quickly scrambled up to the top of one of rocks to sketch the fine view of Bunsen Peak.

 
Leigh Anne Dunworth found a perch with another great view. While here we simply sketched with pencil and later added color back in the classroom.

Here's the sketch I did, and there are little abbreviations here and there to help me keep track of the colors. I darkened some of the shadow colors on the foreground rocks to give the illusion of space in three dimensions, following the rule that the darkest darks should be in the foreground.

Painting at Norris Geyser Basin, Yellowstone

Norris Geyser Basin is full of wonders to paint. The runoff channel in Porcelain Basin beckoned us with the incredible colors of its thermal pools and cyanobacteria and algae. I began this sketch there, and finished it back at home, intensifying some of the colors to try to convey the impact of being there.

In the Back Basin, also at Norris Geyser Basin, we painted Steamboat Geyser early in the morning. The temperatures were in the upper 40s and low 50s early in the day so the vapors were much more dramatic and gave us exciting forms to paint.  The geyser itself erupted periodically and as the day warmed up we had a better view of the water eruptions as the vapors dissipated. I used a little white gouache to paint the fumarole in the foreground, as I wasn't able to wipe that out sufficiently when painting on location.