Molly Hashimoto

Watercolor Travel Journal: More Students' Work

These are two facing pages in the journal of Noel Kreicker, who attended the workshop I taught at Daniel Smith on Sunday on watercolor travel journals. I'm including other fine work below and on subsequent posts, not all of it with names, as some students weren't on my contact list.

Watercolor Travel Journal Workshop: Students' Work

Yesterday at Daniel Smith Artists' Materials I taught a workshop on watercolor travel journals. We did small vignettes using pen and wash, pencil and wash and walnut ink.  I am featuring several of the students' efforts here and in coming posts. These sketches are by Cathy Dempsey and are scenes from Amalfi.

To the right is Mary Heath's pen and wash sketch of a cottage in Hawaii.

Goldfinches

Pomegranate Communications has just published Goldfinches as a notecard. I've been working on a series of bird prints, and am planning to teach a workshop on these for the North Cascades Institute in the upcoming season at the Environmental Learning Center. The date of the workshop is April 27 to 29, 2012; registration will begin in February. I've completed prints with several different species, including hummingbirds,  barred owl,  hairy woodpecker, California quail, and mountain bluebird. Pomegranate will be publishing the bluebird as a small notecard next month.  I'm also working on some  new ideas--the warbler I saw last week at my feeder (my last post) seems a strong candidate for a print, with its black and white and yellow markings.

Birds: The Colors of Winter

The recent snow in Seattle delighted me in many ways. Keeping the hummingbird feeders thawed and snow-free, and filling the suet feeders kept me busy indoors when I wasn't outdoors enjoying the transformed urban environment.
Observing the birds visiting the suet feeder just outside our kitchen window was like having a front-row seat at a movie! The yellow-rumped warbler visited dozens of times--here fluffing up its feathers keeping warm while waiting its turn on the feeder.

A towhee visited briefly, and that was a testament to how hungry the bird must have been, as they are generally very shy.





The flicker has visited before--our neighborhood is full of them, and I often hear them drilling on our metal chimney pipe.

Maple, Moon and Snow

I recently completed a set of moon and snow paintings for Pomegranate Communications, who will be publishing them later this year in a boxed set of holiday notecards: December Moon. It was challenging and fun coming up with the four designs.  I had just traveled to Yosemite, and then the Portland Japanese Garden, and those places inspired my illustrations. There was a beautifully intricate Japanese maple at the garden, and I imagined it with snow, and changed the perspective just a little bit, to include a pond and distant shoreline. I used masking fluid to save the snow atop the branches and small shrubs. The blue paint I used was a mixture of Daniel Smith indanthrone blue and phthalo blue red shade.  It gave me some dramatic dark indigos.

Whidbey Island Wildlife

We spotted this Sunflower Star on the beach at Double Bluff on Whidbey Island yesterday. It was a quiet, windless morning with sun and wonderful wildlife. This star is also called the 20 rayed star, and it is the fastest in the west! In the space of 10 minutes we saw it travel 3 feet.  I don't think I've ever seen a sea star travel before!!

Several common mergansers were fishing and diving along the shoreline and we saw this one catch a fish.

All Things Counter, Original, Spare, Strange

This week at Snoqualmie Pass, where we skied, I saw these beautiful natural patterns, and couldn't help but hear the words of one of my favorite poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins, in one of his finest poems: Pied Beauty. Here is an excerpt. Even readers who are not religious can appreciate the poetry of the Jesuit priest Hopkins--his innovations with the English language, and his deepfelt love for nature speak to everyone.

Glory be to God for dappled things...

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

With swift, slow, sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers forth whose beauty is past change:

Praise him.

 

 

New Year's Vision: Pileated Woodpecker

Out for a walk on the Burke-Gilman Trail this New Year's Day, we spotted a pileated woodpecker on a tree, a happy vision for the day!  I've seen them many times on the Trail, but have never been lucky enough to have my camera with me, so I've started bringing it with me when I bike or walk the Trail to run errands, as it seems that's when I always see them, when I am not looking for them. So many beautiful things come this way, uninvited and unexpected.