Molly Hashimoto

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.

Giant Sequoia: A Walnut Ink Sketch

When walking in the Upper Mariposa Grove back in October, we saw deer grazing beneath a giant sequoia, and it gave us a very immediate sense of the enormous scale of the the tree. This week I used my photograph, some walnut ink loaded into Niji waterbrushes, and a Pitt sepia brush pen to sketch the scene.  I buy walnut ink crystals at John Neal Books, and mix them with distilled water. This way you can determine the degree of saturation--I find the bottles of walnut ink available at art stores are too diluted for my purposes. I wet the tree area first, and then brushed in the walnut ink, using 2 different saturations, loaded into 2 different Niji waterbrushes. After the wash dried, I used the Pitt sepia pen to stroke in a few quick dark lines.  I've written about walnut ink several times in these pages, as it's my favorite sketching medium, and I'm pleased that a few of my sketches will appear in the upcoming book Sketchbook Confidential 2, published by North Light Books, and available this May.

Sketching with Walnut Ink: North Cascades Wildlife

 
  I've just returned from a few days in the North Cascades, where we saw some great wildlife, including this marmot at Cascade Pass. I took a photo of the marmot sprawled in the snow on its belly, cooling off. I would guess those big rocks really heat up in the sun and a little snow-bathing must have felt very good! I decided to try out some walnut ink sketching back in my studio, so here's a demonstration. 
1. Materials and tools: Staedtler Pitt brown brush pen with permament ink. 3 waterbrushes, one with plain water, 2 with solutions of walnut ink made from walnut ink crystals. One solution is weak, the other stronger.

  Step 1. I began without pencil, brushing in the overall shape of the darks, with the brush pen that was filled with a weak walnut ink solution. It's liberating to forgo the pencil because then you find you are really looking at shapes and darks and lights, which is what we all want to get to as artists!  You can see a few pen marks on the marmot's tail. Even though the pen is waterproof, it will still dissolve if you wet it before it has a chance to dry and fix.

Cottonwood Reflections

This is the latest of several watercolors I have done of reflections in water. Bare cottonwood branches appeared as a beautiful pattern in a pond in winter and inspired this painting.

   Below is the painting in an earlier stage. I had begun by laying a smooth wash of yellow gold and blue gray over the entire paper, allwed it to dry, and then added the darker blue pattern of the waves. Once that had dried I applied masking fluid.

 

 

 


Next I used a rigger brush and a Da Vinci Maestro number 8 round to paint the patterns of the dark reflected trunk. You can still see the masking fluid on this version.

Woodcut: Tree Swallows

These are first proofs of a woodcut I am working on. Earlier this year I took a photo at Union Bay Natural Area in Seattle of a trio of tree swallows sitting on a branch amidst foliage, and thought it would make a good print--how graceful swallows are, even at rest. You can see where I have carved out these blocks, leaving the blue/green and black in relief. 
 
 The two color proof shows where it will be neccessary for me to do further carving to clean up the lines. I am hoping this print will turn out well enough for me to include it in the upcoming exhibit February and March 2011 at the Elisabeth Miller Library at the University of Washington Botanic Gardens.

Tinting Block Prints with Watercolor

 
Daniel Smith Artist Materials just published an article I wrote about combining block printing with watercolor.  You can read and view a-step-by-step demonstration online of how I created this print. I love the process of carving and the strong values I can achieve, but there's no need to give up the subtlety of watercolor, as I am able to manage gradation and the beauty of watercolor hues with the process I describe in the article.

Looking at Birds

I've been working on a couple of printmaking projects the last few days.  A very good printmaker friend is sharing her studio and much knowledge and experience to help me with this intaglio print of a green heron, one that I viewed last summer at Union Bay Natural Area. This is a detail from my first proof and it still needs alot of work, but I was happy with the combination of the Magnani Pescia blue paper and an etching ink I mixed using Charbonnel sepia natural and prussian blue.

I recently read an interview with Saul Weisberg, executive director of the North Cascades Institute in Clearings Magazine. Editor Larry Beutler asked him who his environmental heroes were and Saul answered, "Everone who is looking at birds and bugs and flowers, teaching kids, and challenging themselves and each other to get busy and save the world."  My experience is that once you start looking at nature and spending time in it, it's impossible not to want to share your joy in it with other people, and at the same time, take action to conserve habitats and wild places, both in cities and in wilderness.

Sketches from the Cloisters, New York

 The extreme northern point on Manhattan is Ft. Tryon Park and it includes The Cloisters Museum, part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We arrived too late to go into the museum, but I took several photos outside. Once again, I looked for architectural armatures for the dazzling array of greens. To the left I saw an orderly series of buttresses receding into the greenery. 
I loved the view of trees through elegant pointed Gothic arches that can be seen throughout the museum. After I finished the sketches I thought the greens were not diverse enough, nor did they capture enough of the spirit of springtime. I found a tube of paint in my collection: phthalo yellow green made by Daniel Smith Artist Materials. I dabbed a glaze of it over the long-leaved plants in the foreground of the buttresses sketch, and also glazed over sections of the trees seen through the arches. I think this amazing color really brought the sketches to life, though I would use it judiciously, and it might not find many homes outside of a springtime landscape.

 

Union Bay Natural Area

I am working on a series of small acrylic paintings on subjects that I have observed and photographed at the Union Bay Natural Area in Seattle, adjacent to the Center for Urban Horticulture. I'm preparing for an upcoming exhibit, and plan to share watercolors, egg tempera, woodblock prints and acrylic paintings. Last January I photographed a coyote at around 9am one Saturday morning. 
 For this painting I used an Amerpsand gesso panel, size 5" X 7". The gesso was white, and I wanted a dark ground for my painting,  so I first glazed the panel with a mixture of brown and black acrylic thinned out with Daniel Smith Acrylic Flow Releaser.  It aids in creating glazes with minimal brush marks.

Next I sketched on the coyote, using white Saral transfer paper, and began with broad brush strokes to indicate the fur, using various colors-- white, burnt umber, yellow ochre and Mars black.   I decided to keep this portrait loose, without rendering every last hair perfectly. It's always difficult for me to hold back from getting overly tight, but perhaps this looser expression gives a better sense of that quiet moment when coyote and human crossed paths.
 
  

Yellowstone Bison Woodblock Print

 I printed this on Magnani Pescia gray printmaking paper using white, brown and black water soluble inks. I have taken countless photos of bison at Yellowstone, and I really love the sculptural quality of their forms--I think this is about the 6th image I have created from the photos I took.  At the moment I am working on a 5 color print.  I began it way back in October, and am amazed at the length of time this is taking, as my primary medium is watercolor, which can be painted really quickly.  I do like the meditative quality of carving, and also the handling of a three dimensional object. I have talked to several printmakers who say they like their wood blocks better than their completed prints, and wish they could frame the blocks!

Title: Yellowstone Bison

Medium: Rainbow rolled ink on gray Magnani Pescia paper

Price: $50

I understand that--I really like the woodgrain on this block and wish it could reveal itself better on the print. I used Japanese shina plywood and moku hanga carving tools, a knife and a u-gouge, all ordered from McClain's Printmaking Supplies.