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| 5/23/18 Upper and lower Yosemite Falls, morning |
Inspired
initially by the well-known photographs by Ansel Adams, I have been wanting to visit Yosemite National Park for decades. In his documentary series, Ken Burns called
the national parks “America’s best idea,”
and Yosemite could be among the best of the best. Greg and I marveled many
times at how fortunate we are that previous administrations had the foresight
to protect and make places like Yosemite accessible to ordinary people like us.
(We thank Cathy McAuliffe, a regular
park visitor, for many helpful tips, maps and other information. I call her the
Rick Steves of Yosemite!)
And
by “ordinary,” I mean people without rugged hiking or climbing abilities.
Although we are strong and avid level-ground walkers, we don’t call ourselves “hikers”
and certainly not “climbers,” and we were pleased by how easy it was to see and
experience so much of the beauty of Yosemite without breaking a sweat (or an ankle).
Of course, we had to share those experiences with many other people who had
also heard that late May was Yosemite’s sweet spot (not yet hot but the waterfalls
at their peak). But the park is a big place, and if we walked only a short
distance away from the prime selfie spots, it suddenly became quiet, and we
often felt we had the place nearly to ourselves.
One
of Yosemite’s attractions is its four major waterfalls, two of which we were
able to see up close in the Valley – Bridalveil and the upper and lower parts
of Yosemite. As an urban sketcher in the Pacific Northwest, I don’t get many
opportunities to practice sketching falling water, so I knew these falls would
be a challenge. Remembering the small thumbnails I’d seen in Cathy’s Yosemite sketchbook,
I made a thumbnail with tonal markers first of each challenging view before tackling
it full-size. I know that many urban sketching instructors recommend making thumbnails
to explore compositions before taking on a larger sketch, but I rarely do it on
familiar territory. I admit, though, that thumbnailing was very helpful at
Yosemite.
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| 5/23/18 thumbnail of upper Yosemite |
In
fact, I found myself making thumbnails more often on this trip than I usually
do, even when I didn’t necessarily feel a need to “practice” a composition
first. There was so much to see and experience in the concentrated space of Yosemite
Valley that I wanted to capture as much as possible. Sometimes I would stop just
for a small, three-minute thumbnail, and if I had more time later, I would go
back for a full sketch. Sometimes the thumbnail was all I had, but I’m happy that
I captured it at all. It taught me that I don’t have to have a full-page sketch
with color and details to scratch the itch for a sketch. It was an important
learning for future travel.
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| My hero! |
A
personal tradition when I travel is to try to use a local natural source of
water to fill my waterbrush or spritzing bottle. The first fall we experienced up close was Bridalveil, where we got
close enough to the thundering spray that we had to put on our raincoats. I was
a bit leery about stepping onto slippery rocks, but my fearless Spouse-Man
filled my spray bottle for me. I was then able to sketch Yosemite Falls (and the rest of the park that we saw) with
Bridalveil water! It’s sketching meta.
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5/24/18 Upper and lower Yosemite Falls with late-afternoon
shadows behind the water. |
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| 5/23/18 Bridalveil Fall (inset: thumbnail of nearby river rocks and trees) |
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| 5/22/18 Upper Yosemite |
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| 5/22/18 thumbnail of upper Yosemite |
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| Upper Yosemite |
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| Bridalveil Fall |
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