Yosemite Palette Follow-Up (and Another Wish List Item Fulfilled)

Colors I added to my palette for Yosemite

The only sketch kit prep I did before my recent trip to the Bay Area and Yosemite was to review my colored pencil palette and add the four colors shown at left to my everyday-carry urban palette. Although I used all of them, the color I found most useful from the new palette was 159 (Prussian blue), which came in handy for late-afternoon shadows on slate and stone. Surprisingly, I used the warmer hues less often than I expected. For the times of day I was sketching and the season, Yosemite’s landscape looked cooler to me rather than warmer.

5/24/18 In this sketch of upper and lower Yosemite Falls,
I included all colors from my Yosemite palette. I like
the blend of 159 (Prussian blue) and 106 (dark plum) that
I used for the dramatic shadow behind the falls in the late-
afternoon light.

Over the years, I have streamlined my pre-travel sketch kit prep to almost nothing. I no longer use waterbrushes filled with ink, which were huge leakers when flying. They required careful wrapping with paper towels and then plastic bags to prevent messy disasters (I learned the hard way the first time I flew with them). On the advice of other sketchers early on, I also used to wrap my fountain pens the same way, just in case they leaked. But my Sailor fude pens have never once let me down, so I’ve lately skipped that precaution, too.

Now my prep includes only these steps:

1. Review my colored pencil palette; add/subtract colors as needed for the specific location (based on Google image research).
2. Stitch enough sketchbook signatures for the duration that I will be traveling. Over time, I’ve become more accurate in estimating how many signatures I will fill while traveling, so this step has gotten easier.
3. Fill my two fountain pens with ink. I used to fret a lot about how to pack extra ink; bottles or any kind of containers carry the risk of breakage or spillage, and my favorite inks don’t come in cartridges that fit into Sailors. But I don’t use ink as much as I used to, and I never ran out even when I was using it more. If I ever do run out, I can use a brush pen or some other pen instead. 

At the last minute, I made one change to my kit before leaving for Oakland: I had been carrying a double-sided colored pencil (neon orange/neon green), which I use infrequently but which comes in handy in construction site sketches. I waffled about whether to bring it, especially since I’m not particularly fond of the pigments (they look right on paper, but they lose their neon qualities and look dull in digitized images). As I was waffling, I finished writing a review of the Tokyo Slider Twin Pencil Holder for the Well-Appointed Desk. For the qualities I mention in the review, it’s one of the most interesting pencil holders I’ve seen.

Tokyo Slider Twin Pencil Holder

I dug through my colored pencil stubs and found two in bright green and orange. (They aren’t neon hues, but at least they scan accurately.) I popped them into the Tokyo Slider and took them with me instead of the bicolor. Alas, I didn’t spot any construction sites to sketch at Yosemite (or even San Jose), but I felt very cool carrying a pencil holder that Darth Maul would certainly appreciate! 😉

I like this compact tool that enables me to make a bicolor pencil out of any two pencil stubs. It’s not quite as good as the Tsunago concept, but so far, it’s as close as I’ve come to fulfilling another item on my sketch material wish list. 

Yosemite, Part 2: Big Rocks

5/23/18 Half Dome viewed from Cook's Meadow

The sketch above is of Half Dome, probably Yosemite’s most famous icon, thanks to Ansel Adams. (His photograph, Moon and Half Dome, is the image that prompted me to put Yosemite on my bucket list all those years ago.) When I’ve seen photographs of an icon hundreds of times, I often wonder how different the real thing would be. In the case of Half Dome, it was both familiar and at the same time fresh, because no photo – not even Ansel Adams’ – can capture the scale and grandeur of something as awe-inspiring as this big rock carved by glaciers millennia ago.

5/24/18 Farewell to Half Dome and Yosemite

Needless to say, sketching it was somewhat intimidating (not unlike how I felt sketching the Eiffel Tower). My plan was start with a small thumbnail before attempting a “real” sketch, but by the time I finally saw it for the first time on the second day of our visit, I was so excited that I jumped right in. Ironically, the next evening I ended up doing a small “farewell” sketch shortly before we left the park for the last time (at right).

An even bigger rock than Half Dome is El Capitan. Its sheer vertical cliff is a favorite of serious climbers. (I’ve heard that if you look at El Cap after dark, you can see the lights of climbers’ lanterns as they turn in for the night in their rock-clinging hammocks.) The first morning when we drove into the park, we came around a bend, and suddenly El Cap loomed before us – a startling wall of granite that told me I was in Yosemite. As it was my very first sketch in the park, I made a couple of quick thumbnails from the road using gray-toned Pitt markers. My intention was to come back later to do a larger, more finished sketch, but I never got back to the right place to do it. As I mentioned yesterday, sometimes a thumbnail is all I can manage, but it’s just as good as a full-size sketch to feel like a complete visual memory.

 

5/22/18 Thumbnails of El Capitan

On our last morning before going into the park, we drove first to Tunnel View, a popular viewpoint for postcard photographers as well as selfie snappers. This stunning panorama displays many of the Yosemite Valley’s major sights, including El Capitan, Half Dome and Bridalveil Fall. I also found it to be an interesting challenge in atmospheric perspective and trying to convey the vast space and scale (below).

 

5/24/18 Tunnel View panorama

I could have spent many weeks or months in the park sketching lots of big rocks, but I wanted to capture the small, moss-covered ones, too – not to mention the flowers, birds, squirrels and even people. I made small vignettes whenever I could.

 

5/22/18 Flower, Merced River, moss-covered rock

Stellar's Jay and squirrel (unfinished)

5/24/18 Selfie snappers at Yosemite Falls

5/26/18 Incense cedar tree (sketched from photo
with a Blackwing pencil made of incense cedar
-- more sketching meta!)

I regretted not having time to sketch the incense cedar tree – the type of tree from which the wood used to make most of my favorite high-quality pencils comes – that was growing in the outdoor part of the Yosemite Museum. I took a photo of it, though, and after I got home, I made a sketch from the photo (at right) as homage to the source of my favorite drawing tools.

Although we covered Yosemite Valley fairly well in three full days, the Valley is only a tiny portion of the entire Yosemite National Park. We saved plenty more for the next visit.

Mossy rocks

Sketching Tunnel View

Merced River

Between a rock and a hard place

Half Dome from Cook's Meadow

Merced River

El Capitan

Obligatory travel ice cream!

Yosemite, Part 1: Falling Waters

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.

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.

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. 

5/24/18 Upper and lower Yosemite Falls with late-afternoon
shadows behind the water.

5/23/18 Bridalveil Fall (inset: thumbnail of nearby river rocks and trees)

5/22/18 Upper Yosemite

5/22/18 thumbnail of upper Yosemite

Upper Yosemite

Bridalveil Fall

Yosemite Palette

My everyday-carry urban palette

By the time you read this, I will be somewhere in Yosemite National Park! Yosemite has been on my bucket list ever since I first saw Ansel Adams’ Moon and Half Dome decades ago. I don’t know why it took us so long to bring it up to the top of our list, but we’re finally there!

Although I always take a look at my sketch kit before I travel, I didn’t need to make any major changes – my everyday-carry sketch kit has been a lean machine (both at home and away) for quite some time now.

The one thing I seriously reviewed, however, was my colored pencil palette. Going from my typical urban palette to Yosemite’s granite, waterfalls and sequoias took a bit of thinking. As I always do before I travel, I did a little Google image research of the landscape I would be seeing – in this case, the Sierra Nevada. Of course, I couldn’t remove all my usual urban colors, because I was going to spend a couple of days in the Bay Area first. And they all had to fit within the 23 available slots in my Tran Portfolio Pencil Case (two of the 25 slots are permanently assigned to a white pencil and a cheap conventional brush). The exercise required some critical sampling and making judicious choices.

Shown above is my typical urban palette. (All colors are Caran d’Ache Museum Aquarelles except 217, which is Faber-Castell’s Albrecht Durer Middle Cadmium Red. A brick red that I’ve been using frequently on the Tudors in my neighborhood, it is surprisingly lacking in the Museum palette.) This is basically the same palette I’ve been using since February after my minimal sketch kit challenge ended. I finally took out the cherry blossom pink I had optimistically carried for months. Just recently I’ve been carrying a neon orange/neon green bicolored pencil, which is so useful in construction zones (probably less so in Yosemite, but who knows about San Jose?).

My Yosemite palette

I retained all the above and added the carefully selected four shown at right – three earthy tones that were missing from my urban palette, plus indigo, which I thought might come in handy for rocky shadows.

I’ll let you know in a few days whether my selection turned out to be useful! Or you can see for yourself now on Instagram.