Art & Story Blog

When sketching on Paiko Beach, I made the aquantance of another artist, Spencer Chang, who showed me some of his terrific loose watercolors of places in Japan, Hawaii, and the Los Angeles area. He told me about a group that meets every week in Foster Gardens, a botanical garden in Honolulu, to sketch and paint. I was also pleasantly surprised to hear he’d participated in a Sketchcrawl in Hawaii. So, long story short, later that week I went to Foster Gardens to see what it was all about. In addition to getting a late start, that was also the day it started raining. I walked through the gardens, but the rain made sketching and painting a bit more difficult, so I just took lots of photos and tried not to ruin my camera. The small assembly of people in this sketching/painting group were stationed under an overhang near the restrooms of the park. I wasn’t quite as excited about the compositions I could create from this area, but I settled into sketching this large nearby hunk of wood covered with epiphytes and included the many different trees visible in the background.

I had just completed another light sketch of this in my watercolor book and was getting ready to add some color, when Jamie called me on my cell phone [I finally did add color later on. See here.]. We were going on a tour of Shangri-La later that afternoon and decided we should get an early start to allow for lunch. So I ended up leaving the group early. More on the trip to Shangri-La in a later post.