A sketching touchstone is a subject that I return to over and over again.
And the Pt. Arena Lighthouse certainly deserves the title.
I have sketched this beautiful lighthouse several other times, but from different angles.
Point Arena is a special place because it is the closest part of the United States to Hawaii. It is the furthest west you can get in the Lower 48.
I drove out to the lighthouse and pulled over at a dirt lot and started to sketch the scene before me.
I was a bit far off from previous sketches but I like the way the power poles and lines leads the eye to the lighthouse in the distance.
My constant companion during the sketch was the world’s largest songbird: the common raven. The corvid was finishing up a meal on a fence post.
The raven then proceeded to give a post-repast repertoire of its gronks, groans, and bill-slapping. It was hard to take my eyes off the entrainment as I was sketching the lighthouse. I added the raven to the closest power pole.
The town of Mendocino has two California Registered Historical Landmarks, both are houses of worship.
I had already sketched the Temple of Kwan Tai on a previous visit and now I wanted to sketch the Mendocino Presbyterian Church.
I sketched the church from my curbside sketching blind and when I finished I walked over to get a closer look at the California State Historic Landmark Plaque.
The church was dedicated in 1868 and is the oldest church in continual use in California. As I was reading the plaque a kindly local asked if I wanted to have a look inside.
I replied in the affirmative and the kindly church lady put her dog indoor and returned with the key.
She gave me a brief tour and told me if I was brave (I was) that I could climb the ladder in the choir loft to see the chalk signatures of past pastors and church members on the inside of the bell tower (which I did).
She also said that I could ring the bell, so I grabbed the pull and did.
The church is built of the local wood, the wood that put Mendocino on the map: coast redwood.
I left my Caspar cottage at 8:45 and I walked down the road to Jug Handle State Natural Reserve.
I would he ascending the Biological Staircase of terraces, my final destination would be 2.5 miles from the trailhead on the third terrace. This is the 300,000 year old Pygmy forest!
One reason that the Biological Staircase is so appealing to the naturalist is that you pass through very different habitats, giving you a nice cross section of this rare part of Coastal California.
Weeks before I set off on my journey to the Pygmy forest, I did a sketch of a cross section of the five terraces to help me understand that ecosystems I would be traversing.
The trail was filled with large puddles and portions of the trail became a small stream bed from recent winter rains. This was a wet walk but well worth the mud and the blood and the tears. (Okay just mud, but lots of it.)
I had been on the trail for almost an hour when the tree cover opened up and the morning sun warmed my bones.
I was now nearing my destination: the Pygmy Forest! A small sign marked the beginning of the boardwalk.
A Pygmy forest occurs when the soil is nutrient poor and plant species are stunted as a result. A Pygmy forest is rare habitat that is only found in a few locations in Northern California. The boardwalk protects the valuable soil from visitor’s damaging footfalls.
The serpentine boardwalk through the Pygmy forest.
Half way through the board walk there was a pull out with benches and a 1968 plaque proclaiming the Pygmy forest as a California Registered Natural Landmark. I rested here, had a snack, and did a sketch of the view. I’ll admit the sketch is a bit loose and wild (featured sketch).
The town of Mendocino is really a sketcher’s paradise.
I have sketched this town many times and there are endless angles, perspectives, and hidden gems to add to my sketchbook.
As a sketcher you can either “zoom” in or “zoom” out depending on what strikes your fancy (no zoom lens required). For much of my panoramic sketches I chose to zoom out with a wide angle perspective.
For the featured sketch I positioned myself across the street from the Blair House (used in Murder, She Wrote) right beside Heider Field. The sketch looks towards Lansing Street at a water tower, old buildings, and the Masonic Lodge. A rustic townscape.
On another day I took a wide angle perspective from the small park across the Big River mouth to draw the bluffs and the town (below).
A panoramic sketch of Mendocino. What a view!
I did do a few sketches a little more “zoomed in”. One was of a water tower and the back of the Crown Hall and the other is at the Mendocino Headlands State Park and a black oystercatcher.
Black oystercatchers are easy to see at the Mendocino Bluffs.
While many painters, sculptors, and artists are attracted to the picturesque town to the south, Ft. Bragg has plenty of objects to sketch.
And I added a few to my sketchbook.
I hiked out on the Noyo Bluffs, north of the river mouth. My destination was the Noyo Center’s Crow’s Nest Interpretive Center.
This center has marine mammal skulls and bones, maps and diagrams, a tide pool tank, and a deck for whale watching.
I sat at a picnic table and sketched the interpretive center. All this hiking and sketching makes me thirsty.
Good thing I was in Fort Bragg, because on Highway One, near the train depot, is the North Coast Brewing Company. Across the street from the brewery is their pub where you can get a bite to eat and sample their brews.
North Coast has been brewing since 1988, well before I could legally drink. They always have creative names for their brews such as Scrimshaw, Old Rasputin, Brother Thelonious, Old No. 38 Stout (named after a California Western Railroad steam locomotive), and my favorite Red Seal Ale (sketched above).
I have enjoyed sketching in the town of Fort Bragg, just to the north of Mendocino.
The genesis of Fort Bragg as a town was the huge strands of coast redwoods and lumber mills sprang up to harvest the timber.
Now how to get the lumber to markets like San Francisco to help build the growing city?
Lumber was shipped south by boat but once the California Pacific connected Ft. Bragg with Willitis and the Northwestern Pacific, milled lumber could be shipped by rail.
The rails of the past lives on as the Skunk Train. Now a tourist railroad.
I did some sketching at the train yard (featured sketch) including the water tower with the skunk logo.
The past and present of Skunk Train. A diesel pulling into the station with a water tower of the steam age in the background.
My Christmas morning tradition does not entail waking early and opening gifts under the lighted Christmas tree but waking early and heading west to find some feather gifts at Gray Lodge Wildlife Area.
The main draw of driving the auto route is the thousands of wintering waterfowl that can be seen from my movable birding blind.
There is nothing like the sight and sound of thousands of snow geese bursting into flight!
There also a lot of wintering raptors at Gray Lodge. On my visit I saw red-tailed, red-shouldered, sharp-shinned, and Cooper’s hawks, peregrine falcon, American kestrel, and bald eagle.
While not considered a raptor, there are plenty of turkey vultures about, including this one sunning itself.
During my morning visit I notched up 63 species of birds including some species that I don’t regularly encounter at Gray Lodge including the secretive sora and American bittern (below).
On a Thursday morning I was on the hunt for two sculptures near the Ferry Building at the base of Market Street.
It wasn’t going to be a tough hunt because sculptures don’t move.
About a week earlier I had done some sketching at the de Young Museum. I had sketched two pieces in the Sculpture Garden by Henry Moore and Clars Oldenburg.
There were other pieces by these artists in San Francisco. One, Cupid’s Span (Oldenburg), near the Bay Bridge and the other Standing Figure Knife Edged (Moore) at Maritime Plaza. Both were within easy walking distance.
Oldenburg’s bow with the Ferry Building in the background.
I took the N Judah towards the Caltrain station and 50 minutes later Cupid’s Span appeared to the left. This was really Muni front door service to this large piece of outdoor public art.
Riding Muni after experiencing the spectacular trams of Oslo over the summer made the City by the Bay’s transit system seem amateurish and unreliable. We could certainly learn something from Europe’s exemplary transit. If you want to be late for work, take Muni!
I sat in the little park before Cupid’s Span. I liked sketching the curves of the bow and the feathers of the arrow. I have always wondered at the meaning of an arrow pulled taunt against a bowstring aimed into the earth. Still wondering what, if anything, it means.
After sketching I headed along the Embarcadero past the Ferry Building. My destination was Maritime Center near the Embarcadero Center (featured in Coppola’s The Conversation).
I was searching for the Yorkshire sculptor Henry Moore’s piece Standing Figure Knife Edged. This was a bit of public art that took a bit more searching than Oldenburg’s oversized bow and arrow.
Adding another Henry Moore sculpture to my sketchbook.
After sketching Moore’s piece I wandered to the other side of the plaza and found another whimsical sculpture, Bronze Horse by Italian sculptor Marino Marini. The sculpture looks like a giant anteater crossed with a horse.
Ever since my babysitter let me stay up and watch Halloween on television (mom sure knew how to pick a babysitter), I have loved the films of John Carpenter.
One of Carpenter’s lesser known films was filmed on location in the Northern Bay Area. This is The Fog (1980).
This paranormal ghost thriller was filmed in Marin and Sonoma Counties, north of San Francisco. I wanted to revisit some these beautiful locations and do some Saturday morning sketching so I headed north over the Golden Gate Bridge.
The fictional town of Antonio Bay were really the west Marin towns of Stinson Beach, Olema, Pt. Reyes Station, and Inverness.
My first stop was Stinson Beach, or more accurately just southeast of Stinson Beach on Highway One.
About 50 minutes from leaving my Sunset digs, I was sitting in my sketching chair sketching the town of Stinson Beach.
The scene before me that I was adding to my panoramic sketchbook was the same view used for the title sequence for The Fog.
After finishing my sketch (featured sketch), I drove north on Highway One through Stinson and then skirted the shoreline of Bolinas Lagoon on my way to Olema.
Scenes were filmed in this area at the junction of Highway One and Sir Francis Drake Boulevard. The location featured two generations of scream queens who happen to be mother and daughter: Janet Leigh (Psycho) and Jamie Lee Curtis (Halloween). Neither did much screaming in The Fog.
Olema parking lot. The parking lot and the bar in the blue building to the right were used as filming locations in The Fog.
I continued on to Pt. Reyes Station where the “downtown” of Antonio Bay was filmed. The Fog demonstrates the patchwork nature of how location filming is used to create one whole location is is not usually geographically accurate.
On a SLO Saturday morning with a breakfast at the Copper Cafe at the Madonna Inn (celebrity sighting: Steve Perry), Grasshopper and I headed out west past the Men’s Colony to do some birding-hiking-sketching at Morro Rock.
The 581 foot tall Morro Rock is a volcanic plug on California’s coast. A volcanic plug is the extinct neck of a volcano. It is a prominent landform that is a beacon for wildlife. The extinct volcano formed about 23 million years ago.
We birded around the rock. Avian highlights included white-throated swift, Bewick’s wren with common loons on Morro Bay and willets, black oystercatchers, and brown pelicans on the breakwater.
Around the base of the rock were “No Climbing” signs because Morro Rock is a peregrine falcon reserve. On our visit there were no signs of peregrine falcons.
Sketching Morro Rock with Grasshopper.
We left the trailhead and found a sketching perspective with Morro Bay in the foreground and found a sketching boulder to sketch from (featured sketch).
Corvid Sketcher 