Project: · Pod

I'm working on a series of pods for the botanical garden, and I did how this magnolia looks so far with the high-contrast underpainting. I grew up on a street with many magnolia trees--we'd play kick-the-pod as kids--but today was the first day that I've really examined the structure of the pods in any detail. Like dozens of "eyes of Sauron" staring back at me! Wacky.

More preliminary sketches of other pods (carob and jatropha) are over here.

Carrotwood trees are leaving seed pods, replete with bright orange seeds, all over the streets and sidewalks this time of year. Love it. Cheerful orange plant matter getting pulverized by passing cars.

They are complex things to draw though. My initial stab at the whole stem got very confused...so I went on to draw a single pod next. Color will help distinguish things!



By the way, since I have the art-blog running more reliably nowadays, I may start posting as katura_art rather than as pasajera. Don't let that confuse you!

Thanks to pixels_of_light for pointing this out: great pod-like sculptures by an artist named Jennifer Maestre, made from the sharpened tips of pencils!

http://www.jennifermaestre.com/pencil_show.html

I was never happy with the flat purple interiors of the paulownia pods. I thought over a million different ways to deal with them. They always felt like they were missing something. Then I discovered this metallic goop - faux gold leaf. I think the "gilding" makes them feel more special, like they're a treasure of sorts. Anyway, that's how I feel about the dried up pods that I collect on hikes and walks. They're treasures to me.

I'm happy with these now.

Pods are 8" long.

Coming up: Paulownia pods and Chinese lanterns.

While combing through my files for samples of digital art, I came across this fun illustration:

Wacky, huh? It's the female (=seed-making) cone from some kind of cypress tree. I remember sketching it in colored pencil at the UCSC arboretum, and then playing with this digital version here. The colors aren't really all that exaggerated from life, believe it or not. (I am an honest Puck...)

It doesn't "count" for the pod project because it's a cone instead of a pod, but I thought it would be a nice placeholder until I get those darned castor bean pods under the microscope! I'm thinking to do a crazy-close-up view of them, just to see how that looks--I'm feeling inspired by this recent sculpture by Audrey.

Hey pasajera, I met someone else online who is as fanatic about pods as we are. You can see an example of Julie's work here. Be sure to check out her other work too - really lovely stuff!

I can't believe how long it has been since I posted a pod picture to this project--forgive my absence!

Over my camping trip this Thanksgiving, I ran across a fabulous seed pod from a plant that is most likely Penstemon centranthifolius, or the scarlet bugler. Gorgeous golden-brown pods that I couldn't resist.

And a detail:

Always the spiky things...

The castor bean plant (Ricinus comunus) is a rather pretty plant for a crazy invasive weed. Leaves, stems, pods are a lot more purple than you'd commonly imagine. If the weather cools down, and/or if I find a nice place to work with a/c and simultaneously remember to bring my stash of pods at work home, I'm going to have a fun time drawing this one!

I added diox purple for depth, then washed over it with the green. I'm pretty happy with the way these turned out - especially like the waxy feel and look from using matte varnish.

Anyway, off to the sketchbook to come up with some more imagined pod forms.

I still have quite a bit to do: six lantern leaves to paper, and 9 pauls to paint. One paul got fired broken, so I need to try to epoxy it back together. All is tedious work because it's the same thing over and over. Not terribly exciting.

This angle from the exploded underside, with one of the seeds having popped out for easier viewing. I'm kind of amazed it got it this far, because an hour ago I was stuck at this stage and thought I'd lost control and have to just run the whole thing through the paper shredder:



That's a great example of what I call the "ugly adolescent phase" of art--not cute and undefined enough to be a charming sketch, but neither well-developed enough to be anywhere near done. It's the point in a painting's life where it's darned hard to get a prom date, you know? This time around what I ended up doing is scanning it in to the computer (thinking I'd just post a work in progress and give up for the night), but as I fiddled with the color correction in photoshop it occured to me that my photo-retouching mindset was kicking in. So I just used the burn and dodge tools on the scan to figure out what I needed to do in order to make the piece look better, then went back to the painting and had a much better idea of where to go with it. Better living through Photoshop, who knew!

Discovered that this lovely specimen, having hung over my desk on the clothesline from which dangle all manner of oddball things, has popped open! I'm working on a closeup of the open end of this pod too, but it's currently getting a little out of hand and I'm going to peek at it in the morning to see if it's salvageable or not...This one is still a little weak on the left side but it'll likely clean up pretty well.

Kapow! The seeds are very large and shiny, a pale beige-pink. Pretty cool!