Category Archives: Practice

In and Out of the Studio

I have been having the best time lately, in and out of the studio.

Airport people

I never go anywhere without bringing some sort of art supplies, even if just a colored pencil and a tiny sketchbook. On our trip to CA earlier this month, I learned just how easy it would be to bring along my gouache and accompanying materials.

The center flap of this case flips over and has 6 pen straps on the other side which holds all my brushes. The numerous zippered & elasticized pockets assure I have plenty of room for everything.

I bought an inexpensive travel palette that has a silicone cover which keeps the paints moist and leakproof. It nestles within a generously sized collapsible water container which, along with all the rest of my gear, fits neatly into my 4″x9″ pencil case. Together with a lightweight Holbein 7.5″ x 6″ watercolor/multi-media sketchbook, I have a very compact but complete travel kit.

Note the palette with its silicone cover in place.

That said, makeshift studio space while traveling can be a bit of a crapshoot. Luckily, our Berkeley Airbnb not only had terrific natural light, but a lovely little desk looking out on the garden.

Berkeley Garden

You may laugh, but with no IKEAs in VT, wandering through the maze of the Emeryville store was more than a planned activity – it was an inspirational treat.

IKEA pattern

This boldly patterned duvet cover was a real eye-catcher. The calm of recreating it later with paint was equal to, if not better than, any meditation app.

This little exercise was a great way to use up leftover paint that I didn’t want to waste.

A subsequent field trip to the Ruth Bancroft Garden in Walnut Creek was just as fruitful in the inspiration department.

You have no idea how hard it was to choose just 2 photos among the many I took, to show here

This dry garden has been on my to-see list for a long time and it was worth the wait. So many wonderful layers of color, pattern, and texture.

Succulents

The bottom line is, pretty much anything can serve as input to brew in the back of one’s mind and eventually lead to new ideas. This trip got me thinking about ways to incorporate pattern within my worktable still lives — sometimes as a last layer, but also at the beginning of a sketch.

I used some Neocolor I’s for the under-layer of this experiment. Unlike Neocolor II’s, they aren’t water soluble, so didn’t bleed when I washed a thin layer of gouache over everything, followed by the contours of objects, again with gouache.

It’ll be interesting to see how pattern might affect a push and pull between the fore and backgrounds. Because of its opacity, gouache gives me the freedom to try this in a way that isn’t possible with watercolor. And that is a game-changer!

2025 Elizabeth Fram, Gouache on paper, 9″H x 5.75″W As I go along, bits of the original pattern poke through, which I can obliterate or enhance with subsequent layers of paint

Before I go, you may remember that last year I took the month of December off from posting to Eye of the Needle. It was such a successful way to recharge my batteries that I promised myself I would do it again this year. With that in mind, my next post will be on January 1, 2026 — which will be here before we know it.

Till then, wishing you and yours the happiest of holidays ahead!

PS: I want to give you a heads-up that there are changes on the horizon for Mailchimp (the platform I use to send out blog notifications to all you lovely subscribers). Looking into other options is one of my December chores, so there is the very likely possibility that I may send you a test in December and that my notification emails may have a new look when I return for real in January. Thanks for your patience.

Something New

Perhaps the biggest gift of an ending is the beginning that follows.

This past summer has left me with a lot to digest.
Marked most significantly by the loss of my father, I can’t ignore that that sadness was bookended by two events which have brought me tremendous joy. Both “Full Bloom” in June and “Holding – Mementos Kept, Memories Kindled” (which wraps up at the Kent Museum this Sunday, 10/12) have grounded me over the past several months while being an ongoing reminder of the irrefutable fact that life is inherently a mixture of bitter and sweet.

Maybe it’s the confluence of these three recent endings that has led me to seek out something new this fall. Without departing too terribly far from the familiar, I treated myself recently to a basic palette of gouache and a few new brushes. With no particular endpoint in mind, I have been having a wonderful time this week, just seeing what happens.

If you look closely, you will see this was the first pass for the painting below.

Following the examples of Sandi Hester and Peggi Kroll Roberts, I divided a sketchbook spread into quadrants of color as a starting point, then ad-libbed a composition of items from my work table — letting those initial four colors be something of a guide without being too restrictive. The point for now is to keep things simple, concentrate on learning to handle the paint, and to make discoveries about color. I’ve ended up happily lost in the process.

Up to this point, my only painting experience is with transparent watercolor, so the opaque quality of gouache is a revelation. It has triggered a whole different way of thinking and is SO MUCH FUN! I can’t help but consider a million possibilities, not to mention how great it will be to incorporate stitch once I get my sea legs and figure out where I may be headed.

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Not able to make it to Calais for “Holding” at Art at the Kent? Get a taste of its unique flavor with this episode of Across The Fence. If you keep your eyes peeled, you’ll see a few of my pieces along the way.

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In case you didn’t already see it, please enjoy this gifted-to-you New York Times article by Sam Thielman and Gabriel Gianordoli about Emil Ferris – “The Comics Artist Who Sees Monsters in Museums, and in the Mirror”. Her drawings are spectacular.

Epiphany

My father passed away last week.
He was a Mainer through and through, a fact upon which most of his life hinged.

White Pines 1

Sitting by his bedside during his final week, I listened as he fondly reminisced about many things that were so “him”, including: his love of being on the water (he marked periods of his life by sailboats, much the way many of us recount the years by the succession of dogs who have graced our families), the pride he had in crafting the delicate curve of a particularly challenging set of table legs for one of his many fine furniture projects, and memories of the island people whose salt-of-the-earth integrity had greatly influenced his own approach to life throughout his 98 years.

Early in the morning, before going down to be with him, I would sit on his apartment porch and take a few moments to quietly paint the nearby pine trees — tall and stately Eastern White Pines, which coincidentally are Maine’s state tree.

White Pines 3

I realized as I worked to capture their distinctively irregular shapes that these sturdy conifers could be seen as an apt representation of the man who, along with our mother, had raised my brother and me: tall, upright, determined, resilient, unique, long-lived, and even, to make a terrible pun that he would have loved to hate, a bit sappy (classical music, especially Bach, could bring him to tears).

Much of making art is seeing the connections and metaphors that hover over our lives. Thanks to this unexpected sketching epiphany, I have a new way of seeing and remembering Dad — not only here in Vermont, but especially along his beloved coast of Maine.

White Pines 2

Steeped in Color

We’re having such a lovely, wintery winter this year.

Getting an inch or two of snow most days over the past weeks has resulted in a healthy accumulation, smoothing the rough edges of our landscape and keeping things visually subdued, restful even.

Our home is nestled between the Worcester and Green mountain ranges. Once the sun rises high enough to clear the Worcester range behind us, it shines on the Greens to our west, making for a bright start to the day.

That means there are days when the sunrise or the sunset offer our only fleeting glimpse of color in a 24 hour period, made all the more vibrant by our muted surroundings.

The sky can be just as spectacular in the early evening

Never fear, there is always plenty of color in the studio. Lately I’ve been looking at specific palette combinations, aiming to grasp why it is they appeal to me at a gut level. I figure this is the best approach for leveraging what I then learn in order to create new palettes of my own.

Zorah on the Terrace, Henri Matisse, 1912. Years ago I began clipping an assortment of visual references, often color-centric, (deposits, if you will) to fill a visual bank of spiral sketchbooks that I return to time and again for inspiration.

Right now, M. Matisse leads the way.
One might think just looking is enough, but I’m learning so much more by isolating and then trying to recreate the colors of favorite paintings and from collected resource photos, using the paints and drawing tools I have on hand.

A hasty copy of Matisse’s Zorah on the Terrace using colored pencils and Neocolor II’s helps me to understand some of the nuances of his color choices.

Making color swatches solidifies my grasp of how this particular palette can be translated with my own mixes.

Playing around with mixtures or layering colors over each other to arrive at just the right hue helps me to more intimately know the colors I already own, while – bonus! – being a restful and meditative exercise unto itself.

It’s been very helpful to keep a devoted sketchbook for saving palette mixes as I go along. Not only can I reference what I learn from master painters, but it’s an easy way to retain the various mixes I discover from my own work, including color notations about specific locales (as shown in this post). This has been a game changer for narrowing down what colors to pack before a trip.

Spirit of SPA ©2025, Elizabeth Fram, Watercolor and stitching on paper, 7-1/8″ x 7″. The palette of this latest piece was meant to reflect a mid-August afternoon, which was when I took the reference photo and had a delightful visit with my model. It’s all interwoven, isn’t it? Light affects color affects time affects light.

Working on this portrait last week, I was conscious of separating the colors so they could be seen as individual strokes and marks which come together in a palette that speaks to the specifics of the time I spent with my sitter. I still have plenty to learn in order to push this idea – but at least this offers a glimpse of what I’m aiming for.

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Find of the week:
Patty Hudak’s Mokuhanga prints…stunning!