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More Sierra Watercolors

This is probably the last of my summer sketchbook, this time from a little further south and a couple weeks later, in the Bear Valley area. This year I’ve been to Tuolumne, Loon Lake, and now Bear Valley, pretty good for one summer. I’m hoping to make it up the mountains one more time before the snows, but we’ll see.

These first three watercolors are from Spicer Reservoir. It has more of a bathtub ring than Gerle and Loon lake, but it’s nice. I wasn’t aware of any hiking trails around the reservoir, so I walked along the shoreline, boulder hopping and swimming from the rocky peninsulas.

I had a minor plein air adventure at the reservoir. While I was sitting at a picnic table, working on this one of the dam, a couple came and settled themselves down in the sand about thirty feet away, a little behind me. I didn’t pay much attention to them, and I’m thinking they didn’t notice me either, because a little while later I realized they were sharing the kind of intimate moment which is not usually shared in front of other people. With my watercolor stuff spread all over the table and the watercolor wet and half-completed, I ended up just putting headphones in my ears and ignoring them. I’m still a little taken aback.

I also went to Calaveras Big Trees State Park along the same highway, a little bit lower in elevation. Great park, amazing trees. I think the sequoia groves there are better than the ones in Yosemite. I did a couple of watercolors at a swimming hole on the Stanislaus River running through the park. I set up in a more visible place, on a big rock in the river, and no one there showed me anything I didn’t want to see.

2 Responses to “More Sierra Watercolors”

  1. September 15th, 2012 at 11:05 am

    James says:

    I guess the wilderness was romantic and finding an artist in it was even more so. But yeah, really now folks. Get a room. The other human perturbations that you can see in the third sketch are interesting, the dam, the tower-thing (I’m sure there’s a name for it), the little kayaks… If I had to pick favorites, though, I’d pick the last one and its greens sliding towards aqua and chartreuse.

  2. September 15th, 2012 at 2:27 pm

    ryan says:

    Yeah, I considered shouting that exact thing, Get a room, but in the end there didn’t seem much point.

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