Tales from the Trails

The creek-side trail behind my house is walled for a little distance by a row of townhomes on one side. A few months ago, a wicker chair and footstool was placed outside one of the gates to a townhome.  That is a first, I wondered if someone decided to discard the chair, or if it was there for use. When I saw a stuffed dog (a life sized Old English Sheepdog) lying in the chair, it looked like an art installation, of sorts. I had to go back to sketch it. The shadows ended up too dark. I think I need to dilute the Noodler's Lexington Gray ink that I keep in my fude pen.

Stuffed dog in chair on creek-side trail.
Various inks and waterbrush.
Canson XL 140lb. paper

Mistletoe on Sycamore, Poway creek.
Inks, pens and brushpen.

Down the trail next to the bridge into my neighborhood is a sycamore tree leaning over the creek bed. It has a very healthy mistletoe plant parasite hanging from it. I had about 15 minutes left before I had to head home, so I decided to try to focus on the mistletoe (considering the dissatisfaction I'm feeling with my sketches of trees).

Green heron, Poway creek. Watercolour
pencils and inks. 

As I walked over the bridge to walk home, a Green Heron burst out from under my feet and flew a few yards down the creek before settling back into the cattails. I often see Great Blue herons, Snowy egrets, and Great (white) Egrets in the creek, but the Green herons are much more secretive. Of course, I had to try to sketch it to record the memory. I used Faber-Castell watercolour pencils because they are fast.

South Poway Hills trailhead with fog. Canson XL 140lb. paper with inks and pencils.

I am trying to get in the habit of taking a half hour hike in the morning when I'm not meeting someone at 7 am. We are still having an unusual percentage of foggy mornings. On my way to the other end of community park, I stopped to try to catch the last of the fog as it drifted along the tops of the hills around the South Poway Trailhead. I used inks and watercolour pencils. The fields here, that I have hiked for almost 20 years, are being choked in the past 8 years by the invasive wild artichoke plants. Just last year and this year they seems to go brown prematurely, I think someone is spraying them with something. A couple days after I sketched this, those brown stalks with the round seeds heads were being chopped and bagged by a crew. I wanted to cheer!

Cleaning vegetation out of the drainage in Community Park. Watercolour pencils and inks. Canson XL 140lb. paper.

Then I walked on through a small neighborhood west of my house to where there is another bridge over the creek. A long drainage runs through the park, it is concrete lined as it flows by dog park and drains into Poway creek. Ducks, crows, herons, killdeer and other birds frequent the shallow drainage and plants take root in the sediment. Once a year, the city scrapes up the sediment and plants. I wish they didn't. I once watched in horror as a female killdeer and two tiny killdeer babies ran just ahead of the skip loader. The next time I saw the mother, there was only one baby. So when I saw the men just starting to scrape up the vegetation, I had to stop for a quickie sketch. I think they are starting later so there were no nesting killdeer in the ditch, only the ubiquitous crows.