Apple Tree on 2nd Street

By Marcia Milner-Brage from Cedar Falls, Iowa

There are other apple trees growing on public boulevards in my neighborhood. This one is notable: it’s the latest to bear fruit and then, the fruit hangs on the tree well into winter. This year it was particularly bountiful.



I wanted to draw it before the first hard frost and the first snow. Before the brilliant autumn colors diminished. Time was running out. The forecast: 2 days of rain and wind followed by colder temperatures and then a snowstorm. With one day left, before the upcoming string of unfavorable weather, it was still too cool and windy to draw outside of the car.

Unfortunately it was Sunday and there were more parked cars then on weekdays. So I couldn’t get the angle on the tree that I had envisioned. I wanted to be across the street, with the tree in the foreground and the car wash sign on the other side of the block in the mid-distance. Hoping that a parking spot with this view might open up, I decided to bide my time and draw this sketch in my pocket-size Moleskin. No cars vacated my optimal spot. Resigned, I launched into a gouache painting, right from where I was.

Go to Eat Local: Scavenge on the Urban Sketchers Blog to see the gouache and  enjoy a closer look at the apples.

Greenwood Cemetery

It was a blustery late afternoon at Greenwood Cemetery. Unusual for Halloween, the leaves, still in their peek autumn color, have barely begun to fall. Today, I was prompted by Urban Sketchers weekly theme: cemeteries. Not unusual is that this and the other times I've drawn there, I've never seen another human.

But there are always crows:

And from the cemetery bluff, looking across the Cedar River and its watershed to the vast distance of farmland, is one of the best views in town.

GHOSTS!!

Ghosts in the Windows

The people who recently moved in across the street have seized the Halloween potential of this very old, very decrepit, charming house.

pocket-Moleskine sketch for Ghosts in the Windows

This is not the first October I've painted this house.

Gingerbread Roof and Silver Maples

                         Happy Halloween everyone!!

pocket-Moleskine sketch for 

Gingerbread Roof and Silver Maples               

Apple Picking

Me drawing in the orchard

               
                                                                                                      A family outing on the East Coast

Junked Truck, Still There

Junked Truck and Goldenrod

Diagonally across the street from my house is a vacant lot where junked or little used vehicles are stored by the owner of the lot. Theoretically, not allowed by city ordinance in residential neighborhoods, this truck has been there for several years. The seasons change around it. Today, I stood on the edge of the lot to paint this.

Here, in winter, I drew looking down on the lot from my second floor bedroom window. Then the truck was joined by a school bus.

School Bus in Vacant Lot

2 Steeples for February Scavenger Hunt

2 Steeples in Winter

When the leaves are off the trees, looking north from my second floor bedroom window, I can see the steeples of St Patrick Catholic Church on the right and First United Methodist Church on the left. This is a Neocolor II water soluble wax pastel done at the end of January 2012.

Here's the same 2 steeples from a different angle and a different season in watercolor.

2 Steeples Autumn

Great Wall--Next Stop on the Restaurant Scavenger Hunt

We hardly ever go out to eat. Having food delivered from Great Wall Chinese restaurant is a treat, a welcome break from cooking. I did this watercolor November 2011, on a cold, late afternoon from the car.

From the same window, again and again

Early this morning, before the wonderful craziness of cooking, eating and sharing that is Thanksgiving Day, I painted two watercolor versions of the same view--the morning sky over the rooftops--from my second floor bedroom window.

I worked in tandem on 2 individual sheets of watercolor paper--the top one on cold press and the bottom on hot press. I've been experimenting with water soluble graphite, applied with a brush, for quick, out-and-about sketches. This time I used watercolor and the water soluble graphite on larger works.

I've done other drawings from this window. I guess it's one of my favorite perches to look out on the world from. 

One in summer and another in winter, both including the rooftops you might identify in the above: 

Death Knell for Twinkies

Wonder Bread, November 17, 2011

The inevitable has happened. Hostess Brands, which includes Wonder Bread and Hostess Twinkies, is bankrupt and are closing all their operations around the US, including Home of Wonder Bread in downtown Waterloo, Iowa. Approximately 80 workers--including bakers and drivers--are losing their jobs here. 

Home of Wonder Bread was built by the Continental Baking Company in 1957. This yellow brick with red accent building is a landmark, sandwiched between the Carnegie Waterloo Public Library, the orange-y building to the right, and the Waterloo Art Center (unseen) to the left. The aroma of baking bread has wafted from it for over a half a century.

Almost exactly a year ago, I drew this from my car on a chilly, windy November afternoon. My original flickr post of this drawing is here.

For local news coverage in today's Waterloo/Cedar Falls Courier with some photos of Home of Wonder Bread go here.

I associate Wonder Bread and Hostess Twinkies with guilty pleasures from my childhood. Oh, those pure white, silky, flat pillows of white bread, spread with smooth Skippy peanut butter and Welch's grape jelly that I was served at my best friend's house (never at my own!). And the rituals of eating a Twinkie--the thrill of  breaking open the golden spongy loaf, appreciating the inside's perfectly centered, whitest of white cream, which I'd test with the tip of my tongue, before taking a bite. But my most favorite were the Hostess Cupcakes. They were the ultimate of comfort food, with their dark thin frosting crossed by that cheerful and elegant white loopy line. Inside: flawless chocolate cake with a white cream heart. There were two schools of eating a Hostess cupcake: mine was lifting off thin wafers of frosting before taking a bite. Or my friend's: cutting to the quick with a bite to the middle--cake and frosting and cream all in one mouthful. Hostess cupcakes were the standard for chocolaty wonderfulness until, as adults, we were swept into gourmet and the likes of upscale flour-less chocolate cake decadence. 

Climbing Hydrangea--more leafy and now less

 
























I drew the climbing hydrangea outside our south-facing living room two years ago and then again today. I designed the trellis 20 years ago and had it custom made by a local blacksmith. My husband then planted the hydrangea and, over the years, has trained it so when leafed out we have privacy from our neighbor's driveway and house, which is only a few feet away. Today, with many of the leaves fallen, the blue of the neighbor's house is seen.

When I picked the last of our pepper crop over a week ago, they were all light green. Look what happened: a couple turned red in the bowl! Procrastinating on doing this drawing maybe wasn't a bad thing.

Fall Fiesta Outside--Comfy Chair Inside

Fall Fiesta from 2nd Floor Window

When a straight-line windstorm toppled two seventy-five-year-old maples three years ago in the front of our house, we planted a Fall Fiesta maple to replace them. My husband and I love this new little tree and revel when its leaves turn their full brilliance.

Fall Fiesta in Porch Window

Working on a watercolor block, I roughed in the composition first with water soluble graphite, applied with a brush. Then came the Neocolor II water soluble wax pastels.

To the right: a watercolor of the same tree, seen through a first floor window, done 2 years ago:


This is my husband's favorite chair:

Nighttime Easy Chair

House Across Clay

 And a winter, night view from the same      window of the house across the street.

Wertjes Uniforms: Open for business--Closed for the day

Today, while featuring this small storefront, I got a good sighting of the Cedar Falls Utilities' coal-burning smokestack through the partially leafless trees. Tucked into a neighborhood of houses, Wertjes is three blocks from my house and two blocks from the smokestack. It sells uniforms to policemen and firemen.

A cold front is forecast for the rest of the week. Taking advantage of what I assume to be the last Indian summer day, I set my stool up across the street. In the window,  a handwritten sign stated they were closed for the day while the owner attended a police uniform show in Waterloo. A car parked and blocked my view; I asked the driver if she'd move back a bit and she did. I got sniffed by at least 4 dogs. One of the dog walkers, a man my age in his 60s, told me he'd grown up around the corner when Wertjes was a grocery store;  he'd buy candy and bread there. The owner and her husband returned. After I'd packed up to go, they invited me to come inside. She bought the store 13 years ago  from the Wertjes, who'd owned it for many years. The current owner just happened into it when she went to pick up a uniform for her police officer son and was told the business was for sale. Business is so good, she's thinking of bringing her son from Cincinnati, who just lost his job as a pilot, into the business. I'll have to go back and draw the inside, too. Obviously a thriving business, yet it looks like something from a bygone era.

Gate to Abandoned Orchard

Down a lane in the Cedar Heights neighborhood of my hometown of Cedar Falls, Iowa is an abandoned orchard left from when this was farmland and not residential. This iron gate is a curious remnant of another time. Recently, the land changed hands. The scuttlebutt is that the new owner will be building multiple new homes.  When I got back from my recent trip to California, I sensed it was now or never if I wanted to capture this artifact in a drawing.

For most of the 2 hour time doing this, everything was quite delightful as I sat on my stool, set up across the road in the leaf mulch. Then at the very end,  I got swarmed by itty bitty bugs. They weren't biting, but they were all over me and my stuff (inside my crayon box! inside my gear bag! under my hat! under my shirt! between the pages of my sketchbook! EEEEK!) Needless to say, I hightailed it home. Later, my husband identified the critters as harmless spring tails. Before I was attacked I snapped this photo of my set-up.