Colour sketch for Henryville

Google street view never ceases to amaze me. I stopped on the way back from Boston last week to take some reference photos of a farm located somewhere on the road between Montreal  and the Canada/U.S. border point in Vermont. Now that I have completed a sketch as well as a full painting (tomorrow’s post!) of the farm I realize that I don’t really know where this is. So I went onto street view, dragged that little yellow guy onto Route 133 and miraculously found the Choquette farm located in Henryville, Quebec. I used the zoom tool in street view to get a closer view of the silos where I could read the name of the farm and even found a road sign to tell me the name of the town.

Lately I have been taking lots of reference photos to use in my paintings. Now that I have a studio set up in my house I am finding that it’s much more comfortable to paint indoors than in my car in the wintertime. I will always prefer to paint on location in the summer and it doesn’t mean that I am giving up my “urban sketching” but I have been working on larger size paper lately in preparation for a spring exhibition. This really needs to be done on my big tabletop easel so that I can step back from the work to see it properly. I usually stand while I paint, I use larger brushes and I need to have the full range of motion in my arm to work with these. Tomorrow I will post the completed painting which I now have to photograph since it doesn’t fit on my scanner.