Blue and rust

Today I thought I’d post both sketch and final painting for a scene that I painted in studio today. Actually the sketch was done last night but I wanted to wait until the morning to start the larger painting. The only problem with having an idea for a painting at night is that I dream about painting it all night!

The scene was one I saw at Lovric’s Shipyard in Anacortes, Washington, this past summer. As my friends who live there know, I could paint in that places for weeks. It’s an endlessly fascinating hive of old boats, piles of rusty stuff, big skies, distant mountains and reflections. All the stuff I love to paint.

On my studio table I had a dirty palette with some Indanthrene Blue leftover in the wells so I dashed off a quick sketch on a block of Winsor & Newton paper. It seemed from the sketch that the painting could work, and painting it smaller helped me establish a value pattern.

Since this is a scene where texture is important, I selected a sheet of 16″ x 20″ Two Rivers cold press paper. The drawing took some time but getting everything in the right place is important in a scene like this. When it was time to paint, I knew I wanted to keep a dominantly blue colour scheme, but I also wanted to contrast all that blue with some warmer tones, especially in the centre of the painting where all the detail is. I used lots of Burnt Sienna mixed with Transparent Pyrol Orange for those rusty bits. And as you can imagine, I had a great time painting all the details.

The frozen hand

I did a little sketching from my car this morning, hoping to capture the piles of fresh snow after yesterday’s storm. When I got home and looked at my sketch, I thought “What a mess!” And then I realized that my warm weather drawing is so much more careful than my cold weather drawing. Duh. My drawing hand is frozen, my feet are cold, and there’s blowing snow obscuring the car window. I just want to get it over with quickly so I can go home and warm up. In Florida, with warm hands, I was able to slow down and take the time to really look at things before drawing them. But now that I’ve returned to winter, I’m back to frozen extremities and messy speed sketching.

The last few from Sanibel Island

Now that I’m back in Montreal with my trusty scanner at my side, I’m posting my last few Sanibel sketches. If you missed any from the trip, the full gallery of Sanibel Island images is now on my website.

The really hot beach days were during the first week of the trip. I did a few people sketches while visiting my family in Siesta Key.

There were also a few days that I didn’t post during the first week because I had a flu and spent a few days in bed. When I felt well enough to get up I sat on the deck and sketched the green chair and the coconut, as well as the two palms and the causeway across San Carlos Bay.

That’s about it for the warm weather sketching. I’ll be back to painting snow this week!

A bit of Sanibel Island history

This morning my bike took me to the Sanibel Island Museum & Village. Composed of eight authentic restored buildings, the village is well worth a visit if you are interested in the history of the island between 1880 and the 1940s. I opted out the guided tour, choosing instead to sketch Bailey’s General Store (mostly because of the gas pumps out front) but I did overhear tidbits from many docents leading tours past my sketching bench. The building I sketched was the “new” store, constructed in 1927 after the old store was destroyed in a hurricane. In 1966 a bigger store was opened in a new location, and you can still shop there today.

Big banyan

I sketched this big banyan tree in the last hour of daylight, while sitting on the front steps of the Old Lee County Courthouse in downtown Fort Myers. It’s an impressive specimen but not much can be found about it on Google. The only tidbit I dug up was from a 2016 article by Amy Bennett Williams in the News–Press. “Back in the pre-political correctness days, Lee County wags would string up local politicians in effigy from the banyan and a nearby live oak, then put up a “political graveyard” underneath.”

Knowing I only had a short time to sketch before losing the light, I chose a brush pen for drawing. I quickly drew in the tree and then added some surroundings (buildings, people, etc.) for scale. The effect of the brush pen is a bit cartoony but it allows me to get things done quickly. And since the tree takes up most of the two-page spread, I tried to get as much colour in my washes as possible.

Bird stories

The day started and ended with a bird story. On a morning bike ride through a wooded trail that crossed through a reservoir, there was an Anhinga atop a wooden post drying its wings (which are apparently not waterproof) by spreading them open in the sun. I’d only ever seen this bird once before, a few days previous, at the J.N. Ding Darling Wildlife Refuge where the bird was perched on a low hanging branch above a marsh, watching for fish in the murky water below. We stopped our bikes to watch the bird, even moved a little closer to take photos, and miraculously it did not budge. It stayed on its perch for so long I probably could have sketched it but eventually a runner went by and it flew away.

Later in the day I sketched the ominous sky and the wind in the palms across the canal. At one point I looked up and saw hundreds of black birds fly in, darkening the horizon as they landed on rooftops and trees.

At about the same time, a little blue heron landed near me on the dock. I reached into my pocket for my phone to take a photo but realized I had left it behind. The bird watched me for a long time, taking small steps closer and closer before eventually flying off. A few minutes later it landed again next to me, not two feet away, and this time it stayed, and stayed and stayed. It stayed so long I decided to draw it. I’m not an accomplished sketcher of birds like Cathy Johnson or Jean Mackay, but this little guy seemed to pose for me for a good ten minutes, certainly enough time for me to observe details in the blue-grey feathers and greenish legs. Seems like a long time in bird time. I would have loved to add a little shadow on the ground but the bird finally found something more interesting than me and flew away. And by then the moment had passed and it seemed strange to continue the sketch. I guess this story epitomizes what I love best about urban sketching. You sit down to do one thing and something else happens, just because you are there, watching and listening to what is around you. And in the end, I am happy that I forgot my phone, this one time, because when I look back on this day my sketch of the bird will mean more to me than a photo of it ever would.

Beach house and sea grape

I often select an area of a scene I want to focus on and work outwards from there. In this sketch it was the area of shadow that crossed the doorway of the beach house. From there I worked outwards to the palm, the sea grape and the beach. The top of the sketch is a bit unfinished, mostly because I was sitting on a very low beach chair to draw and it was hard to look up to see behind the sea grape. On this trip that beach plant has become one of my favourite to draw — how can you not love a plant with such circular leaves? Sketched in a Handbook Watercolour Journal, portrait size (approx. 16 x 8) and held open with shells on a windy day.