Announcing “Sketching Fresh Flowers: Late Summer Blooms” — a new online course

As you know if you’ve been following this blog, I’ve been sketching a lot in my garden this past summer. I guess we’re all sticking closer to home and enjoying the beauty that surrounds us — especially the flowers.

Flowers are such a big and in-demand subject, that I’ll be rolling out a series of online classes covering various ways of painting them. But I thought a great way to start would be with a trio of small bouquets that allow me to introduce the basics of painting flowers in watercolour.

I’m so excited to share my love of sketching flowers a new online class! In “Sketching Fresh Flowers: Late Summer Blooms,” I’ve raided my own garden, and a few others, to pick and sketch the best August and September blooms. The fresh flowers are right in front of me in my studio as I sketch, so I can capture the subtleties of their colours and shapes as I draw and then paint them with the most vibrant colours on my palette.

The course includes three full-length demos and lots of tips about colour, composition and painting the transparency of glass vases. Plus there’s a new section within each demo where you can share your sketches with other students.

For a preview of “Sketching Fresh Flowers: Late Summer Blooms,” check out the trailer.

Dark and bright

Six bouquets from Ferme Tournesol and one to come in late September. I’m so happy I’ve been home this summer to enjoy them, and to paint them! Of the six, this was the hardest to paint because of all the darks. Of course I could have simplified the bouquet by removing the dark red Celosia in the back, but part of the challenge of painting these is trying to include everything they give me. (To be totally honest, though, I did add a few yellow flowers of my own, but I made no subtractions.)

My recipe for the darks in this is simple: Permanent Alizarin Crimson and Phthalo Green. You have to be careful when you combine these because if you use too much of the green, it’s quite awful, but mixed with the right amount of red, it’s almost black, and it works most effectively as a contrast to the yellow. (See why I needed them in here?)

Garlic braid in gouache

Every once in a while, especially when I’ve been doing a lot of watercolours, I love to go back to thinking about values. Just good old black and white — in this case gouache in a Stillman & Birn Nova toned sketchbook. I try to simplify the big shapes into three values — lights, mid-tones and darks — even if I sometimes veer into variations in between. It’s a great exercise in looking, especially with a simple subject like my garlic braid, and it’s a rest from thinking about colour.

REM on Labour Day

Montreal’s REM light rail line is making its way west. I draw it often but I stopped for the summer because it was too hot to sketch from the car and there’s not much shade out on the highway. Now that September is here, I’m starting back and I was rewarded with the start of the Kirkland station. This is the first time I get to draw something other than the construction of the line itself. And I’m lucky because this station is being built right in front of a Tim Horton’s coffee shop, which means there’s parking and coffee for me when I draw, especially as the weather starts to change.

If you’re interested to see what this elevated station will look like, have a look at the architectural renders on the REM site. You’ll see a view of the Kirkland station seen from Highway 40. It’s pretty cool.

Treasure

In my university days, or shortly after, a friend was selling an immense wooden drafting table. Even though I probably had no room for it at the time, I found a way to get it home and have been using it to paint on ever since. It’s been such a fixture in my studio that I take it for granted, but when I was sketching the objects on top of it today, I took a good look at it (six feet wide, four feet deep and three inches thick) and I realized what a treasure it is. The surface is so vast that I can work on two paintings at the same time and still have room for jugs of water and cans of brushes. At times it serves at a cutting surface for paper, a tabletop for still life, and if I lowered it and put some chairs around it, a family of six could comfortably eat a meal on it. I sketched it today with a limited palette of four gouache colours (red, yellow, blue and white) on some toned paper.

Where to start

I’m determined to paint all of the bouquets I receive this summer from Ferme Tournesol. This is the fourth. Each one is a challenge because of the variety of flower shapes and colours. In each bouquet there are flowers I’ve never seen before, so the Plant Snap app on my phone comes in handy. A quick photo and I get the name! On the weekend I also brought home a few zinnias from my friend Alison’s splendid garden, so I added those in as well.

I’m never really sure where to start the drawing for something this complex. The sensible place might be to start with the big zinnias at the bottom of the bouquet, but I did something a little different today. I started at the top. I wanted to make sure I got in the tiny flowers at the top of the bouquet, so I drew those first and worked my way downward. Of course that can end up being problematic if you don’t leave enough room for the rest of the flowers, or if you end up stopping the bouquet in an awkward spot, but I was working on a longish pad of Arches paper so I managed to get it all in. I have two or three more bouquets left from the farmers in the coming weeks and then it will be back to grocery store blooms for me.