Two of Alice

Alice is enjoying her walks this week. Or maybe that’s just me enjoying the February thaw, the clear roads and the melting snow. After our morning walk is the best time to draw Alice. Yesterday I tried to sketch her at 5 pm but she was on alert for dinner and wouldn’t sit still.

Today I drew her once with her nose tucked into her paw, and since she was sleeping so nicely, I drew her again with her favourite toy: the tricky. When she wakes up from her nap, I will put a few treats in the tricky and she’ll roll it around with her paw until the treats drop out.

If you’re a subscriber to Artists Magazine, have a look at my many portraits of Alice in the March/April issue, coming out this month. My article is titled “One Dog Many Ways”, and it’s about using a familiar (and beloved) subject as a way to explore different drawing and painting tools.

Red shed in shade

You might think this red shed is located on a country road, deep in the woods somewhere. Not at all. It’s just off a main road, and right next to a big Shell gas station/depanneur. It’s part of a riding stable complex, and I pass it almost every day when I’m out and about. The constant traffic makes it impossible to stop on the road but yesterday I pulled into the long driveway and took a photo from the opposite side. I’m always reluctant to sit in my car to draw on private property (unless I see someone wandering about who I can ask) so I took a photo and painted this in studio. I think that was the right way to go. It would have been challenging to load up a big drippy brush and paint the background and shadow washes while sitting in the car.

As for my recipe for snow shadows for this one: a little tap of the brush into all my blues (Prussian, Ultramarine, Cobalt and Cerulean) and another tap into the Alizarin Crimson. Painted on a pad of Arches CP paper, 10″ x 14″.

Blizzard bouquet

We haven’t had a real blizzard in Montreal in a very long time. Maybe a decade. Which means it’s a great day to stay indoors and play in my studio.

As promised in yesterday’s post, here’s my experiment using water-soluble ink and watercolour. I drew the bouquet using Ancient Copper ink (in my watercolour sketchbook) and then painted on top of that with watercolours. I am still loving what this ink in doing — how the copper dissolves into the watercolour, adding reddish tones to contours of the greens and blues.

A few people asked me about the pen store in Montreal. If you live in the city and are looking for a fantastic retailer of pens and inks, the store is Stylo. It’s located in the Scotia Bank Centre on rue Ste. Catherine, in the basement just below Simon’s. If you don’t live in the city, they have a great website, plus it’s Canadian, in case you are trying to move in that direction these days.

Scenes from the desert

It’s break time for me — in between one Madeline Island School workshop group leaving and one arriving tomorrow — so I thought I’d take some time and post a few of my favourite sketches from the week. The image quality is not great because these are photographed sketches instead of scanned ones, but you’ll get the idea.

Overall it was a fantastic week. We had some chilly weather and high winds which made sketching outside a bit challenging, but the group was fun and very talented and I think a good time was had by all.

One of my first sketches, before I started teaching, was the view from my room. I’m always amazed by the shapes and patterns of the desert vegetation, and ocotillo is one of my favourite plants. I’m told that it does turn green in the spring but right now, it’s just a bunch of prickly sticks, standing straight up in clumps. Not that colourful to draw but I love the shadows it casts on the ground.

When I’m here, I always spend some time drawing the horses at Tanque Verde Ranch. One of the best places to draw them is to go up to the pancake breakfast at the old homestead. The horses are parked there waiting for their riders, so it’s the perfect place to sketch them.

One of the colours I always bring with me when I sketch in Arizona is Cerulean Blue Hue from Da Vinci. It’s a pigment that has some Phthalo Blue in it, and it’s perfect for the bright Tucson skies. I wet the sky with clear water first and then swirled some blue into it to convey the wind that was whipping up the sand around us.

The panoramic views of the Rincon mountains were quite spectacular this week, and my favourite time of day to sketch the saguaros are in the morning when they are backlit and they have a white halo around them.

And of course, no week is complete without a sketch of the old chuckwagon! If you want to come along to draw with me next year, I’ll be back from January 19-23, 2026. It sure is a great escape from the grey skies of winter.

The mess on my desk

There’s a mess in my studio this week. The remnants of planning and filming a new online course. In this case it’s a colourful mess because the new course is about colour.

It always takes tons of time to figure out what I’m going to paint during filming, and then of course I practice it a bunch of times so there are no disasters during production. The reject pile of practices that don’t work out is there too, and eventually that makes it to the recycling bin, although sometimes I save the failures so I can cut them up and make them into cards.

The new course — Expressive Triads: Limited Palettes, Unlimited Possibilities — is about something I never get tired of playing with: triads of colour. I could tell you more about the course but it’s easier to just send you over to my website so you can check it out. And while you are there, all my individual courses are 30% off this month as well. Have a look!

New paper for a new year

Our postal strike is finally over in Canada, and the backlog of mail is trickling in. A few days ago I received Etchr Lab’s new 9″ x 12″ 100% cotton watercolour paper block. As always, when I am testing out new products, I paint something easy, like the paint tubes on my table.

If you use Etchr sketchbooks, you’ll recognize the feel of this block. It’s the same paper as in their Perfect sketchbooks, just a little thicker. I’ve filled many of these sketchbooks, so I know it’s a paper I like to use for both ink and pencil drawings, and it takes the colour really well. Like the book, the block has a cold pressed surface so it stays wet for while, allowing me to deepen washes like I did in the cast shadows of this sketch.

So why use a block instead of a book? I don’t know about you, but I don’t cut pages out of my sketchbooks. But sometimes I want to create a sketch with the intention of giving it as a gift. Or I want to put it in a frame for a small format exhibition. That’s when a block comes in handy. It’s easy to transport, doesn’t need taping to a board, and stays pretty much flat as you work. And it’s a definite plus if you are familiar with AND like the properties of the paper.