Mushroom soup

What is mushroom colour? A bit of brown, a bit of blue, a touch of red with a bit of raw sienna thrown in. Luckily I had a lot of these leftover dried washes on my palette today. Perfect for the mushrooms on my counter. Just add a bit of water and reconstitute.

Comics at the Museum

If you love illustration and you have a chance to get to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in the next few months, a show that you must see is “Comics at the Museum.” My students and I spent a few hours there today with our sketchbooks and I will definitely go back before it closes at the end of March.

The show has an interesting premise. Fifteen illustrators from the publishing house La Pastèque have each chosen a work from the museum’s permanent collection and then created an original panel based on the work. The talent of these 15 artists is rich,varied and very witty. The pieces they chose for inspiration cover a wide range of styles and periods —  a classic Eames chair, an Inuit sculpture, a Colville painting, an Italian poster — and that’s what makes the exhibition so much fun.

It took the students a while to figure out the connection between the art objects and the illustrations and for many of them it was their first time at the museum.  I have to admit I was pretty thrilled to see many of them drawing for a full hour. Some drew the objects like I did, some drew bits of the illustrations and, in typical teenager fashion, some saw what there was to see in the first five minutes and promptly disappeared.

If you can’t see it

I’ve painted Saint Joachim Church and the Presbytery next to it many times but never from the convent parking lot so I thought I would draw it before work today. Only problem was, I couldn’t see much of the buildings because of the trees in front of them. That’s when I decided to make the trees my subject and use the building as a backdrop. It’s kind of a strange result but that’s what I like about drawing every day. You get to try stuff. Some of it works and some of it doesn’t. There’s always tomorrow.

Broken

Last Friday’s windstorm did a lot of damage to trees in Montreal but some were cleaned up rather quickly. I’ve been looking ever since for one to sketch and finally found it today next to Lac St. Louis on the grounds of the convent in Pointe Claire.

Great stuff

I love drawing outside but when I can’t there are always areas in my house where I can find great stuff to draw, including this corner of the workshop that even had a can of Great Stuff. Not quite sure what that is but I’m sure one day it will come in handy when I mess up part of a drawing and it needs to be filled in.

Big ol’ tree

Sketching wouldn’t fun if there wasn’t some sort of disaster every day. Today I forgot my paints at home so I did the line drawing in the car (combo of Micron pen and Sharpie) and ran back home before school to add in the colour. I used a limited palette of Phthalo blue, Alizarin and Gamboge to get those late fall muted colours.

Sunset from the parking lot

I bought a new box of Sharpies and cracked it open in the parking lot of the store. The setting sun was in my eyes (at only 4 pm now that we have set the clocks back!) but the backlit suburban houses were irresistible.

Test-driving Stillman and Birn

In a giant cleanup of my studio I found a little surprise: a cellophane-wrapped postcard-sized package of Stillman & Birn paper samples that I received at the Urban Sketchers Symposium in Barcelona. I sketched five shoes with five different pens on five different sheets of paper. You can see the names of the paper on the sheets. All are beautiful papers but my favorite by far: the Beta Series. 180 lb, natural white, cold press surface. The thick paper doesn’t warp at all, takes repeated washes and has a wonderful pebbly finish that is great for both drawing and painting.

Still life on a windy day

Power outages from the wind have affected me twice today. Once when I started this sketch and had to stop in the middle because I was painting in my basement studio and could hardly see my still life in the semi-darkness. And then again when my afternoon class got cancelled because the power went out at school too and I got to come home and finish the sketch.

Four spikes

Even though I draw most every day, I am always ready for a challenge. And perspective is a challenge — it just never gets any easier. The St. Joachim presbytery in Pointe Claire has all these great spikes that pierce the sky but boy are these things hard to draw. I did this in my Moleskine sketchbook with a MUJI mechanical pencil and many sighs of frustration.