More from the woodpile

They’ve been working to tidy up the sandpit/quarry near my house. All summer I’ve been watching workers cut down trees and cut up the logs. But it’s not really a place I can go to paint on location, even in summer. It’s fairly isolated and it’s also private property. Best to paint from my photos, I think.

This is a working sand quarry. Dump trucks come and go as the sand is dredged from the bottom of the lake. It’s especially beautiful in winter (of course I think everything is more beautiful in winter!) and very atmospheric. On the right side there’s usually some smoke coming from underground, caused by decomposing organic matter, I guess. I will have to figure out to paint that before I add it to this scene.

The woodpile

Alice loves this woodpile that we see on our walks every morning. There are no doubt countless other dogs that have explored it and many small animals that live in it, and it’s full of wonderful smells. I love it too, especially in winter, when the logs and stumps have a coating of snow on them.

Winter landscapes are always fairly monochrome (a few blues and few earth tones) but today I added Burnt Umber to my palette so I could get those real darks. I mixed it both with Prussian Blue (that upper section) and Ultramarine (for the logs). I think I will be painting the woodpile again soon.

Daoust dumpster

As I look outside my office window, wet snow is falling. Some of it is even accumulating on the ground. I don’t know if it will still be around tomorrow morning, but I hope so. At this time of year, I get very excited to paint snow scenes.

Earlier this week, I drove around the town of Hudson, looking for something interesting to paint. There are some beautiful old houses in the town but it was afternoon and at this time of year, darkness descends quickly. I realized that I didn’t have enough time to do a complex architectural scene. But I was parked in a spot across from a construction site, and the dappled light was just right on the dumpster that was sitting on the front yard. I don’t think this would have been half as interesting as a composition if the plywood and palettes hadn’t been there, but the yellow shape intersecting with the blue gave me a focus in the scene.

This was painted with a fairly limited palette: Cerulean Blue, Ultramarine Blue, Raw Sienna and Burnt Sienna with a few dabs of red on the truck. The darks are made with the classic combo of Ultramarine and Burnt Sienna. Painted on a pad of Arches CP paper, 14″ x 10″.

Corn for the King

I know I’ve shared this painting before but here’s some fantastic news:

I am so very honoured that my painting “October Corn” was selected by the jury to be one of the 25 paintings to be included in the final gift to the CSPWC’s Royal Collection Trust Project. These 25 watercolours will join 75 others in the collection (donated in 1985 and 2000) that are part of The Royal Collection of King Charles III, and they will reside in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle. Many thanks to Linda Kemp for all her hard work organizing this project, as well as the members of the jury.

Here’s the text that accompanied my entry: Cornfields are everywhere around where I live in Quebec, and corn is so typically Canadian. While out exploring my new semi-rural neighbourhood one day, I discovered miles and miles of cornfields. The corn had been harvested but the dry, rustling stalks were still standing, and as the morning sun filtered through the foliage, it created a strikingly abstract pattern. I thought it would be a great challenge to design a painting that is simply a repeating pattern of contrasting colours, lights and darks. I wanted to convey the light coming through the stalks and hitting the tops of the floppy leaves, as well as give a sense of all the colours that you see when you get close to the stalks and the decaying foliage. Surprisingly, there’s so much variety in the colours — bright reds, yellows and greens but also a variety of earth tones. I’m really happy I stopped to get a close-up view of the beauty of what some may find a mundane subject.

I also wanted to wish all my American friends Happy Thanksgiving! I know it’s a huge holiday in the US and everyone travels home to be with family. Canadian Thanksgiving was in mid-October and I was teaching in Bar Harbor at the time, but we managed to make a small turkey dinner in our AirBnB to celebrate even though we were far from home.

If you’re looking for something to do while you digest that turkey dinner, today is the start of my Black Friday Week Sale on my most popular courses. Have a look here!

Kohlrabi

When someone gives me a gift, I always try to record it in my sketchbook. If it’s a gift from someone’s garden, even more so.

Yesterday Alison brought over this purple kohlrabi from her garden. I had never tried one of these until a few years ago when it was in our CSA basket. I wasn’t sure what to do with it but the farmer told me to peel it, chop it and add it to salads. I’ve been doing that ever since. But not before sketching it. It’s such an odd looking thing because the leaves come out of the sides of the bulb, but it’s also quite beautiful, especially this one since it’s a deep purple.

I started my sketch by drawing with my Platinum ink pen. I really wanted to convey the solidity of the bulb and the curve of the delicate leaves. But once I was done, I felt that it was missing that purple colour so I went over the whole thing with some light watercolour washes in purple, green and ochre. Now I can peel it and eat it!

Sketched in my Stillman & Birn Zeta sketchbook, 8″ x 8″.

Rotten

Sometimes you just have to pick a subject that describes your day or how you are feeling, or both.

I needed a little change of tools to shake things up today. I grabbed a pad of Stillman & Birn toned paper, some black chalk pencils, a white chalk pencil and a few coloured pencils. I wasn’t sure if this would work but I layered the yellow pencil both underneath and on top of the chalk. I was hoping to convey a bit of the afternoon sun on the bruised fruit. I like the layered effect on the beige paper, and I appreciated the distraction of the time spent drawing.