The grey season and a few invitations

It’s the grey season now. The month when I check my weather app daily, looking for a snowflake icon. So far, nothing on the horizon at all, so I will be painting scenes like this one. Bare trees, bare ground, dead grasses, and hopefully a bit of colour somewhere in the scene for variety. Despite the lack of colour, it’s the best time to paint from my car because I need neither AC nor heat and I can be out there for as long as I need.

There are few upcoming shows that I’m excited to take part in this month. This coming Thursday, November 7, is the opening of The Merry Mini show at the Cline House Gallery in Cornwall, Ontario. I’ll be joining 50+ artists (including my husband Spyro who is exhibiting photos in the show), and all works are 12″ x 12″. It’s the perfect time to stock up on original gift ideas for the holidays!

It’s always a great honour to have a watercolour in the Stewart Hall Art Rental Collection. There’s a top-notch selection of work and this year I’ll be exhibiting “Hidalgo 1“. I hope to see you at the vernissage on November 17. All the info is on the card below.

Under the wire

I flew out the door at 4 pm to sketch the last of the pumpkins at the local farm stand. It was a sorry display of rejected gourds, dried out perennial grasses and overgrown ornamental cabbage. There were a few scary black cat cutouts that had blown to the ground in today’s wind, but it was still fun to be in my car studio. I couldn’t let a Halloween go by without sketching a few of these. And then as fast as I got there, I flew home to empty my boxes of tiny chocolate bars in a big bowl before the first of the trick or treaters arrived!

Bar Harbor Village Green

The Village Green in Bar Harbor is the perfect spot for an urban sketching workshop demo. There’s at least one of everything, or at least everything I want to include in a sketch. There are people, dogs, cars, buildings, trees, a distant mountain, a bald eagle flying overhead, a trash can, a lamp post, a parking meter, a gazebo, a giant clock, a fountain, benches and probably a lot more. As you can see I couldn’t include everything.

We set up in the early morning when the sun was behind a tree but as it moved, we were facing into the light, and that made things a little tricky. I wanted to convey some of the bright colours of fall but in that light, the trees were backlit and ended up darker than I was hoping they would be. Maybe next year I’ll turn around and paint the fountain and the gazebo instead.

This might be it

I’ve been looking for a big old maple tree to draw. You can read about my criteria here. For over a decade I painted another beautiful old maple in my former neighbourhood, but it’s too far away to go for a short sketch outing.

Well, good news! I may have found my tree yesterday. And it’s not too far from my house.

Here’s why it works:

• I can see it from a parking lot!
• It has a sign in front of it, like my old tree
• It has a big wide trunk and a domed crown that hasn’t been chopped off
• It’s not in a forest. I can see the whole tree.

For my first sketch of it, I should have parked a bit further back but I was so excited to find it that I jumped right into sketching. Next time I will try to fit all of it on my page. I don’t think it’s fully ready to sketch yet anyway. I’m waiting for the leaves to go bright yellow, which should be at the end of the month. But in the meantime, I am relieved that found it, just in time for “My Favourite Tree” season.

Cul de sac

It’s National Tree Week. I guess that means different things for different people but for me it means get out and paint a tree! This is one I found on a dead end road not too far from here.

I’m still getting to know the roads and landscapes around our new neighbourhood. As soon as you leave this suburb it becomes rural very fast. Horse farms and then corn fields. Lots of them. The long road I followed had some beautiful scenery but no shoulder to stop on. I found this little spot at the end of the road, where I pulled into a driveway next to a house. The bright fall light made some interesting shadows on the upper part of the tree. I painted from the comfy seat of my car studio, on a 10 x 14″ pad of Arches Rough paper.