The mystery of memory

Somewhere in a file drawer of my memory there was a pirate ship on the water, a house next to it and a jetty that faded into a thick blanket of fog. I was pretty sure it was a scene from a childhood trip to the Massachusetts coast. When I was in Salem today on a museum visit I had to make my way down to the waterfront to see if Salem was indeed the place, and sure enough it was exactly the picture I have had in my mind all these years, minus the fog. It’s funny how strong those visual memories can be. And in case you are wondering what those bits and pieces from my file drawer are — the jetty is Derby Wharf with the Derby Wharf Light down at the end, the house is the Pedrick Store House and the ship is the Friendship of Salem, a replica of a 1797 East Indiaman. 

Now here’s the funny thing. The house was transplanted from Marblehead in 2007, the ship was built in 2000, and my childhood trip to the Massachusetts coast was long before that. So where was that memory from?

In full mist

I didn’t quite get to finish this sketch. What started off as cloudy turned to mist and then to real rain just as I was getting to the part of the picture that I was most interested in. Those pilings under the clubhouse of the boat club in Rockport are fascinating to paint. Mossy green, deep and dark, full of mystery. The reflection is also study in deep rusts and indigos but just when I was getting to that part, the rain sent me indoors. I hope to get out there tomorrow and have another look. It just might be that the dark will extend right down and off the page on the right side. Sketched on Canson Moulin du Roi hot pressed paper, 9″ x 12″, and photographed with an iPhone camera at dusk, hence the poor colour reproduction. 

In full sun

This red building in Rockport — Motif No. 1 — is supposedly the most painted building in America. If you Google it, you’ll be amazed at how many renditions of it you can find. For that reason, it always has to be in at least one sketch while I’m in Rockport. I found a bench facing the harbour and sketched this in the blazing sun, which is not something I make a habit of. Usually I find some shade or bring an umbrella because if I’m in the sun I can’t see the colours on my palette and the white of my paper is blinding. But I liked the spot where I was sitting and painted it anyway which resulted in some super saturated colour.

Rockport warm up

It always takes me a little time to adjust to a place when I travel, to figure out the light, the locations, the wind, the temperature, the colours. But sketching in Rockport is like coming home. The first sketch always has to be the one from my window —the repeating motifs of lobster traps, little triangular roofs, buoys, pilings and boats. The light is changing fast at the end of the day but I had to get one in before darkness falls.

I also wanted to announce the winner of the draw for a free subscription to my Craftsy course. I’m sorry I couldn’t announce it sooner but I had no name, only an email address. Now that I have heard from the winner, I can say congratulations, Marie-Ange! I hope you are enjoying the class.

My first online video class

I am thrilled to launch my first online video class “Sketching Landscapes in Pen, Ink and Watercolor” today (on my birthday!) at Craftsy.com. The course is 2.5 hours long, and in seven lessons we cover all the steps I use when I’m sketching in the field. We start with a peek through my sketchbooks (yes, I carried them all to Denver in my suitcase!) and a glance at the materials I use on location. From there we journey to the Flatirons in Boulder at sunrise to work on composition and value sketches. Back in the studio, I go through the step-by-step painting of different types of skies, and then draw and paint the Flatirons scene, along with other common landscape elements such as trees and foregrounds, adding in texture and darks along the way. I hope that breaking it all down into steps will make it easy enough for any viewer to try out the steps on their own.

It was an interesting and exhilarating experience to create this course, but I couldn’t have done it without the help and guidance of all the talented people at Craftsy. In preparation, I had to really think through the steps of how I work, and this helped immensely during the shoot. You’ll find plenty of great shots of my palette, so you can see how I mix colour for each scene and how different types of pens create texture. If you haven’t seen the Craftsy platform yet, you’ll be impressed by the way it works. You can speed up or slow down the video, make notes, ask me questions, post your projects and see what other students are working on. As an instructor, it’s an interactive experience for me too, since I can answer individual questions and give feedback on projects (it’s almost like being in one of my summer workshops). And once you buy the class, you can watch it as often as you like. If you register through my blog, there’s even a special discount.

Register for the class at the discount rate!

Since this is the start of my summer sketching season, I’ll be posting new sketches on the projects page too. I’m thrilled with how my online class turned out and I look forward to seeing your projects. So get out there and do some landscape sketching!

Variety in greens

A few weeks ago someone asked if I could write a post about mixing greens. This pond scene seems like a good place to start.

There are really two parts to this answer. The first has to do with the pigments you use and the second with how you vary the greens in the scene. Let’s start with the pigments. Are you using tube/premixed greens? Sap Green would be an example of this. Or do you make your own greens from mixing yellow and blue? I do a bit of both. I have Azo Green (a lighter, more acid-looking green), Sap Green and Phthalo Green on my palette. I use them all, as well as mix my own greens from yellow and blue. I like the more natural greens that I can achieve from the mixes, and the combos I use most frequently for that are Azo Yellow and Ultramarine Blue, Azo Yellow and Indanthrene Blue, and Quinacridone Gold and Indanthrene Blue.

The reason I use so many combos to mix greens has to do with the second part of the answer. I want variety when a scene is dominantly green. I want some greens to be greyish (like the second layer of foliage below), some to be yellowish (like the grasses in the front of the pond) and some to be dark (like the shapes between the leaves). I can’t get that variety with one tube of green. If you notice, I’ve added some red in the foliage too, which— because it’s the complementary colour to green — really enlivens the greens.

And a little reminder: today is the last day to enter the draw to win my online video class “Sketching Landscapes in Pen, Ink and Watercolor” for free on the website Craftsy.com. Here’s the link: http://www.craftsy.com/ext/ShariBlaukopf_Giveaway Hopefully I’ll be announcing the lucky winner very soon.

Overhead

I always get a little antsy when I haven’t been out to draw in a few days and even though I knew rain was coming, I went out to sketch at the boat club, knowing that I might enjoy a little drama. From where I was sitting, what was most remarkable was the white of the masts against those darkening trees and sky. As you can see, the rain came down so quickly that I never was able to complete the bottom part of the sketch because I couldn’t see out of the window. The white lines of the rigging are done with a gel pen that I keep in my bag because white paint applied with a brush is just never fine enough.

Castle in the mist

It probably would have been wise to listen to the weatherman this morning. He said the rain would stop around noon but… there was a light mist falling when I left my house so it seemed that the rain would be over at any moment. When I joined the Tuesday Plein Air group I was surprised to see that I wasn’t the only optimist. There were five of us who spent the morning painting in that mist at Cap St. Jacques Nature Park. It was an interesting process to work on this sketch of Chateau Gohier which I did on Fabriano Hot Press paper. Normally this paper dries faster than you want it to, but today I couldn’t get it to dry at all. That made for perfect texture on the stones. If you look carefully you’ll see the marks from the mist. It’s almost like I used a fine spray bottle. Even the ink lines are somewhat runny from drawing on the damp paper.

The approach I took with this was a bit like what I will be teaching at the Urban Sketchers Symposium in Singapore in July. My workshop is called Big Brush Colour and in it I’ll be demonstrating this very technique. The first wash I did on this was one that covered the entire building. With my big mop brush I painted that first layer of colour in the stone, varying the wash as I went along. Later on I came in with darker colour in the roof, under the turret and in the individual stones, but it is really that one first big brush wash that ties it all together. The paper remained damp long after I got back to my car, and from what I hear about the humid weather in Singapore in July, I may have the same drying issues as I had today. There’s still time to register for the Symposium if you are interested!

New Bonaventure

Last summer I visited both coasts of Canada and despite doing lots of sketching, I didn’t get much painting done. Now that teaching is over for the semester I have a bit of time to revisit some of the scenes that I never got around to painting. New Bonaventure, Newfoundland, is where The Grand Seduction was filmed. If you saw the movie, you’ll remember Taylor Kitsch arriving in this bay by boat while the whole town plays cricket on the upper green. It’s quite a spectacular setting with the dark hills behind.

In my studio paintings I’ve been trying to work in larger formats which makes the work too big to scan. This was photographed, which is a production in itself. Getting the right lights, balancing the colour, setting up a tripod… it takes about as long to do as it does to paint the watercolour. Painted on Fabriano Artistico CP, 140 lb, 30″ x 20″.

Sailing shapes

When I looked at this scene early this morning the first thing I thought was “how do I make sense of this confusion?” I’ve painted it before — last summer, and the summer before — but not in the early morning like this and perhaps with fewer boats in the bay. If you think about it, it’s impossible to draw in all the details on the boats, unless of course you have all day and besides, why draw details that you can just as easily add in with a brush? In a scene like this there are three repeating motifs: the sail covers, the masts and the shapes of the foreground boats. The rest is just filler. Bits of lights and darks between those shapes that convey more rows of boats.

So here’s what I did. I drew the foreground boats, the sail covers, the horizon line and the line of trees. When it came time to paint, I started with the sky and water and left a good chunk of unpainted (white) shapes in the middle. If you look carefully, there are no boats behind that first row. Just masts, sail covers and little dark and light shapes. I painted the reflections fairly early on in the process and it’s a good thing I did since the wind picked up not long after and changed the scene considerably. The last thing I did was the masts, trying to connect them with the sails, and not always succeeding.