Greetings and happy holidays from Sanibel

My beach sketching skills are a bit rusty but nonetheless I’m happy to be on Sanibel Island in Florida for a bit of family time and relaxation. Starting with this first page of a new sketchbook, and with a bicycle as my vehicle of choice to find places to draw, I hope to fill this book up over the next few weeks.

Thanks to everyone who sent me notes over the past few months during a busy semester when finding time to get some drawing in was near impossible. Your comments and kind words sustained me in more ways than I can describe. I hope you all have the most wonderful holiday season with lots of time to draw and paint! All the best from this beautiful shell-covered island.

Riggers, daggers and stripers: six calligraphic brushes

In yesterday’s post I wrote about a new brush I was trying out, and promised to write more about it today. When I sat down to sketch the brush I decided to expand the post by comparing all the brushes I use for calligraphic strokes and marks. Turns out I have four more that I use frequently. Of course I had to start by sketching them all, and then painted with each of them to demonstrate the types of strokes you can obtain by using them.

1 & 2: Richeson Squirrel Dagger Stripers
The first two are the short-handled brushes I used for my background trees yesterday. My friend Russell Black had this to say about the origin of the brushes, “the dagger striper was used to pin-stripe lines on the bodywork of cars. Used with thicker “lead” based paint, it wasn’t originally that floppy. Used with thinner mediums, the long squirrel hair can be a bit unpredictable.” So true. And that is what I liked about it when I painted yesterday’s trees. That floppy unpredictability, the randomness of the stroke is what makes it so much fun to use for organic shapes like trees branches. Brush 1 was a bit thicker than Brush 2, and you can see how fine the wispiest lines are in #2. Note: For all the samples below I loaded the brushes with a watery mix of Cerulean Blue, a bit of Burnt Sienna and then added Indigo into the wet areas. 

3. Scroggy’s Loose Goose from Cheap Joe’s
This brush is also made from squirrel hair. The marks are quite similar to the brushes above (maybe a bit more delicate), but the brush has a longer handle which makes it easier for some people to use. It also doesn’t hold quite as much paint, but it still has that floppy random quality that I love.

4. Rosemary Brush Co. 1/2″ Sable Blend Series 772 Dagger
This dagger from Rosemary is the one that Liz Steel introduced me to. She uses it for just about everything. I love this brush for painting trees (both branches and foliage) because it creates both a wide stroke and fine lines, so you can drag from the big areas of leaves right into the finer branch lines. It’s a wonderful brush for leaf shapes.

5. Richeson Grey Matters Rigger Series 9834 #3
This synthetic rigger brush is useful for so many things. I love it for painting power lines in an urban landscape, but it’s also great for painting grasses and branches. As you can see, because it’s long and even, the strokes are more uniform. I love to paint with it because as the brush runs out of wash the strokes get finer and finer. Because the head of the brush is very long it holds a lot of wash, allowing you to paint for quite a long time without reaching for more wash on your palette.

6. Richeson Sable/Squirrel Reservoir Liner #6 
This magic brush dances across the pages, creating the finest web of tiny lines. Because it has two diameters — one for holding all the paint (hence “reservoir” in its name) and a much finer one for painting with — it is perfect for the thinnest branches, wires, grasses or other details in your sketches. You need to dip into a very wet puddle to get it flowing, but the marks it makes are unique in their delicacy.

Tree, house and squirrel

Have you ever tried a dagger striper brush? I think they were originally used by sign painters and lettering artists. The one I’m trying out is made from squirrel and I used it this morning for the first time when painting the view from my front window.

The brush has a short wooden handle and very soft, long squirrel hair. It’s an unusual experience to paint with it because the brush is very floppy but for painting certain things — like the trees in the background or the texture on bark — it is the perfect tool. It has a life of its own when you paint with it (and I hold it quite loosely) so the brush strokes end up being almost random as the brush flops around the paper. It holds a lot of wash and the strokes stay wet for a long time, making it easy to go back into them with more pigment as I did on the snow shadows. Tomorrow I’ll take a photo of the brush and demonstrate the type of marks it makes.

Gouache with gouache

Here’s the difficulty of painting tubes of gouache with gouache. If you squeeze out pigment before you do your drawing, you run the risk of having the gouache dry into hard mounds by the time you’re ready to paint. If you decide to wait and instead squeeze the pigment out after the drawing is done, it’s hard to place the tubes back in exactly the same position unless you move them one by one, very carefully. Not an insurmountable feat. Simply a minor inconvenience. Sketched on Stillman & Birn Nova series, 3.5 x 5″.

A recipe for snow shadows

On very cold and sunny days in the winter (if you factor in the wind today it’s -29°C in Montreal!) the shadows on the snow are brilliant and sharp. I can’t think of one tube of blue paint that would approximate the colour perfectly. Today in my studio I did a few experiments to see what mix would work best for the scene that I saw while walking the dog this morning.

In the past I’ve used Cobalt Blue for snow but I wanted something a bit more purple and less opaque. Since my sky is painted with a light wash of Phthalo Blue, I thought I’d start with that. I added the tiniest drop of Quinacridone Rose to my blue wash, but felt it needed a warmer blue as well, so into that I mixed some Cerulean Blue. I always keep a test sheet next to me for trying out colours, and this seemed to dry at just the right intensity. It’s always a balancing act, getting the colour right and then mixing enough of it to paint all the shadows in one go without running out of wash. But this was an easy mix to make and fairly easy to duplicate, so I’ll be trying it again on the next winter scenes I do. And if you are curious about the really dark trees — that’s mostly Indanthrene Blue, a bit of Indigo and some Alizarin as well. Arches CP paper, or maybe rough, 15″ x 11″.

Rue St. Joachim

The first big snowfall yesterday coincided with the end of my teaching semester. I’m thrilled to have some time to paint again, post more frequently, answer comments in a more timely manner… and simply have time to breathe.

Right after a big storm like this one, parking on the street is sometimes problematic because of the snowplows, so I painted in studio this morning. My limited palette was mostly Cerulean Blue, Yellow Ochre, Cobalt Blue and Burnt Sienna — a fairly quiet choice of colours for this scene. Paper: Bockingford cold press, 15″ x 11″. Playlist: some chill jazz on Spotify.

Gouache experiment on toned paper

I’ve been having so much fun using a Stillman & Birn toned sketchbook these past few weeks that I decided to take it one step further by painting in gouache. But gouache is hard to find. The first store I went to had none, and the second place had a few tubes in a sale bin. I guess it’s not very popular, at least in my neck of the woods.

Back at home I placed a few things on my studio table — two of my favourite pieces of pottery (the one on the left recently made by a friend of mine) and a natural sponge that I use for painting (in case you can’t tell what the blob on the right is).

I drew first in pencil and then painted, using a limited palette of White, Lamp Black, Cadmium red, Ultramarine Blue and Cadmium Yellow. I’ve never painted with gouache before but here are a few things I learned:
1. You need to mix up enough paint if you are going to paint a large area. Notice what happened in the background when I ran out of paint on the right side.
2. Gouache dries fast! You need to paint quickly.
3. It’s hard to duplicate a colour if you need to add more to an area (again, look at that background.
4. You can correct mistakes quite easily by painting over areas.

Here are a few things I like about gouache (and some of these are why I like oil as well):
1. The flatness of the colour
2. The subtleties of the colour
3. Working from dark to light
4. Adding white
5. The fast drying time.

I will certainly be trying this again. Especially since I cleaned out the sale bin at the store.

The mind wanders

Ahhhh… Can you hear my sigh of relief that classes are done for this semester? It seems to me that the exhale is so loud it can be heard from very far away. But with classes over it means that the worst is yet to come — the piles of grading that have to be looked at before final marks are turned in.

I took a day off today to let my mind wander, sit in my studio corner, and think about scenes I want to paint. I’ve now added a few things to the room thanks to great ideas from blog readers — an old lamp, as well as a side table to rest my teacup on. A footstool will come in time. From that comfortable spot I drew Alice after her walk. Nothing too strenuous for Day One of my (almost) holiday.

Studio corner

I’ve spent some time these past few months making my studio a better place to paint — adding lighting, clearing out junk, etc. There’s still a bit more to be done but yesterday I spotted this big old chair on the other side of the room and I had an idea. I dragged and pushed and dragged some more until I got it into the perfect spot in the corner right next to all my favourite art books. When school finishes next week I hope to be spending some time there, catching up on reading. Sketched in a Saunders Waterford FatPad, 140 lb Rough, 28 x 38 cm.

Inside and outside: more experiments on toned paper

I spent a bit of time this week experimenting some more with a tiny Stillman & Birn Nova series toned paper sketchbook. Since I haven’t worked much on this type of paper, it’s been a lot of fun to try different materials on the tan surface.

On my way home from work one day I stopped in Lachine and did a little street scene on 6th Avenue. The light was great that day, and even though the sketch is a bit messy because I drew with charcoal instead of pencil, this will hopefully be the sketch for a larger painting.

The next day I had a few minutes before leaving for school so I did a quick sketch of some bananas on the kitchen counter. This time I tried mixing some white paint into the yellow watercolour to get a more opaque effect, something like gouache.

Today I drew at a café, and added white watercolour, white chalk and a bit of transparent watercolour to my ink drawing. This paper works really well when you can add lots of little darks and lights and use the tan paper as your middle tone. So far this is the technique I like the best.