Good news and bad painting

Let’s start with the good news. My painting “Breakwater” was selected for 90^th Annual Open Juried Exhibition of the Canadian Society of Painters in Watercolour at the Halifax Public Archives Exhibition Room, Halifax, Nova Scotia.  (Exhibition date:  Nov 4, – Nov. 28, 2015). This was painted on location in Gloucester in June and if you want to read a little bit about the process you can here.

And now for the bad painting. Yesterday I received this comment on my blog from Francisco about my post from Saturday, “would love to see a batch of the “disasters”, might qualm the feelings of inadequacy that arise when viewing your work.” He was responding to a comment that I had made about painting without pencil lines,”When I paint this kind of sketch with no pencil lines, it always starts out easy. You make one nice brush stroke (in this case, the geranium bud at the top) and then you move downward. At a certain point you realize that it is getting more complex and there is no plan for where to go next. It is a bit like a flow chart. One arrow points to success and one leads to disaster. More often than not the outcome is the latter, but occasionally it turns out ok.”

I’m up to Francisco’s challenge. I can’t seem to find any disasters (in the disaster pile) that occurred because of lack of pencil lines but I do have this little dud that I painted on the same trip to Rockport as my lighthouse above. I would probably qualify this one under the heading “lack of planning”. I can’t blame this on bad paper because this is done on Arches, nor on the weather, because it was a perfectly beautiful day. It was painted while on an outing with family (can’t blame them either) but in my haste to get this done and not keep them waiting, I didn’t take the few minutes necessary at the beginning to sketch out a value plan. The result is a weird optical illusion — the rear wall of rock seems to float above the foreground rocks. Probably a little work in Photoshop would help me figure this out, but I think what I did wrong was to bring the dark reflections of the rocks on the left too far down. And because I knew something was wrong, instead of leaving it alone and analysing it later, I did what I often do, which is to keep on adding paint. There are other design errors too. The shapes at the top seem to echo those at the bottom, almost like two paintings. And the foliage in the shadow of the rock wall is too light. Could this dud have been avoided with good planning? Probably. Will I make the same mistake again? Sadly, yes. But it’s a good exercise to spend time analysing what went wrong and trying to avoid it next time. Thanks Francisco.

Fuchsia on Aquarius

I remember some years ago that when I tried using Strathmore Aquarius paper, the experience was unpleasant. The paper had fiberglass in it, and if you made the mistake of rubbing your hand on the surface, you ended up with small, irritating fibres in your skin. How could I forget that? But the paper has changed, and when someone suggested recently that I should give it another try, I bought a sheet at the art supply store. Strathmore Aquarius II is quite a thin sheet and seems be manufactured only in this 80 lb weight, but because of the synthetic and cotton composition, it doesn’t buckle when you paint on it.

I took it out to sketch a few pots in the garden, with the dual purpose of trying the paper and using up a blob of Vermilion paint that had leaked in my palette. I really don’t know how this paper would be if I used it for a more complex (and layered) painting but for simple brush shapes like this, it worked pretty well. And I think this would be a great paper for taking out in the field. It’s smooth enough for a pen line and the colours remain pretty bright. And as advertised, the paper doesn’t buckle at all so no taping required. Would it replace Arches or Fabriano for larger paintings? No way. There’s no tooth to the paper, so forget granulation. But I have been writing for weeks about trying to find a paper that is both smooth enough for a fine pen line and textured enough for a wash. This is definitely a contender (along with Fluid 100 CP) for that.

Purple door

There are three much-photographed Victorian houses on Carré St. Louis. You’ll even see them in the Wikipedia entry for the square. One has red trim (here is the door I sketched a few years ago), one has teal blue trim and then there’s my favourite —the purple house. Since we’re having some kind of September heat wave in Montreal, I took a little time to sketch that house today. It’s especially nice in the morning when the sun travels across the door.

Me and my Sharpie

Me and my Sharpie went out today to draw some people. It’s been a long time since we’ve done this, and the exercise was painful. We haven’t been keeping in shape and it shows. We parked ourselves across from the weekly market where people come to collect their vegetables, hoping that the slowly moving line of figures would help to work out the kinks between us. After about thirty minutes things started getting better. The hand loosened up, the lines were more fluid, and the ink started flowing. We agreed that this would be a daily encounter for the next little while.

Newly shorn

Argh. It started off as a perfect view of a yellow building in sun and the rest of the street in shadow, and I had one hour of sketching time before heading off to school. I finished my drawing just as an SUV pulled up and blocked my view. Yikes, I should have known that would happen. I spent a moment debating the situation. Draw the car or ignore it? I looked for the driver to see where he was going and spotted him ducking into a barbershop. That meant at least 20 minutes of painting time for the car. Fortunately for me my estimate of the barber was quite accurate and I had plenty of time to paint the car before the newly-shorn man drove off. 

False alarm

There was a storm warning of epic proportions today. Here it is, word for word, from the Environment Canada site: “Very strong wind gusts can damage buildings, down trees and blow large vehicles off the road. Be prepared for severe weather. Take cover immediately, if threatening weather approaches” What should a sketcher do with a warning like this? I sketched in my car, just in case. Turned out to be nothing, but who would want to get hit by a large vehicle being blown off the road?

Begonias and a new brush

I’ve been trying out a new brush (photo below) this week. It’s a sable blend from Rosemary & Co, and what’s unusual about it is the shape. It’s a 1/2″ dagger — an angled shape I’ve never used before. I first tried a Rosemary brush in Cambodia when Suhita Shirodkar lent me hers to try, and she almost didn’t get it back. I liked it so much I ordered one when I got home. It’s advertised as being a great brush for long flowing lines, and it is. But this was the only brush I used for my begonia painting, so it’s clearly wide enough for big washes as well. And what I liked most about it was the ability to draw with it too, both at the start and at the end of the painting (there are no pencil lines in this). The brush is so delicate that you can make a skeleton drawing, move into the painting, and then finish with more calligraphic lines. It’s a real beauty. I can see why many artists use these handmade brushes. Painted on Arches Rough, 300lb, 12″ x 9″.  

Art by the Lake

Once again this year I am happy to be part of “Art by the Lake” — the annual outdoor show of the Lakeshore Association of Artists. The exhibition takes place on the lakeside grounds of Stewart Hall (a place I’ve painted many times) on Saturday and Sunday, September 12 & 13. It’s always an honour to be exhibiting with this talented group of artists, and there’s no nicer way to spend a September afternoon than wandering around looking at the art. This year the raffle prize will be my painting “Lake Water”, so if you come by my booth don’t be surprised if I try to sell you some tickets. The money raised from the raffle (as well as a portion of the proceeds from all sales of art) funds a mentorship program for a Visual Arts student through The John Abbott College Foundation. The show will be on from 10 am to 5 pm both days, so if you are in the area, please come by to say hello.

As an added bonus, there will also be eight artist demos at the show, at different times on Saturday and Sunday afternoon. My demo is at 1:30 pm on Sunday, and I’ll be demonstrating ink and wash technique like the one I did on the blue house on St. Joachim in Pointe Claire. I hope you come by to say hello.

Campus

If you want someplace to practice adding figures to your paintings or sketches, a college campus is a great place to start. Why? Because students, for the most part, walk slowly. They dawdle. They chat. And they are in no rush to get to class which makes them perfect subjects for painting. I don’t need to be reminded that it will soon get colder and they’ll be walking faster (and I will probably be indoors) but for now, on these beautiful end-of-summer days, there is a constant stream of models waiting to be painted.

Testing vibrancy

Warning: this post is for paper nerds.

I’ve been looking for a watercolour paper that is good for drawing on with a fine ink pen and also takes washes well and keeps colours vibrant. It’s become a bit of an obsession for me and I appreciate that every time I write about it, people send me suggestions. In today’s experiment, I thought I’d compare apples to apples by painting the same scene each time on different surfaces. In fact, I was so scientific that I lined up all the sheets of paper next to each other (except for the last one which I did later) and tried to paint each section of the sketch with the same wash from my palette. That’s about as scientific as I can get with paint.

This first sample (of a scene I saw on the river on Thailand) is painted on Canson Moulin du Roy cold pressed paper. I’ve been frustrated with this stock because it seems to absorb too much paint and the colours dry lighter than they should. In watercolour,  you can always expect the paint to dry a little lighter but not this much. Compared with the other papers, the colours came out looking flat and were considerably duller than I had hoped.

The second sample is painted on Arches 140 LB cold pressed paper. I usually use this paper for watercolour alone, and as I suspected, it doesn’t take the ink line well. The paper is too textured and seems to dry out the pen, which is not what I want. Predictably the colour washes look fine since this is a premium quality watercolour paper. The third sample is painted on Fluid 100 cold pressed paper (which I also tried a few weeks ago). I am still liking this paper, both for the way it takes a pen line and for how vibrant the colours are. The last sample is painted on Fluid 100 hot pressed paper. Naturally the ink line is great because of the smoothness of the paper, meaning that the pen glides effortlessly over the surface and reacts to pressure, creating a thicker line in some places. That is exactly what I want. And as you can see below, the colours are pretty vibrant too. I’ve worked with hot pressed paper before and while it’s not always my favourite surface to work on, for small sketches where I really need a good combo of dynamic ink line and saturated colour, this seems like the winning paper. And guess what? If you’re still here, reading this, you might be a paper nerd too.