Back to school sunflowers

It was a bit of a shock to get back to school today, both for me and for the students. It’s one of the nicest days of the summer and I think we were all in a bit of a daze to be back in the classroom. The start of the school year also marks the end of being able to work on large paintings, at least until the weekend. I took my sketchbook out to paint some sunflowers and ended up painting them two ways.

The first sketch was in my regular sketchbook. I quickly realized two things. 1: Sunflowers are hard to paint because the dark centres create a hole in the composition. 2. I have been spoiled by working on good watercolour paper for the last month or so and now it’s very difficult to go back to working in a book.That led me to redo the sunflowers. 1. I wanted to solve the problem of the dark centres. 2. I needed to work on some good paper.

I moved to another room (so as not to have the flowers in front of me) and started again. From my sketch I did a simpler sketch and this time instead of the having the centre of the flower as the darkest shape, I added an even darker area behind the flowers. I think that solved the problem of the hole. I also tried to keep the yellow of the flowers as a more unified and simpler shape. These are sunflowers, after all, and their essence seems to have gotten lost in the first sketch.

From chime to chime

People often ask how long it takes to do a painting or a sketch and usually I don’t know. I always lose track of the time. Except today I know exactly how long it took to do this half sheet. The church bells chimed at 9 when I was setting up my easel and then again at 11 when I was putting everything back in the car.

This week I have been thinking about how to treat foliage in watercolour so the last three paintings have had good sections of trees. Today I tried a few different brushes because I instead of making deliberate marks for every leaf I wanted the brush to do some of the texture work for me. I used a hake and a squirrel mop brush, both much more floppy than I’m used to. If you treat the foliage quite dryly, you can get some nice texture from both of these brushes.

Washington Park

There are still paintings from my summer travels that haven’t been painted. Places I saw that I didn’t have time to paint because I was teaching or driving or it was just too late in the day and the light was fading. Washington Park in Anacortes was one of those places. It had the same impossibly tall pines that I looked at every morning from my cabin. Painted on 300 lb Fabriano cold press paper. Size: 11″ x 15″.

Back in the hood

There is a certain comfort in sketching the familiar. After a summer of travel it feels great to be looking at my neighbourhood with fresh eyes. Despite a chilly wind blowing off the lake and an equipment malfunction (broken tripod leg), I was happy to be back at the yacht club to sketch today. There didn’t seem to be much action at the sailing school — I guess lessons are over for the season — and before you know it the boats will be coming out of the water, so I have to make the most of the time that’s left. Painted at a picnic table on a Saunders Waterford CP block, 9″ x 12″.

Rediscovering a brush

There’s an interesting feature in the October issue of Watercolor magazine called “Brushing Up: five artists share their go-to brushes for achieving their signature looks.” I love reading articles like this and it made me dust off some brushes in my studio that I use infrequently. In the process I discovered a little gem — a 1″ Grumbacher Aquarelle flat that I don’t remember buying and that I haven’t used in years but that works like a gem. It’s so nice, in fact, that I had to do a little research to find out more about it. Turns out it’s a sable brush, one of the best ever made by them. I do have other flats of the same size but the secret with this one is how much wash it holds and what a sharp edge you can get with it. You can paint a whole painting with just this brush, except for possibly the tiniest of details. If you are interested in something similar (this one has been discontinued), have a look at the Richeson Series 6229. It’s the closest I could find to this one.

Capitol Reef cross-section

The desert colours are still in my brain, especially the different hues that comprise the many layers in the canyons and cliffs of Utah. I bought a poster of a geologic cross-section because I loved the names of the rock — Navaho Sandstone, Redwall Limestone, Bright Angel Shale and Carmel Formation — and because they serve as a good reminder as I finish the paintings from home. Each park was visually unique and splendid but Capitol Reef remains a favourite because I spent the longest time there and it was relatively quiet compared to the more popular parks like Bryce and Zion.

Tri-state car panoramas

I’m just back from a full week of touring and painting in Utah’s five National Parks. I still have comments to catch up on and more sketches to post going back to day one. The start of the sketching week begins like this:

It was easier to get to southern Utah through Las Vegas, rather than fly into Salt Lake City, but that meant that last Sunday, upon arrival in Vegas, we had to drive directly to the first National Park which was almost six hours away. The start of the drive was surprisingly pleasant despite the long flight, with changing desert vistas and wide open skies. When I looked at the map I realized that before getting to Utah from Nevada, we had to cross a little corner of Arizona, so I dug out my panoramic sketchbook with the idea of capturing a bit of landscape from each state. The view of the Nevada hills was grey and dry, not a tree in sight, just low scrub and cracked ground. By the time we reached Arizona, the colours of the rock started to change. When we crossed into Utah, the setting sun lit up the red hills and green pastures.

I won’t go into too much detail about the harrowing second half of the drive — in total darkness, on switchbacks through narrow canyons and then for a long time on an open range. I’d rather forget it. But if you want more info I can put you in touch with some of the locals I met a few days later who told me that NO ONE drives on an open range at night.

The Temple of Sinawava

It was a pleasure today to have a guide through Zion National Park — and even better that my guide is a watercolour painter. Russell Black lives not far from the park and paints here often so imagine my luck when he offered to accompany me to some favourite sketching spots of his. Zion is the greenest of Utah’s National Parks with rivers, waterfalls and hanging gardens. I guess we could have climbed to the great lookout points but it was a pleasure to sketch in the cool shade of the greenery both in the Temple of Sinawava and near the waterfalls of the Emerald Pools. Check out Russell’s wonderful watercolours of these splendid spots here.

Here’s Russell sketching in the shade of the canyon.

Lost in the hoodoos

Each of Utah’s five National Parks have vastly different rock formations and that’s what makes them so interesting and yet so difficult to capture in paint. Capitol Reef was big red canyon walls and layers of the Waterpocket Fold. Arches was monoliths. Canyonlands, which I visited yesterday but had no time to write about was, as the name suggests, vast vistas seen from above. Today’s park is Bryce Canyon. Again this is geography that you look down into from the rim. It’s a more hospitable landscape for the shade-seeking sketcher because of the pines along the edge, but it’s geology that is so foreign to my eyes that it took a while to comprehend.
Looking into the canyons of orange limestone pillars, it took some time to think about how to paint these, and I decided that it might be best to start by sketching them. The spires are vertical but the layers of colour are horizontal and mostly deepen in intensity as they move downward. It’s not necessary to paint every hoodoo, although that is what you might think upon first impression. I tried to use something I learned from Tom Hoffman. How can you say it in the least amount of paint strokes? Tomorrow I will be in Zion National Park and I suppose that will bring a whole new menu of geological formations that I will have to comprehend.

Delicate Arch

Today’s painting day started with rain and ended with rain. In the middle the sun at Arches National Park was blazing hot and that’s when I sketched the iconic Delicate Arch from a viewpoint a distance away. Painting it up close would have involved a three-mile hike of some difficulty on open slickrock, carrying 2 litres of drinking water along with my painting gear (and more water for painting!) The high desert conditions make watercolour difficult. As you can see from my sketch, the water on my brush dried before it hit the paper.
I’ve never seen anything quite like the rock formations in this park. A series of monolithic red sandstone fin formations stand out all over the park. They really need to be seen to be believed because there are no photos or sketches that can do these arches and spires justice. Despite that I keep trying.