Colour at dusk

I don’t do much painting at dusk but today I was near the lake at just the right time so I did a quick sketch in the car. It was harder than I imagined. The winter light changes so fast! In the span of 15 minutes (the time it took to put most of the information down) I went from being able to see my colours on my palette and on my paper to practically working blind. I had to darken the branches when I got home. It was a great exercise in speed painting.

Value sketch for Walkway

Every time I go to the Jean Talon Market I notice these back alley structures — mostly houses with sheds and garages, and some gardens in between. But the most interesting one, by far,  is a two-storey shed with an outdoor walkways that leads up to the house. I hope to paint this sometime soon so I have been working out the values for it.

Doing these little value sketches helps me immensely to clarify what I want to do in the painting. At the same time I can eliminate unnecessary shapes that I feel will detract from the composition. And as always, if it works out, I will post it.

Blue steps

There are days when I drive around scouting for something interesting to sketch and nothing catches my eye. Until I really slow down, or park, or park and sit awhile. Then I start to see interesting shapes or shadows or preferably both. The landscape is not very inspiring these days because the leaves are off the trees and there is no snow yet, resulting in a rather gray vista, but this week the light is crisp and bright, making for some great shadow shapes.

Milk and honey

Lucky me. No one needed milk or honey while I was drawing this at my favourite Thursday sketching spot.

Two-tone

I have no idea what to call this structure but it was on my left when I was painting the houses in my post of a few days ago (Corner). I was so intrigued by the beauty of the rusted blue metal structure that I went back today to sketch it. It is on the property of a company that does industrial metal fabrication (makes sense!) but even with all my googling I couldn’t figure out what these were.

Campus view

When I left school today I realized I had to take advantage of the record-breaking warm November day. After all, how many more days will I be able to sit outside to paint before the real cold sets in? The light was hitting the roof of the church next to the campus just perfectly, so I grabbed my sketch stuff from the car, found a bench and painted right there.

Corner

Here is the colour version of yesterday’s value sketch, painted with a limited palette of cobalt blue, raw sienna and carmine.

Value sketch for “Corner”

I am hoping to do some larger paintings this winter so this little sketch, done in washes of Payne’s gray, is the first step. I tried to do the full-size painting in my car but there is just not enough room to have a bigger sheet on my lap so I will try it again in studio.

The advantage of doing this little sketch first is that I can figure out where my lights and darks will be, as well as work out any compositional problems. There is one thing that I would like to change here. The back part of the stop sign on the foreground pole gets mixed in with the windows on the building in back of it, so I may adjust that in the final drawing. And if the painting is not too much of a disaster, I will post it.

The end of the week

Shoes are really hard to draw. There is always one that comes out longer or wider or just plain funny looking.