Waiting for the horses

I went back to the shopping mall parking lot carnival again today to see how things were going with the set up. Just as I started painting, the carousel starting spinning and the guys began unloading the wooden horses. If I go back tomorrow I may even be able to take a ride on the Zipper.

Announcing Urban Sketchers Montreal!

I am so happy to announce the launch of Urban Sketchers Montreal, the local chapter of urbansketchers.org. Marc Taro Holmes and I have been wanting to organize this for a while and thanks to all the work Marc put into setting up the website, we are now official. What does this mean? Well, we are going to be meeting once a month to sketch (on the fourth Sunday of the month) and we invite anyone who is interested to join us. Our first outing is this coming Sunday, September 23, and we’ll be meeting in Place Jacques Cartier. We hope to have lots of sketchers turn out to draw and paint with us, so to find out more here’s the schedule. In the winter we have some indoor locations planned and there’s lots more info on the site so please have a look. And there’s no pressure to post anything… just come and have fun drawing.

Today’s sketch is one I did at the Roxham Wool Gathering — a unique craft fair that takes place every year at Roxham Farm close to Hemmingford. I was hoping to see (and sketch) some sheep shearing but I arrived at the wrong time so instead I found a nice old Dodge De Soto sign that was almost as good.

Peacemaker

The tall ship Peacemaker is 150 feet long but I couldn’t get far enough away to draw the whole vessel so I chose a detail. The light was hitting the  rolled up sails just right against the turbulent sky. And if you tuned out the crowds of people lining up to board the ship it seemed that we had been transported to another era — a time of adventure or exploration or conquest.

Les grands voiliers

The spectacular Tall Ships have arrived in Montreal and today Marc Holmes and I spent the day sketching them. When we arrived we approached from the pier above so these two looked more like short ships but we sketched them first because of their relative simplicity compared to the truly tall Tall Ships. As more people arrived on site a crowd developed in back of us, perhaps thinking that we were part of the entertainment like the guy on stilts or the man in the pirate costume. When I was just finishing my drawing they put up the tarp on the ship on the left so I erased all the details on the deck, happily added in the tarp and then a gust of wind or a passerby knocked a whole lot of dirt in my travel palette. Despite that it was an amazing outing to see and sketch these majestic vessels.

Wow du Québec

I sketched this at Jean Talon market and then added colour when I got home. It’s hard to pull out the paints while standing in the middle of the aisle full of shoppers. As it is I had my toes run over a couple of times with shopping carts.

Backstage at the market

Jean Talon Market is really the best of the outdoor markets in Montreal. There’s a huge covered area in the middle where all the farmers sell their vegetables and then there’s the perimeter, lined with little shops selling spices, smelly cheeses, coffee and even mushrooms shaped like lobster claws. The centre rows are neat and tidy with all the vegetables perfectly arranged but the back lanes where the produce trucks pull in and out are always a little more interesting to me. I think today  must be carrot day because everyone was hauling great bags of them to their cars and it got me wondering what they were going to do with all those carrots. Do they have horses? Are they baking huge batches of carrot cake? The carrots in my fridge always seem to last a long time so these quantities are a bit of a mystery to me.

Down below

This is the second part of my sketching outing in the Hemmingford area yesterday. In the morning I sketched from Covey Hill looking down into the valley and in the afternoon I looked back up at Covey Hill. As the leaves turn to red and the great swaths of cornfield turn to yellow I will certainly go back there.

I was experimenting with some Winsor Newton 240 lb stock that I had in the house so I also redid this sketch on paper.