From above

There is most certainly a change in the colours of the foliage this week and it is most pronounced in the higher elevations. This was sketched south of Montreal, on Covey Hill, an area where my father spent many summers of his youth.  We’re talking some years ago, probably in the mid 1930s, but he still remembers the names of many of the farmers in the region. This is “apple country”, as he calls it, and no trip is complete without stopping to bring a bushel of them home.

Peaches

Some days things just don’t work out. I painted this as a double page spread in my sketchbook but the composition was so unsuccessful that I decided to post only one side. For the curious, the other side is a basket of pears.

Rocks and blocks

I was hoping to paint some sailboats on the water this afternoon but it is a windless day so I painted this little spit of rocks and concrete blocks near the Pointe Claire yacht club. It was a good opportunity to try out these Daniel Smith Quinacridone colours that I happened to find in my paint drawer. Not quite sure what to do with them, I read through their promo and found out that they are very luminescent and you can use the Gold instead of Raw Sienna (I use gobs of that) and the Burnt Orange instead of Burnt Sienna. These Quinacridone colours are mostly in the red, orange, violet range so these rocks were probably not the right place to try them but I did add a bit of the Gold into my green mix and that’s the Burnt Orange on the little sign. The colours are more vibrant than I’m used to (my palette has more of the classic colours and very few novelty hues) but I think it’s worth giving them another try.

Drawing trees

My students love field trips. In fact I think most students love a chance to escape the classroom setting, and today I surprised them by dragging them outside to draw trees. They didn’t really have to be dragged, of course, because it’s one of those gorgeous September days — hot and humid — that we all savour because we know what’s ahead in the coming months. I am fairly certain that if I asked them to draw a tree from memory I would get a series of lollipop shapes on paper — symbols of trees rather than naturalistic ones. Today they had to draw from observation and for some of them it was the first time. We looked at how the trees on campus are shaped, the ratio of trunk to foliage, the way some of the leaves are in front of the trunk and some behind, and how to draw them in contour. The results were shocking to me and to the students! Each and every tree was keenly observed, finely drawn and there wasn’t a lollipop in the bunch.

My drawing was done a little earlier with a Lamy pen and a Pentel brush pen in the cemetery next to the school.

Dusk at Mountain View

It was getting darker and darker as I painted this and I stopped when the mountains and the lake started blending into one.

The back of the cafe

I’m mad at myself for not walking around Carré St. Louis before I painted this. The other side of the café was much more interesting, with people, umbrellas and signage but that only became apparent as I was leaving for the day.

Carré St. Louis

I painted in good company today with Tex Dawson, Helmut Langeder and Marc Taro Holmes. We took advantage of one of the most beautiful Labour Days I can remember by arriving early at Carré St. Louis. Victorian houses are so much fun to paint and the square is surrounded by plenty of them. Some garish with bright purple or red trim, some elegant, and some downright silly. In the 19th century well-to-do French families would call these residences home and now they are owned by writers, musicians and anyone lucky enough to be able to afford them. The square has a three-tier fountain in the centre, a garden café and a parade of interesting characters who make the park home (some who seemed to be waking up as we arrived).

Maman

There is not very much that seems maternal (at least to me) about Louise Bourgeois‘ gigantic bronze spider sculpture “Maman”. The statue inspires awe and possibly fear from all who pass beneath it and gape up at the marble eggs contained in the metal sac. I wasn’t sure which angle to draw this from but in the end the position of the sun dictated my spot. I would have loved to contrast the sculpture with the glass and granite structure of Ottawa’s National Gallery of Canada as the background but that would have meant looking into the sun so instead I faced the Notre Dame Cathedral. Not as interesting as the Gallery but most certainly a lot easier to draw.

Challenge through limitations

Facing a sheet of pristine white paper can sometimes be intimidating but I got some great ideas to overcome that fear from a workshop I did in Santo Domingo with Nina Johansson. I loved every workshop I did at the Urban Sketchers Symposium and yet I haven’t written about this very first one — Challenge through limitations — most likely because I didn’t draw anything worth posting at the time. We used all sorts of drawing tools that Nina generously shared — bamboo pens, markers, ink — to try to shake us out of our usual ways of working. The technique I liked best, and tried in the sketch below, was to mess up that clean white sheet before drawing on it. I mixed up some watercolour, dripped it on my paper, sprinkled some salt on top of that and then when it was bone dry I shook off the salt and did my drawing of the broom on top of that. In Santo Domingo we even put paint on our shoes and stepped on our sketchbooks. It’s very liberating to work on a sheet that already has some marks on it.

Three layers of green

I picked this little area at the Botanical Gardens because it was the reverse of the scenes I usually draw. Most of the time the dark green trees are in the background and the grass in the foreground is light. But sitting on the hill in the Chinese garden, I looked through the dark layer of trees to the sunlight foliage beyond.  The hosta in the foreground is mostly a wash of cerulean blue with few darks added in later.