Another yellow wall

It’s finally warm enough here to get out and do some sketching from my car. I left the house not knowing what I wanted to sketch, but I got on the road and ended up in Sainte Anne de Bellevue, in a parking lot facing the main street. I can’t tell you the joy I felt with the window cracked open and my sketchbook propped up against the steering wheel. It didn’t really matter what the view was! I was outside, sort of, and even though the trees were still bare and there were many patches of snow, there was definitely a whiff of spring in the air.

Urban Winter: a new online course

If you’ve been following this blog for a while you’ve probably seen multiple paintings of this yellow house on Lakeshore Road. I’ve sketched it so many times, and when I was trying to come up with a subject for an online course based on an urban scene in winter, this was the obvious choice. It has so many elements that make it fun to draw — all those leaning poles and hanging wires, the curve in the road, the wet reflections, houses of different sizes and always a few pedestrians shivering at the bus stop.

In Urban Winter I spend a good amount of time doing a demonstration of a wet-in-wet technique for that shiny and slushy road, which is also what makes that scene interesting to me. If you’re curious, have a look at the trailer. You might enjoy painting this too!

Impulse buy

I didn’t go to the store to buy flowers but there they were, near the cash. A pale bouquet of tulips. I brought them home and didn’t realize how much I missed seeing flowers until I put them in a vase. I did a quick watercolour of them because even closed, they were beautiful.

I like to have them hanging around to draw when I have a few spare minutes, so I brought them to my studio and sketched them again in ink while chatting with friends on Zoom.

They’ve finally opened and deepened in colour, and my Friday afternoon reward was to paint them again. They’re pale pink but I had some fresh Permanent Rose on my palette, so I took a few liberties with colour intensity.

A few upcoming events and a nice bit of news

Sketchbook Revival is coming up soon! I participated in this fun FREE event in 2021, and the feedback was great from students who really enjoyed taking part in last year’s sessions. This year there will be 27+ workshop sessions led by artists from different backgrounds, each of us sharing our own unique way of creating in a sketchbook. You’ll have the chance to make your own sketchbook and fill up pages with an exciting mix of creative ideas, approaches and styles and get you trying new things as you draw, paint, journal, collage and use mixed media. Inspired by my recent visit to Sanibel Island, my session is called “From Bill to Tail Feathers: How to Sketch a Bird”. To find out more and to register, go to the Sketchbook Revival website. Dates are March 21 – April 7, 2022.

If you’re looking to strengthen your watercolour skills, you might enjoy a Virtual International Paint-Along on April 23 & 24, 2022. There will be twelve instructors, me included, each doing a demo of 75 minutes. I’ll be doing a landscape demo called “The Endless Possibilities of Wet-in-Wet Watercolour”. This is an online event on Zoom, and if you register before March 18, you’ll receive a discount of $50.

As for my bit of good news, I received notice from the Transparent Watercolor Society of America that my painting “Good Junk” was selected for the 46th Annual Exhibition in Kenosha, Wisconsin. I haven’t had much success lately getting paintings into shows, so this was a nice email to receive.

Notre Dame de Bons Secours

I’ve been wanting to draw Montreal’s oldest chapel Notre Dame de Bons Secours in winter, but it’s not located in a place where you can sketch from the car. And these days it’s too cold to paint outside. I tried to sketch it in pencil from a sheltered corner, but even with big gloves on, my hands froze and I gave up. This was done in studio, after my hands thawed out.

I guess what makes it so interesting for me is that it sits at the bottom of a hill, at the end of a narrow cobblestone street, with beautiful historic buildings on either side. And of course, for fans of Leonard Cohen, it has the historical significance of being “our Lady of the Harbour” from the song “Suzanne”. It’s our city’s sailor’s church, and the lady of song fame is on the other side of the building, facing the harbour, of course.

Little house on Lakeshore

Every once in a while I get in the mood for drawing with a fountain pen, and the pen that I love best these days is my Indigraph. I’m not very good about cleaning my pens after I use them, so the low maintenance ones are the best for me, and this one works just perfectly even after months of collecting dust on my desk.

The drawing was started on location, from my car, in Pointe Claire Village, and finished at home while on a Zoom sketching call with friends. I probably didn’t need as much hatching as this but I got a bit carried away during the conversation, and just kept scratching away at it.

Hat rack

Today was one of those days when painting was more about the process than about the results. These days I am finding the news from friends with family in Ukraine so upsetting that it’s hard to find joy in my usual subjects. That’s why I picked these hats. I see lots of people painting sunflowers but I have none on hand at the moment, so I chose the most colourful arrangement I could find in the house and focused on putting down shape next to shape and colour next to colour, with a special emphasis on yellow next to blue.

Indebted

Alice really wanted to go out to play but when she saw me pick up a sketchbook and a pencil, she gave up trying and plopped down on her bed. I tried to capture the shadows quickly, in pencil, but they changed faster than I could fill them in. I guess I owe her a good walk now.

Ice cliffs

On a long drive through Vermont the other day, these incredible ice formations caught my eye. Of course I couldn’t paint them on the spot, but I opened the window and snapped a few photos from the moving car. I often do that, and even though the photos are usually useless, there are occasionally one or two that are good enough to use as painting reference, and often the randomness of the composition is quite interesting.

I painted this one wet-in-wet, hoping that the dampness of the paper would allow both soft and hard edges of the ice to work together. Painted on a quarter sheet of Fabriano CP paper.

Crimson Lake

This amaryllis was a gift from a wonderful friend. I found it on my kitchen counter at the beginning of January — a big fat bulb buried in mulch, with two tiny green shoots protruding. I’ve watched the green shoots grow and grow for the past two months. Finally the flowers emerged, so big that it seemed the shoots might not be able to support their weight, but they have.

I brought the plant into my studio yesterday so I could draw it while on a Zoom sketching sessions with friends. I also took out two tubes of paint I don’t know that well: Crimson Lake and Quinacridone Red. I wanted a warmer red (Quin) for the newer blooms, and a deeper red (Crimson) for the fading blooms that darken as they wither. Painted on a block of Hahnemuhle Collection watercolour paper, 9″ x 12″.