Dry dock

I spent another sunny summer day painting on location with Marc Taro Holmes. This time we met at one of my favourite spots in the area: the Pointe Claire Yacht Club, and he scoped out a view that I had never noticed, right outside the entrance to the boat club. It’s under a big tree so there’s some good shade, plus it was a new vantage point for me. I thought I had painted from almost everywhere there, but there are still new places to be found, as it turns out.

My painting was mostly done on location but when I got home I added a few spots of white and black and pure colour.

To see what Marc painted, and also some of Laurel’s great photos of our outing, head on over to Citizen Sketcher.

Lots of green

I have a great memory of this little café/kiosk in Carré St. Louis because the owner of the place offered shelter to my group during a sudden summer downpour when I was teaching an urban sketching workshop there a few years ago. Last summer the place seemed to be closed due to the pandemic (or at least it was every time I walked by), but this year it’s hopping again. What a joy it is to see people milling about, enjoying coffee and listening to live music when jazz trios perform there.

Yesterday morning the light was clear and the park was filled with dappled shade. I had time to do a quick sketch on site, but not to complete it, so when I got home I repainted it at a larger size (1/4 sheet) while the colours were still in my head. I think I may have overdone the brightness a little bit, but that was what I saw. Lots and lots of green.

Breakwater, and an updated materials page

The overcast weather and nearly still water on Lac St. Louis were ideal conditions for painting the breakwater at the Pointe Claire Yacht Club this morning. Later in the day, while waiting for a friend to visit (yes, we can do that now!!) I started reading “E. J. Hughes Paints Vancouver Island“. I had never heard of this Canadian painter until receiving the book from my son a few years ago, and it’s a pleasure to learn about him and see how he painted his West Coast surroundings in oil, acrylic and watercolour. The book also includes lots of pencil drawings and studies he made for his paintings. There’s a spread in the book titled “Painting Technology”. So far, my favourite quote from the section is this one:

“Watercolours are a good test in getting things right the first time,” Hughes wrote to his sister Zoë on March 5, 1974, “as changes can only be made in darker and duller direction, and as you probably know from experience, in order to change a transparent watercolour in a paler and brighter direction, an artist faces a near impossibility, resulting in fuzzy edges. However, watercolours depend a great deal on happy accident for results.”

As for my own painting technology, I finally updated my Art Materials page to include my most recent studio and plein air materials, as well as a new section on gouache. Have a look here.

Paper testing

I’m testing out some new paper today: Fabriano 1264 Cold Press in pad format. I ordered it because I love taking Arches CP pads out on location, and I thought these might also be good for the same reason: convenience. Sketchbooks are great but sometimes you want loose sheets and are too lazy to cut up full sheets into quarters. At least I am! So this 11″ x 15″ pad arrived today and I had to try it out immediately.

This paper is not 100% cotton (it’s wood pulp) so it doesn’t have the same texture as the best Fabriano sheets. But I do like how it behaves, and here are my first impressions:

The washes sit on the surface of the paper and don’t sink into the paper as much. That means that the puddles take longer to dry. Even after half an hour the wettest blobs were still a bit damp. But that means you can get some beautiful effects if you are using a wet brush. Look at the way the deep purple salvia wash mixes with the green. I love that!

It also lifts really well so if want to lose some edges, like I did on the glass, they are easy to lift.

Admittedly, the texture is not as nice as the cotton stock — it has less of an irregular texture than I am used to — but I quite enjoyed working on it and will use it again for quick sketches in the field. And of course more flowers.

Stretching

After a long winter indoors, and then lots of time in my garden, there is really only one thing I long to sketch. People! People in motion, people in cafés, people at markets, sitting people, standing people, walking people — all would suit me just fine.

With that in mind I headed out this morning to a park where I was pretty certain I could find some life. And I was rewarded almost immediately with an outdoor kick-boxing/circuit training class in progress. I spent an hour or so drawing anyone I could see from my spot at a picnic table in the shade — the exercisers, a mother dancing with her kids to the fitness music, and then lots of people walking by. Each drawing took about 20 seconds or less. In each I tried to capture a gesture, a movement, an expression, a distinctive item of clothing, some great hair, an original hat — really just one thing — in as few lines as possible. It’s a great exercise. As each person walking by me I would pick that thing and begin the sketch with that. A good example is on the third page. There’s a man walking with a tray of coffee cups, and in that sketch I started with his arm and the cups. When the person walked out of sight I would move on to the next person. Near the end of the hour when I started to get warmed up, I added a bit of shading. By the time I put away my pencil, I started to feel like I too had had a bit of a workout.

The last of the peonies

My friend Susanne gave me this bouquet of peonies when I painted in her garden last week. I’m fortunate to have them because the ones that remained on the plants at her house were mostly destroyed in a storm later that day. And if you have peonies in your garden, you know what that means because sometimes the delicate petals on peonies don’t recover after heavy rain.

They’ve been in a vase on my counter all week and today is probably the last day of the blooms. When they start to go, all the papery petals drop at once, which is what started to happen to one flower just before I got them outside. Painted quickly before all the petals blew away in the wind, on a quarter sheet of Saunders Waterford 140lb CP paper.

Just like old times

On Monday, in the midst of a classic Montreal heatwave, I had a wonderful outing with my very first urban sketching friend Marc Taro Holmes and his lovely wife Laurel. Marc was the very first urban sketcher I met, and in 2012 we founded Urban Sketchers Montreal together. We’ve sketched and taught together often over the years, but of course this past year we’ve all been sticking close to home.

With things getting better in Montreal as more people get vaccinated, we decided to meet and start our summer outings with a visit to a place we have sketched often — the Botanical Gardens. It was just like old times. We sketched, we chatted, Laurel took photos, and it seemed wonderfully normal. Have a look at Marc’s blog to see us in action!

Poppies again

I’m so happy I spent another morning in Susanne’s garden painting the poppies, in gouache once again, on a block of Winsor & Newton paper. I didn’t do much drawing, instead choosing to grab a paintbrush and try to capture the red shapes that seemed to float like butterflies over the greenery. Reds can be so difficult in watercolour, at least for me. They seem to lose their saturation once they hit the paper and are never this bright. As for the real poppies, they don’t last long in the best of times, but yesterday we had a huge thunderstorm in Montreal and by evening these were flattened!

Susanne’s poppies

I planted poppies in my garden last year, and three opened today, almost within minutes of each other. I wish I had filmed the process with a time-lapse camera. One minute the hairy green pod was closed, a few minutes later there was a ball of red at the top of the stem, and suddenly the full bloom was open with the giant papery red petals fluttering in the wind. It was magical. And when I got closer to look, the two halves of the pod were on the ground at the base of the plant.

Earlier in the week I was invited to sketch at my friend Susanne’s garden, which is much more lush and wild than mine. The poppies, irises and peonies were all opening at once. I painted a watercolour on location but it wasn’t very successful so I tried it again in gouache. I wasn’t sure if I would be able to get the brightness of the poppies in gouache, but with a fair bit of yellow in the petals it seems to work. Painted on a half sheet of 140 lb Fabriano CP paper.

One day in Havana

A few years ago we spent a day in Havana. It wasn’t nearly long enough to see everything there is to see in that fascinating city. Instead of sticking with the group from our hotel, we chose instead to wander through the streets of the old colonial centre. That’s always the best way to see a city, isn’t it? I hadn’t gotten back into sketching at that time, but I did take a lot of photos, and I go back through them from time to time. This week, when I was looking for a reference image for a large format gouache experiment, I happened upon this one and it seemed just right. A tree-lined square, plenty of locals hanging around in the shade, some exotic yellow Cassia trees and of course good shadows. Painted in gouache on a half sheet of Fabriano CP paper, 15″ x 20″.