Late to the game
Posted: March 26, 2025 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: ink and watercolour, ink drawing, spring, wheelbarrow 23 CommentsI’m sure that you already know that in Canada we have 11 seasons, but I’m a bit late to the game. I only heard about this last week on the radio. My particular favourites on this list are the ones that occur around this time: fool’s spring, second winter, spring of deception, third winter and mud season. I think we are probably in fool’s spring right now. Which means there’s still time to paint the wheelbarrow with some snow on it.
I haven’t painted my old friend the broken wheelbarrow in many months. It was in a spot in the backyard that I couldn’t see from my window, but I fixed that yesterday. I put on my boots and went out there to move it, carefully, to a new spot. It’s not as good as the old spot in my previous yard because it’s up against a skinny pine, not a grand old oak, but it will do. It’s in a forested corner of my yard which makes a good backdrop and hopefully makes up for the lack of a big tree.
I sketched this on hot press paper using a Lamy pen that’s filled with copper ink, and added watercolour after. If you want to learn a bit about this process, have a look at my newest online course, “Sketching Techniques with Pens and Inks“, on sale this week.
Wheelbarrows and whites
Posted: December 13, 2024 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: wheelbarrow, whites, winter, winter watercolour 16 CommentsWhen I posted this wheelbarrow painting on Facebook yesterday, someone asked me where I learned to do negative painting. It took me a minute to think about it because I didn’t really think of this as a negative painting. But of course it is, because of all the white areas. And the answer to the question: I learned to save the whites of a watercolour many years ago when I first studied with Edgar A. Whitney. We used value sketches and careful planning to figure out where the lightest areas of a painting would be, and to this day, I avoid the use of masking fluid. I try to save the large white shapes, and if I need some small highlights I use dots or lines of white watercolour as well as scraping with a blade to get the whites back.
The process for this one was:
1: A careful drawing. I knew I wanted to keep a layer of snow on the upper surfaces on the wheelbarrows so a good pencil drawing was key.
2: Careful brushstokes on the painted surfaces, so as not to cover the white areas that I wanted to save.
3. A light wash of very diluted Indanthrone Blue to tone some of the snow areas in shadow and contrast them with the brightest whites.
4: Lots of scraping with a mat knife to get the whites back in the grasses.
