Last day of winter
Posted: March 19, 2026 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Hudson, railway crossing, watercolour, winter, winter scene 11 CommentsYou don’t need many colours to paint on a dull day like today. From Ultramarine Blue, Cadmium Red and Hansa Yellow I was able to mix the soft grey of the sky, the dark grey of the road, the muted grey of the distant trees and the warm neutral of the bollards. The snow was falling quite heavily at times which required a few brief moments of turning the wipers on, but it was worth it to be out there, capturing this last-day-of-winter scene. Painted from my car studio, on a pad of Arches CP paper, 10″ x 14″.
Sunday walk in the boatyard
Posted: January 4, 2026 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: boats, hudson yacht club, watercolour, winter, winter boats 22 CommentsIt’s been cold in Montreal. Very cold. But with a pre-warmed car and some heavy boots on, I managed to do some painting (from my car) at the boatyard in Hudson this morning. The giant shrouded boats are always a favourite of mine. I don’t often see anyone when I’m parked there, but today I had a little company: a couple walking their black lab. Lucky me! I grabbed a small brush and added them in, making sure to check where their heads and feet lined up with the boats. I think it makes it so much more interesting to have them in there for scale. Painted on a 12″ x 9″ block of Milford paper from St. Cuthberts Mill.
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.
A new online course: Sketching Spring Flowers
Posted: April 3, 2024 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: art, photography, spring, winter 5 CommentsI know I haven’t been posting much on my blog lately. I always miss that. But I have a good excuse. I’ve been painting lots of spring flowers, and after being so inspired by all the tulips at Cheekwood Gardens in Nashville, I decided to turn all that intensive flower painting into a new online course: Sketching Spring Flowers.
If you’re a long-time reader of this blog, you know that I love to paint spring flowers in my garden. I once even filled an accordion sketchbook with drawings from my garden after I planted 200 bulbs from Costco. This year, alas, I have no spring flowers in my garden, or none that I know of, because we moved house in November, well after planting season. But my former garden, and the one in Nashville, were the inspiration for this course. And I’m hopeful that next year I will have spring flowers in my own backyard again.
Here are a few of the watercolours we draw and paint in the new class: hyacinths in my window, crocuses as they open in the sun, and a wide swath of tulips blowing in the wind. And here’s a link to the course. Have a look! And as always, the course is on sale for $30 USD or $42 CAN for the first week and goes back up to the regular price of $35 USD or $47 CAN after April 9, 2024.
