works of wanderlust

Month: May 2023

  • Fire Smoke

    We’ve been routinely waking up to the smell of campfire, and not in a good way.

    Last year I had this idea of creating a video series to accompany this site, and I actually produced a couple early episodes, where I would have a sit around a campfire — maybe in my backyard, maybe in the woods, or maybe in a park somewhere where you can do that sort of thing — crack a beverage, cook some food, and enjoy the mood.

    That channel would have been on hiatus this month because there is a number of cascading fire bans in place all around me. No open flames. No solid fuel fires. No burning of any kind.

    Why?

    The hot and dry conditions, strange for May, have resulted in an early and angry wildfire season.

    My phone pings with alerts routinely noting local evacuation watches for small zones just outside of the city, people being told to be ready to run because a fire is looming close enough to their rural homes that they may be in danger at the whim of the wind direction.

    Inside the city we’re relatively safe, though there have been a couple of major house & yard fires that have resulted in multiple adjacent properties in our suburbs burning out of control.

    So. Fire ban.

    Don’t burn anything.

    Yet, as relatively protected as we are here, there is one aspect to wildfires that won’t be stopped by meandering rivers or highways breaking the burn. The smokey air goes where it pleases, and so as the atmosphere fills with particulate carbon, ash, and who knows what other dangerous chemicals (formerly trees) that poof into the sky as wildfires rage, that smoke swirls into and descends on the whole province, city, town, and rural land alike, and makes for a gloomy (as my kid would put it, post-apocalyptic) atmosphere… literally.

    Small beans, I know, compared to the loss of property and ecology that is happening just over the horizon, but I’ve been attempting to train for a marathon these last few months. My runs have been getting longer and more intense. The volume of air I need to suck into my still recovering-from-COVID lungs is increasing by the workout. This becomes a ridiculously frustrating calculation as the days press on and I skip a few sessions here and there citing air quality and the inverse effects of training in smoke. Again, small beans in the grand schemes, but it does make me think about the impact on anyone who isn’t a mostly healthy middle aged man, someone with compromised health, asthma or whatever. If it’s too bad for me, it’s really bad for many more.

    The weather spirits need to summon us a week of rain to quench the fires and wash the smoke out of the air, and no one is too sure if that will happen.

  • garden boxing

    I take a few months off blogging and, woops! There goes all the news and activities piling up.

    I upended my vegetable garden.

    Well, not literally, I guess.

    When we moved into the house I was resolute on the idea of devoting a chunk of the yard to a vegetable garden. It was a family thing. My parents had a huge garden. Both sets of my grandparents were avid gardeners. My in-laws have a huge garden. My wife’s grandparents lived in their garden and even maintained a second one on their old farmstead after they moved into town. It seemed like gardening was almost hereditary.

    So we devoted a full third of our backyard to a plot of black soil and for a solid decade tended, cared, enhanced, refined and evolved it into a pretty respectable garden plot.

    I don’t know why it slipped, but it eventually did.

    It’s been five years since we’ve had a respectable harvest from our respectable garden plot.

    Invasive weeds. Mice eat all the carrot tops. Wasps took over our lettuce patch last year. The potatoes seem to have given up completely as fewer come out of the ground than go in as seeds.

    I didn’t want to call it quits, but I decided last fall that I needed a rethink.

    The rethink came in the form of a raised garden box.

    I built a square box (atop where the old box-bed had sat, which I demolished) out of 4×6 by eight foot treated posts stacked three tall. I lined it with mesh and recycled cardboard. I filled it with a blend of salvaged soil (from lowering the grade slightly around the box), peat, and free compost from the City’s green-waste composting program. Around the box I’ll grow in the grass as a lawn, but all good things in time. As for the box itself:

    I mixed and raked it.

    I irrigated it.

    I hung up some stuff to startle the magpies.

    And I planted a few tomatoes, a couple peppers, a squash, a bunch of carrots, beets, lettuce and a scattering of radishes.

    It’s May long weekend, the weekend in Canada when all good gardeners are fully planted for the season. I’m fully planted. Does that make me a good gardener again?

  • in a dimly lit space.

    Not only have I been thinking of all the new things I can do with the skills I’ve learned in my watercolour class, but I’ve been thinking such thoughts in the context of our upcoming trip to Europe where (so I’ve heard) there are plenty of neat things to sketch and paint.

    Of course there are.

    I made a trip to the art store last night, and when the “dude” at the counter asked me if he could help me find anything, I lied and said I was “just browsing” but looking to stock up on some stuff for a trip I was taking.

    In fact, I was in the market for a higher quality “smallish” brush, something akin to the blended squirrel brushes I’ve bought for my class but in a 2 or 4 size, versus a 12, so it’s y’know more handy for small format, travel urban sketchies in a moleskine versus big large format watercolours that we’ve been tackling in class.

    I ended up leaving almost empty handed, just one tube of white gouache (which I’ve been eyeing for a few months now) and a mid-grade synthetic brush size 4 that caught my eye and for which I thought I’d give it a try.

    framing devices

    I saw a clever use of taping that has struck me as a great framing method for my upcoming "travel journal" sketches: the faux photo look.  Tape off a roughly 2:3 proportional rectangle, about the size and shape you might see in an old point-and-click photo style from the 90s, setting it slightly askew on the page.  Paint, keeping into but filling completely the bounds of the box you've created with the tape. Remove tape, and then with a ruler and either fineliner or fine-nibbed pen draw a border with a small white margin around the painted area. Add some incidental shading on a couple of the outer edges of your ink box, and voila! A faux photo on the page.

    I was browsing on one of the socials this morning and that white gouache was stuck in my craw, because a neat little astronomy photo as the header for some article about sciencey-stuff quickly found it’s ways a screencap into my photo library and from there as the inspiration to apply some groovy cloud techniques into a solar view technique and…

    Night sky.

    Spatter some white gouache to finish it off and…

    Well, if you showed me this pic a year ago and told me I’d painted it I’d be as surprised as anyone.

  • of west coast wetness.

    The goal of taking a class has always been, obviously, to learn. Incremental self-improvement is fine, and I’m a huge advocate of digging into a problem on your own and trying to wade through the weeds to find the harvestable vegetables in the mess of it all. That said, having one’s hand held a little bit is never a waste.

    The fifth Thursday night of my eight week class happened last night, and after a hulluva shitty day, three hours with no other obligations than putting paint onto paper in an air conditioned classroom with some groovy jazz streaming in the background was perhaps, for the first legitimate time in a long time, earned and deserved.

    Barely a few days ago I posted on an unguided attempt to watercolour in the form of a scene from a run that I’d turned into a rough bit of art. Sure, I’d used some of the lesson that I’d learned to do a piece that was much more complex than almost everything I’d attempted on my own since starting on this painting adventure. And sure, it’s a decent quality “beginner” piece that well-documents progress on this effort.

    But.

    You know there is a but.

    I attempted to tackle some things I’d nary tried previously and the results are telling.

    What I didn’t mention was that upon showing it to my wife and asking if she recognized the scene, she said “sure, it’s a path through the dog park…”

    “No. Well…. um, no. It’s supposed to be a creek through the ravine. But I take your point.”

    wet wooshes on wet

    It's not that clouds are tough to paint, but man... they are sometime tough to paint. Just when I think I've got it almost figured out, along comes some other complexity and my "that accidentally worked" doesn't work the second time or something gets overdone and now they're not clouds anymore or... sigh. Clouds are tough to paint. At some point perhaps I'll start to document all the little clever ways of painting clouds but so far I think my favourite is the one I learned last night in class. All credit to my instructor here, but here's the verdict: a wet-on-wet gradient is set into the sky of the scene, and then, rinsing and 80%-ish drying the brush for each woosh, whispy whorls of clouds are drawn with abandon across the still-wet sky gradient, pulling a bit of the blue (or whatever colour skies are on your world) paint from the gradient and allowing it to slurp and slither and blur into soft tendrils of cloud-like trails across the sky. The proper name for these types of clouds are cirri, but seeing as they are common on a prairie summer day I think I'll be getting more practice with this technique soon.

    Coincidentally then, maybe, in tackling a west coast beach scene in last night’s class I — three days late — came across the solution to my wandering through the wilderness alone attempt at water and wet sandy mud.

    Should I have been able to figure this out on my own? Well, yeah. Eventually. Maybe after another three or four stabs at it, another twenty bucks worth of paper and paint invested on my mediocre doodles, and sure, I would have perhaps, likely, almost certainly stumbled on the correct answer to my it’s-a-creek-not-a-trail problem.

    Or I could just have it demonstrated in a recreation centre multipurpose room with groovy jazz humming in the background. If I’m smart I’ll not just tackle my homework this weekend, taking another stab at the assigned beach scene, but I’ll fish out that picture of the creek once more and see if I’m telling the truth in this post and I actually did learn something after all.

  • of scenes of a run.

    So, I call it a “sketch” sure, but it’s really a proper attempt at a watercolour landscape, tho, isn’t it?

    In the nearly two months since I’ve posted any notes here I’ve drawn and painted so much that I haven’t hardly had a moment to stop and reflect on any of it. And fair enough, I’ve been taking it really productive and engaging class at the local rec centre and from that been spawning at least two solid paintings every week for the last four.

    Two per week!? Well, so it goes that on Thursday evenings we meet for about three hours and step-by-step work through a mix of technique and practice towards building the art of the week. The result is usually an ok, but rushed, edition of the scene featuring some form of Canadian landscape. An east coast beach, a sunlit forest, a rocky mountain scape, and a prairie grain elevator.

    To wit…

    But those images are not really mine. I mean, I painted them, each on my own as the second edition on the Friday or Saturday following the class as part of the weekly “homework” assignment, a polished up, time-taken, second-go at the image or scene from the class-of-the-week.

    But not really mine.

    drafts and seconds

    The obvious reflection on anything is that practice makes perfect, but until I took my watercolour class that obvious reflection hadn't caught my attention around the very specific notion of painting the same scene again, and again, and again, and again. Why paint something I already painted when I already painted it and can paint something new instead. Novelty is not necessarily and enemy of learning, but it does distract from the refinement of technique and better learning. Learning from mistakes means trying a second, third, fourth or more times, and trying not to repeat that mistake on one or more of those repeats. To that end, and as much as I can will myself to spend supplies on second, third, fourth and more editions of my works, I feel like I should be adding more drafts into my learning plans. And you should too.

    On the other hand, the feature image, the scene of the muddy creek flowing through an urban nature scape contrived from a photo I snapped while out on a long Sunday morning run through the local ravine, that one is all mine.

    The class has forced me to buy some good supplies, including proper brushes, paper, paint and other tools of the watercolourist trade, so having these things on hand and not supposing either the gear or the lessons should go to waste, I just started painting last night. Aforementioned reference photo at the ready, I propped it up on my tablet screen and settled into an evening of art.

    And so it goes.

    Maybe not a great work, but technically one of the first of my very own creation.