works of wanderlust

Category: notes for a sketch

  • from high altitude.

    Anyone in search of an example of modern evolutionary pressure look no further than the common fly. 

    Back in the city, like up high in the mountains, flies are ubiquitous.

    But unlike the mountains, the cities are filled streets, buildings, parks and coffee shops full of people. City flies need to be smart and fast.  Any fly that is not keenly aware of its surroundings and has not the instinctual inclination to leap into the air and off into the safety of flight is doomed to be swatted by any of a million people. Flies are not be dullards, and any fly born without the inbuilt drive to flee is unlikely to survive long enough to pass on its disadvantageous genome to a future generation.

    We have spent nearly three days up high in the backcountry camping in the mountains where a million variety of insects thrive. In fact even high up above the tree line where even in mid-August patches of snow remain in the share of large rocks, there are so many flies that an adventure-seeker is bound to spend as much time swatting away bugs as admiring the views. And it struck me as curious—though probably less so for the fly which I smacked dead upon my bare forearm—that there must be significantly less pressure, evolutionarily speaking of course, for mountaintop flies to carry a genome that knows better than to get smacked by a human—which a fly may rarely, if ever, see in is short life on the side of a mountain—than for one of its city cousins who encounter humans as a matter of course and have no such luxury as to leisurely investigate a bare forearm on a Friday afternoon.

    inhospitable conditons

    There were insects of all variety everywhere, swarming and buzzing in my ears, tickling my nose and even swooping with indifference into my mouth (which admittedly I didn’t realize was so regularly slack jawed) but even that wasn’t the biggest barrier to success atop a mountain. I had brought along a minimal watercolour set: every gram of weight mattered when you need to lug everything required to survive for three days in the backcountry up a literal cliff face. Seven pans squeezed into an altoids tin, a self-watering brush, a single black pen, and a thin watercolour notebook, all of it sealed into a zipper bag. Three of my hiking companions were lingering nearby as I tried to capture *something*  and there was not a moment to spare in this absolute paradise atop a mountain. Amazing views. Unbeatable scenery. Not an art studio.  I often art under non-ideal conditions, but occasionally I art at the borders of impossible. But apparently it was not.

    Nearly every fly I encountered up on that mountain was indifferent to the risk of sudden death carried by my swiftly moving hand.

    Nearly every fly sat patiently and still as I reached over and snuffed it away.

    Smacking a city fly requires speed and agility on the part of a human, but one feels superhuman atop a mountain as the dull flies understand too little what awaits the looming shape and shadow of a hand moving towards them.

    Evolution at work.

  • in a theme park.

    As it turns out, Disneyland is not a great place to sketch.

    Oh, sure, it might be a great inspiration for sketching. There are a few thousands of people worth sketching. There is colour and shape and light and shadow and trees and architecture and—deep breath.

    There are also about fifteen places to sit, total. You never really stop moving, and if you do it’s usually because the ride queue is jammed up, and all the best sight lines are meant to be snapped with a camera and moved out of the way for the next person.

    Sketching in Disney kinda sucks.

    But also, it was a bit of a challenge.

    In 2022 we went to Florida and checked out Disney World and I had it in my mind to do some sketching there. When we arrived I started carrying my sketchbook around but then between my unwillingness to be fast and loose and messy, I couldn’t afford (nor would my family tolerate) camping on a bench for thirty minutes to carefully draw a building or a ride or something. So, I started snapping reference photos and (being that we spent a lot of down time at the hotel) I did lots of painting in the evenings from my phone screen.

    loosy goosy

    where photography is about pixel-perfect capturing a scene, and yes, watercolour can be that too when the mood strikes, there is a dream-like element to the flow of water and pigment that can be embraced if one is willing to step away from the seeking of realism. I have been trying to relax my brain in this regard for years, always in a little lockstep with the photographic mindset. “how will people know what I’m painting if the colours/shapes/outlines don’t match??!!” I am trying now to embrace my loosy goosy period, that effort to evoke a vibe or a mood or a feeling from a painting while leaving the literal behind. A bit of shape. A lot of squiggles. A lot of water. A dab of this and a dob of that and just let physics take over. It takes some chill, but it can work out.

    In 2024, just a week ago as I write this, we went to California to check out Disneyland, and I decided, fresh small-format sketchbook in hand and some ripe thoughts about style, that I would experiment. Fast sketches were on the agenda. No sitting. No parking or camping somewhere to draw. Pull out the book and pen and with a maximum (literally MAX) of five minutes, get as much sense of a scene as I could onto paper and—

    Well, I snapped a pic, too, and did all my painting back at the hotel. I wasn’t exactly going to hold a sketchbook open on a rollercoaster while I waited for my washes to dry.

    I did the math and for about 28 sketches I clocked in about six hours total over the week, sketching & painting, and filled front to back an entire Moleskine “small” 3.5×5.5 watercolor folio. Every page, usually double wide.

    The paintings are messy. Some of them I was a little loose on the detail. Some I was a little heavy on the colours. A few got some leakage through the seams of the paper.

    Had I spent even an hour on each of those pics to, you know, make them neater or give them more detail then I would have spent twenty eight hours—two whole waking days—painting everything I painted. As it is, I got it all in between rides and during some hotel siestas. Isn’t that the best way to art, huh?

  • about all the little details.

    As Ferris Beuller wisely reminded us, life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

    I spend a lot of time rushing. And this shortcoming often applies to my painting, as well.

    Of course, one of the so-called rules of watercolour painting that I picked up on early on in my artistic efforts was that in watercolour timing is gosh darn nearly everything. Almost every technique and method somehow relates to the timing of the application of the paint mixture onto the surface during a window of time while there is a certain moisture level on the paper or a particular dryness of the last application or at a very specific moment of diffusion of pigments. Timing can change the final look of a piece dramatically. Vibrancy comes from precision.

    Another of course, because of course, I mistook timing for speed.

    That is to say, I have had this knot in my brain as I reach for my brush to put paint onto the page that precision timing was all about being fast and efficient. I got tangled up in the notion that one wet the page and then zip-zap-zooey one flung the paint around in a glorious way, without hesitation, to create the perfect piece of art. I foolishly thought it was about racing the evaporation of the water.

    And sometimes it is.

    But usually it is not.

    I have learned, slowly, that in fact is goes a lot more like this: some artists are not so much good because they are fast, some artists are fast because they are good.

    short backwards strokes

    Last fall I realized that there was a certain beauty to be found in boundless intracacy. In the details. I dug into the art of sketching backwards from where I usually started. Usually, I would draw the shape of the whole then work inwards to elaborate on the details. A building would materialize as a box on the horizon and then the doors, windows, eaves, ledges, bricks and more would fill in the inside as if I was colouring inside the lines. A tree would begin as a silhouette and then I would scribble in the leaves and the branches and the shadows and all the internal shapes to make it more tree-like.  But taking that backwards, a building might start as  a valance light fixture on a brick wall that extended outward to fill outwards. A tree might start as a collection of inner branch-like shapes with some details leaves and shadows and then maybe only imply that the tree went beyond that. I think our natural inclination is to show the whole, but the edges of objects are only artificial boundaries we impose on them and in telling their stories through art sometimes its the details that are the most interesting.

    I finished the last week of the latest watercolour course just the other night and the instructor mentioned offhand that sometimes he will work on a painting for months, for a couple hours each session a few times per week. He didn’t outright say it, but it pretty much told us that his best work is slow and methodical.

    My goal for this summer is, I think, to narrow in on the details and slow down.

    When I gifted away a bunch of my painting last chrishmus I got asked repeatedly: how long did it take you to paint this?

    I dunno. I’d reply. Like, an hour.

    The paintings were nice. Simply, but nice. A work of efficiency and speed and, yes, even a bit of proficiency in a small handful of watercolour technique that allowed me to work fast—maybe even forced me to work fast.

    But those paintings were only detailed in as much as the randomness of the techniques I used implied detail. There was beauty in randomness. But the detail did not come from precision or intention, rather it fell out of accident and organic chaos, and was good because I had lightly harnessed that randomness.

    Just like when I had to re-teach myself to draw outwards from detail, I think I need to rethink my painting hangups too. What does it mean to paint the details slowly: to start with the heart of what you want to paint and then wrk outwards, rather that trying to affect the whole of the subject to the page and then fill in the bits and pieces with speed and precision?

    I dunno. But it seems like it’s gonna take a lot longer than an hour.

  • of spring flowers

    It’s been nearly six months since I wrote a note here, and regretfully that means I have passed by many opportunties for noting the slow but methodically forward learning that has happened in the intervening span.

    For example, my spring has been consumed by the most stereotypical of watercolour subject: flowers.

    You know. Close your eyes. Picture a watercolour painting. Now say aloud what was in the image you just pictured. Ninety-three point four percent of you just said the word “flowers” —and you wouldn’t be wrong.

    Early on in my watercolour adventures I told people I was getting into this medium an many of the responses fell into the vibe check of “so—you like painting flowers, huh?”

    I resisted.

    I painted urban sketches. I dabbled in nature scenes. I painted bugs, animals, portraits, snowy landscapes, and autumn foliage. I avoided flowers—mostly.

    Then, my favourite local watercolour instructor, a guy who teaches community art classes in my neighbourhood, offered his spring course selection and it was—yup. Flowers.

    layers of light and colour

    there is a good reason flowers are a watercolour favourite. The medium lends itself well to two particular characteristics of colourful blossoms: light and colour. beautiful flowers are semi-transparent whisps of colour and gradient. beautiful flowers are collections of organic curves evoking hues evolved over eons to evoke our senses. And well-tuned watercolour is the same, watery gradients of semi-transparent colours, layers of hues evoking shape and texture and even accidentally a watercolour abstract is likely to imply something floral. it is almost as though the very medium was invented to solve the human urge to depict flowers as art.

    I relented. I signed up.

    Sure. I meant that me, a middle-aged cis white man who spends his days training for running races and writing science fiction would be spending an entire evening each week in a room full of the type of women who signed up for a flower-painting course at the local community centre. (They’re all creative and lovely, by the way—I’m just the odd duck in the room because all their husbands are at home doing more so-called manly things like changing their oil and drinking beer while they watch the hockey game in their garage.)

    And yet it turns out that painting flowers is probably what I needed to do—at least as a progressive step on my watercolour learning adventures.

    Watercolour flower painting is rife with technique and form in the medium. The delicacy of the subject, the application of hue and tonal value, texture and shadow, transparency and implications of our primal understanding of these shapes, all of it is of vital importance to paint a flower that isn’t growing somewhere in the uncanny valley.

    All of it is vital to becoming a better watercolourist.

    It may be stereotypical, but that is not without ryhme or reason. It is stereotypical because it is like asking if a baker knows the recipe for cake, or if a photographer can shoot weddings, or if a barrista can pull an espresso. Watercolours are turning the world into flowers. Everything is flowers.

    It’s probably not unrelated that this morning I bought myself a summer pass to the local botanic gardens, and need to go pack my travelling art kit.

  • of winter puppies.

    I decided to repaint a picture this morning.

    Back in January of this year I snapped a bunch of wintery pics of the dog while we were out for a walk in the local dog park, a sprawling river valley forest woven with trails and interesting sights.

    A couple weeks after snapping those pics, I drew one. I used it as a reference photo for a sketch. It was a light ink sketch of the puppy standing on the trail then painted with some pan-based watercolours.

    Fast forward. Today I was leafing through my “snow” pictures (since we haven’t got much snow worth speaking of so far this season) and found the same photo and the picture I’d painted from it.

    So I repainted it.

    December 2023
    February 2023

    I don’t think either of these are worth much more than as sentimental paintings of my dog, but objectively I think there is a lot going on in the ten months of time that has passed, me as a (sometimes literal) student trying to improve my watercolour crafts.

    For starters, the depth of shadow that I’ve been able to realize in the latest painting compared to the older one I think changes the whole dimensionality of the piece. In the February version I was really just getting into the idea of using hues and shadows to imply dimensionality painting them in as a layer after the initial colouring, but often I did this in a way that was almost cartoon-like. For today’s painting, I actually started with the shadows. I painted a very pale wet-on-wet sky, then uses some wet-on-wet shadows to build the background layer of trees. As the painting began to dry I added additional tree layers building them up across at least four, maybe five different stages and then at the end when it was almost completely (but not quite) dry adding the final dabs of dark that imply the shrubbery at the front.

    The dog herself is almost entirely shadow. Wherein the February painting I had started (probably started the whole sketch in fact) with a crisp outline of the dog, in the December version she started out as a couple of wet blobs of pale paint. Rather than colour her as I see her, I ignored browns and reds entirely (which is what colour she actually kind is—the colours in the earlier work are definitely more accurate from a hue perspective) in today’s painting I focused entirely on the tonality of her patches of fur and the shadows around her eyes and ears and legs. In the end, if you asked me which one looks more like my dog, I’d one hundred percent say the December painting.

    repainting the paints

    I was watching an online painting course this weekend and though the material didn't offer much in the way of technique that I hadn't seen from other places a dozen times before, it reminded me that repetition is not only okay, it's actually a great way to progressively improve what you are doing. I often find myself in the mindset of the one-and-done artist, thinking oh, I already painted that, what's next? But in reality, painting the same thing two, three or many multiples of times means that you can step away from the final result and focus on other aspects of the creation of that art: trying different colours, brushes, techniques, etc. It sounds obvious if you already do this, but personally I need to give myself more permission to try things more than once.

    As 2023 and December draw to a close, and I enter into what will be my third calendar year of watercolour I know that much of the improvement I make day by day will start to plateau and become less obvious. I want to spend the next year focusing on technique and building up a style and being able to create art that makes people say “wow!” and so I think the first step in that is making myself say wow… an act that often comes from the ability to put your own self-critical eye against something that so clearly contrasts. Looking back on your old work (particularly as a student, still learning everyday) is one such way I think I’m going to be trying to a lot more of next year.