works of wanderlust

Category: notes for a sketch

of winter skies.
I decided in later October that I was going to write here more—and then promptly October turned into November and November is a month when I do a 50,000 word novel-writing challenge and that consumes hours of my day, each day, and leaves very little time behind for either art or writing about art.

But it’s December now.

And I’m still busy trying to bring that novel from about fifty-eight thousand words to a conclusion at about eighty-thousand words, but December is not about speed writing so much as settling into a winter routine, so I’ve been writing a bit each day and then painting a bit each day and, y’know, living the artsy-fartsy dream.

Plus, I bought a new wide flat brush this month and in just a few days it has proven to be a magical tool for making incredibly vibrant skies of winter and sunlight.

So, in December I expect to do a lot more art. In fact I hope to do so much art that in January I am compelled to restock my watercolour paper.

Now that’s a resolution, huh?

gouache starlight and snowflakes
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I had this silly notion in my head of being a watercolour purist, of using strict techniques to paint because I thought, wrongly, that I might get judged for not following the rules of painting, and hey, for all I know I still am following those rules by digging out a tube of titanium white gouache (instead of proper watercolour paint) and speckling my sky with starlight or snowflakes or lens flares or whatever it is that you want to interpret those little white points in the painting to be, but I like how it looks, and I don't think that rules are meant for anything but a baseline anyhow. I load a bit of wet white gouache onto my brush at a certain point in the painting process, sometimes it's after the sky has dried and sometimes it's after the whole rest of the painting has dried and once it was when things were still a little wet and I wanted to see the effect of the still-wet sky on the drips of white and you know what? it turned out kinda cool, too. So I've been ignoring that silly notion this month and just painting a lot of white dots in the sky, splattering my otherwise flat art with the chaos and randomness of white speckles of starlight or snowflakes, against the rules that might not even exist anywhere but my own head.
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I used to make skies an afterthought. In fact, when you are urban sketching (at least I have found) you get so caught up in the urban part, the sketching of buildings and architecture and people, that you tend to get to the end and say to yourself “oh, right, what colour was the sky again… here’s a dab of blue and let’s get on with it.”

But painting imaginary winter scenes I’ve been following the approach modified from what I learned in that class I took last spring which is simply to build up from a sky. The whole thing is a sky. The world is basically just blocking the sky. Even the ground. The ground is just in front of more sky. The whole earth after all is a sphere and if you are on that earth painting a watercolour picture (which I think includes all watercolour pictures ever painted in the history of watercolour) there is a spherical orb of sky surrounding you in all directions and sure… the ground blocks a lot of it, but you really can’t go wrong painting a sky and then just going from there.

So that’s what I have done.

I’ve painted a lot of skies, using lots of deep blues and vibrant oranges and magical yellows and speck of white. And they all turn out in a way that I am starting to love.
December 4, 2023
of a thousand little details.
I find there are certain kinds of art that take a lot of concentration, focus, and attention to everything. But then there are other kinds of art that almost let the mind fall into a bit of a flow-state and the world passes by and you play an episode of some random tv show in the background or listen to an audiobook and then suddenly an hour has passed and you’ve filled up a nice chunk of the page with something that is actually pretty interesting.

I suppose in some ways you could just call that doodling, and if so, I was doodling. I prefer to think of it as planned illustration using a method that was repetitive enough that the aforementioned flow-state was inevitable as was the specific level of detail that I set out to achieve when I started drawing.

additive details
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I tend to do a lot of drawing where I draw big shapes and fill in the details afterwards. But lately I’ve been flipping the process and starting with details, and iteratively working to build something big out of lots of little pieces. You do need to always think about the big picture and sometimes starting with strategy is fine. But other times when you just start building the pieces you know are important, then time and persistence turn into something you might not have planned but is exactly what you need after all. What this amounts to is the collective result of a thousand little unplanned details. Each detail is part of a bigger picture, not random but certainly plucked out of the air in the moment of creation to build a whole picture that is a multiple of its parts.
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I’ve been following a couple accounts on instagram that appeared in my suggestions months and months ago based on “similar interests” and when I first saw them they seemed to be sketching in the realm of what I would have classically called “urban sketching” but now am not exactly sure. I suppose that denotes a certain originality and probably what helped catch my eye to their work in the first place. Fast forward, however, and were you to compare this week’s sketching efforts to those account I think you’d find a tremendous amount of similarity. Not replication of substance, per se, but in what I have been “doodling” there is certainly a style and approach that is following the spirit of highly detailed, medium format, one point perspective illustration of architecture.

My buildings are purely fantastical, tho. I’m not sure how much reality is ascendant in those artists work.

Which leaves me at the end of this week doodling in ink on 11×14 sheets of paper while listening to audiobook novels and half-watching old episodes of Doctor Who in the background while I imagine interconnected structures overlapping in a kind of weirdly futuristic but also anachronistic style that is neither dystopian nor utopian, and mostly just hard to put my finger on.

Art is art, tho. So take from it what you will. And while you’re thinking about it, why not check out the long format video I made of some of the process:
October 29, 2023
of birches in autumn.
Summer has flitted by in a whirlwind of action, but not without a lot of paint staining the various papers and notebooks in my house. That’s to say, while I don’t really have an excuse for not posting for two months, it has not been because I have abandoned my art efforts, nor fallen to idleness.

Autumn has left me inspired, however, and I’ve been out in the trails taking photos, sketching, and generally enjoying the orange-hued palette that nature has provided.

I will reserve the specifics for future articles here, but I have found a few vibes sitting in the grass on multiple occasions, sketchbook in hand or watercolour paints at the ready, and enjoying some cool-air, low-bug plein air art time.

I took a long walk through the local dog park and then sat on the ground to paint a low-sun scene of the turning trees.

I pen-sketched some detailed work of various close-up fall foliage.

I used tall grasses as a mask to try out a watercolour technique for painting birch trees.

People always come by. People always look at what some guy is doing sitting on the ground with a notebook. People sometimes ask, sometimes sneak a peek, sometimes are obviously not sure.

It’s been a blast.

technique reps
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In my minds-eye I have a picture of bold and tall birch trees with their pale hued bark with scratches of deep brown and black making distinctive styles set against a pattern of fall foliage. My idea was to mask off the trees, paint the foliage, unmask and then paint the tree detail. Simple, right? On my sixth iteration I got closest to that minds-eye picture, but in each of the six repetitions of basically the same painting I did a little something right and a little something not-quite-right. If I was being methodical about my art study I'd do this more often: paint something. Then paint it again. And again. And as many times as it took to get what I thought it should be.  Because I've done some pretty respectable work this week and it's largely down to persistence and reps.
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Over the past weekend I got hung up on the idea of birch trees in the autumn. If I was attempting realism then the complexity of stark white trees set against a spectrum of fall foliage would be a considerable challenge. But there is a bit of the scene of birch trees, bare as they are in their mid-sections, where they stand out stark and crisp against a backdrop of colours, and after six repetitions of the same subject I’d started to get a feel for what the colours, layers and shadows should look like.

So after a summer of painting and practice, it all came down to birch trees.

Over and over and over again.

Winter is coming and idleness will fill the cold spaces and I’ll be looking back to my summer of painting adventures with envy at the opportunities I had and a little bitterness at the opportunities I missed.

But I am sure glad it’s still autumn for a few more days.
September 26, 2023
in a multi-layer circus.
About a thousand people walked by me as I sat on the ground in Piccadilly Circus on London one afternoon in July and did the sketch for this piece. People stop to take pictures of you while your sketching, look over your shoulder, and generally treat you as just as much part of the chaos of the scene when you’re doing that. To say I was nervous as heck would me an understatement, but that’s half the fun, right?

We have returned from our travels.

We spent three weeks visiting three countries in western Europe: England, France and Italy, and at the core of those travels was a wee bit of sketching.

To say it was the focus of the vacation would be false. It was a family vacation with some sketching squeezing into the gaps when possible, and as such I brought along just enough of my sketching gear to consider it a worthwhile effort. Paints, pens, brushes and just two sketchbooks, one vacation-specific in which I’ll likely not draw anymore and just set it aside as a souvenir, and then also my urban sketches watercolor folio into which I put another ten or so drawings over the course of the three weeks.

This was one of the latter. A sketch into my general collection of watercolour urban scene sketches, and to make it, yes, I sat down on the concrete at the edge of Piccadilly Circus in London, England, and with my pen in my hand and my book on my lap just started to draw as fast as I could go.

public performance
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No one wants to make a scene when they are trying to be creative. I mean, no one who isn't literally performing for the crowd.  And I mean no one who is trying to sit at the edge of the action and just quietly be out of the way drawing.  In a crowded place full of action and tourists and a jumble of people and activity, a guy sitting on the ground sketching it all is almost certain to become an object of attention. Me and my sketchbook are one hundred percent in someone's vacation photo collection. People walked over and looked over my shoulder. People stopped to take pictures. People waved their hands at their friends to get them to come look at the guy sitting on the ground sketching. I'm not sure if the distraction made the final result better or what, but it certainly made me work faster and looser and with less attention on some of those things that sometimes cause me to double think and hesitate.  There was no room for any of that, literally or figuratively.
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Of course, I waited until safely back in the hotel to pull out the paints, and flicked open the photos app on my phone to find the reference photo I’d snapped from where I sat (luckily I remembered to do that, what with the circus chaos around me!)

And the pressure from eyes of the crowd, and the nudging from my family to get up and move along with the vacation, and the pressure from myself to not overthink or overdraw or overwork any of the picture, I stood up after about twenty minutes and tucked my book and pen into my shoulder bag, and we moved along.

“What was your favorite part of the trip?” People have been asking since we returned.

“Oh, the food and sights.” I reply, because its relatable and mostly true. “I did some sketching, too.” I add. And as understated as I make it seem now, yeah, those moments because of the adrenaline rush of the crazy vibe swirling around and through my pen, I somehow think those moments will stick in my brain for a long, long time.
July 26, 2023
of cool thoughts.
It’s been hot outside. Isn’t that typical of us? Complaining in the winter that it’s too cold then complaining in the summer that it’s too hot. Maybe there is some kind of philosophical mindset we all need to embrace about living in the moment and being happy with where and when we currently are.

I opted to embrace cool thoughts in the heat wave, and painted a winter scene (a second attempt of my last watercolour class project) using cool colours.

Also I tend to be a guy that overuses colours and underuses brushes. I’ll use too many conflicting tones and shades, fail to mix them appropriately and then slap them all on using the same brush.

Instead, I tried to use few colours and more brushes for this piece.

In fact, I only used one colour, a big sloppy bowl of blue (with some red mixed in) and about five different brushes of various sizes and styles including rounds, flats and even a rigger. One colour, five brushes. Talk about taking things in the opposite direction, eh?

The first attempt at this painting was in class and was all about colour:

Lots of colours and just two brushes. (Also we used a tracing transfer technique for the base image, where I freehanded the second one, so the first attempt is closer to the reference photo, but who’s counting, huh?)

See the difference?

tonal monochromatics
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Call me strange, but I've always loved monochrome images. Black and white. Sepia. Whatever. I went through a phase in my photography days where one of the custom settings on my mode-select dial was strictly set to take medium-contrast black and white digital images, so that I could just spin that knob over to C1 and be snapping artsy-fartsy moody shots whenever the mood struck. Now that I'm a little more comfortable in my watercolour skin it has become increasingly obvious to me that the layering technique I've been using to add texture and shadow and shape and depth with colours is not only a great way to make monochromatic images (such as the feature image in this post created exclusively with a single shade of blue) but it is in fact simpler than painting with colour. Why? Because it's literally the same technique, but instead of carefully planning and mixing and finding the right hue, you just keep painting with the blue. I love it.
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All this technique-dabbling, though, is really just me prepping for three weeks in Europe this summer and thinking about how to capture that trip in a variety of styles and moods. Snapshot mages full of colour, architectural loose sketches, or old buildings and wobbly streets brought to life in tones and simple palettes.

All of it is opening a broadening scope of artistic opportunity for me to keep figuring stuff out.
June 8, 2023