works of wanderlust

Category: nature

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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

    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.

    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.

  • 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.