works of wanderlust

Category: nature

  • of curious wildlife.

    It didn’t take long for me to become a paper fanatic after I started working on my art more. One sketchbook lead to three or four sketchbooks which lead to a small stack of books, pads, and bricks, each designated for a purpose or a theme or a specific style of art.

    I have a hardcover sketch book just for drawing people.

    I have a coiled watercolour pad just for scenes painted from photos.

    I have a moleskine book I use specifically for sketching objects.

    And there is definitely a canvas-bound landscape notepad reserved for travel.

    A book for everything and everything in it’s right book.

    So buying a new book these days often means trying to come up with a unique and specific use for it. Such as it was when I bought an 11.5x18cm Moleskine sketchbook a few weeks ago. I unwapped it. Flipped through it’s crisp 165g pages, and left it blank for a solid three weeks.

    And then I stumbled on an idea.

    small format painting

    There is a certain satisfaction that comes with completing a full page of lines and colour and watching it transform from a blank page into a colourful scene on the page. I find myself tripped up by that though, too. Committing a long stretch of time and a whole page to anything gives me the painter’s equivalent of writer’s block, frozen over the page with a shimmering idea waiting to be realized. But as I am just learning and practice is oh-so-much-more important than generating completed art, it struck me that small format pieces, y’know, paintings that could fit on a playing card with room to spare and focusing on a subject rather than a scene, may help unclutter some of that practice.  Voila, little paintings with no expectation for scene or palette or perfection. A few lines of sketch, a few daubs of wash, and then a few minutes painting in the details.

    This book would not be ideal for full page art, the paper was a little thin for that, but it could definitely take a gentle few layers for a watercolour doodle or a small format painting.

    My rule of thumb is literal. The goal of a small format painting is to be something that could mostly (or entirely) be covered by my thumb.

    And the subjects would be varied. No need to focus on practical size. A mountain could be an interesting image painted into the size of a postage stamp a few centimeters away from a doodle of an insect filling up a similar space on the page.

    The bunny was the second mini-painting in my new notebook, layered into existence over my morning coffee while the family slept in on a lazy Saturday. Not counting drying time, maybe thirty minutes of work. And a cute little guy too, if I do say so myself.

  • in the smokey park.

    The dog wanted to sit in the grass. We’ve been riding a sine wave of temperatures through the last month or two, going from unbearably hot to jacket cool. Today the temperature swung back up to the hot again after a few days of pre-autumn chilly, and the dog, half way through our afternoon, pulled me in the shade of some big old trees in the park and plonked down in the shade in the grass.

    I relented and sat down beside her. To my back, the sun was glinting through the leaves of the trees and shimmering in a romantic sort of way as if pushed through a bit of atmospheric smoke that has decended on the city from a forest fire burning a thousand kilometers away.

    My camera didn’t do it justice, but then neither did my painting. That said, the shimmer of the light on the individual leaves made me consider that my rough squiggly-line trees with blotchy shadows may be dramatically improved by a few carefully chosen layers of a thousand individually coloured watercolour leaves.

    Points of Colour

    I can’t say if patience is truly a virtue, but there is a time to rush through the blurry colourful mess that is a huge tree and there is a time to be more patient and ask if it’s worth painting every indivual leaf.  Truly, such a task cannot be accomplished in the short ninety minutes it took me to attempt such a feat, but my light to dark layering of hundreds or thousands of individual splotches over my rough wash, each splotch an attempt to convey the sense of an individual leaf on that tree, resulted in a depth and variation in the final result that seems to me more impressive than any mussy blotch of greens and yellows and shadows that I usually attempt.

    Obviously, given more than a rushed ninety minute piece and proof of personal concept I may even improve upon the approach. I also suspect that more care and attention to put a more fulsome subject of focus in the piece would enliven the result dramatically. All that said, I am finding myself unable to steer directly into the headlights of abstraction as I so often set out to attempt before losing my way on that road and simply paint within the narrower confined of realistic colours and shapes.

    It is a fault I hope to work towards recitifying as the months press onward.