works of wanderlust

Category: winter

  • 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 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

    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.

    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.

  • 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

    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.

    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.

  • of vegetable matters.

    As much as I have a minor pre-occupation with so-called “urban” sketching, my situation, life, and local environment often steer me towards subject matter that is decidedly more suburban, rural, or parkland.

    In other words, leafing through my growing stack of sketchbooks, the common theme seems to trend towards nature, trees, insects, and outdoors… in the wilderness sense.

    In the winter this has meant snow and brown, leafless trees.

    In the autumn I specifically went to the art store to buy and build an autumn foliage paint collection.

    And as spring approaches once again for what will be my third warm-season of outdoor painting adventures, I’m anticipating not just building a new “spring” foliage paint collection as a seasonal counterpoint, but finding lots of blossoms and insects and fresh growing things to sketch and paint through April and May.

    Leaves Aren’t (Just) Green

    Nature is tricky and like so many objects that we find emerging from the tips of our paintbrushes, has a subtle colour palette that bears explanation through a glimmer of science.  Leaves seem green because leaves tend to be stuffed full of chlorophylls, a family of plant-chemical that absorbs all the blue, yellow, violet and orange light in an effort to make energy.  But biology is tricky and chlorophyll can fill leaves in varying patterns, be missing entirely from one part of a leaf or another, degrade due to plant health or through the season, and more. And all this means is that the reflected green light is often mixed with a variety of other colours, sometimes yellow and sometimes oranges and sometimes reds, pinks, violets or blues, all merging into a green that is rarely just green, but some other collection of hues that define the very nature of the plant we are painting.

    I was longing to be outside painting plants today, partly because it’s been a long winter, partly because the weather has started to warm and people are talking about the near future state of the streets and parks free from snow, and partly because it’s almost exactly one week until the spring equinox and we can run out into the front yard shouting that “spring has arrived!”

    So I painted a houseplant in my window instead, and I used just three colours, payne’s grey, sap green, and indian yellow to blend and blur and mix the various shades and depths of colour that defined that particular spider plant sitting on the ledge looking at the longer, sunnier days outside.

    Soon that window will be full of life, but most of it will be on the other side of the glass. For now, I’ll use what I can to inspire me.

  • on a winter getaway.

    It’s a long weekend in Canada and so with neither work nor school for anyone on Monday we skipped off to the mountains for some nordic-style fun in the alpine climate.

    We travel out there quite often. To that point, I had bought a “travel” sketchbook that I’d intended to be for travel sketching but after the fifth time I brought it to the local mountains and drew pictures of wildlife, flora, waterfalls, pine trees, and (of course) mountains, I officially called that book my “mountain sketching” book and am now intent on filling it up with the same.

    This past weekend was no exception.

    Except.

    Except it was winter, and I’ve written in the past about my lack of patience for drawing in the snow. So, instead I was back to drawing from my day’s photos from a table in our hotel room.

    messy

    Splats. Dribbles. Drips. And spatter. There is something to be said for the abstraction that evolves from a carefree mashing of paints onto paper. I took another online course in February where the instructor emphasized this particular style. She didn't teach it, per se, but rather she left it hanging there in between the lines, so to speak. She alluded to it as a technique that she enjoyed, a carefreeness of paint upon the page that was as much deliberate and purposeful as it was accidental.  Messy does not mean random. Messy does not imply carelessness. Messy is as much about painting with physics and chaos as it is about painting outside the lines.

    One of our weekend activities was a mountain hike.

    We walked up through a frozen creek bed, between towering rock cliffs cut into the side of a mountain, bracing against the cold and occasional gusts of wind. We walked nearly four klicks up and then the same back down. I took lots of video and a few photos, and warm and dry and full of supper that night I pulled out my watercolours and tried to evoke the mountains as much as the feeling of the mountain hike, blustery, chaotic, and busy with life and people and shifting weather.

    The result was painting outside of the lines, and a bit of chaotic physics.

    I have a lot of learning to do about this style, and while I’m not ready to declare a victory here, also I’m not sad about the result for my first attempt.