works of wanderlust

Category: art & photography

  • in a dimly lit space.

    Not only have I been thinking of all the new things I can do with the skills I’ve learned in my watercolour class, but I’ve been thinking such thoughts in the context of our upcoming trip to Europe where (so I’ve heard) there are plenty of neat things to sketch and paint.

    Of course there are.

    I made a trip to the art store last night, and when the “dude” at the counter asked me if he could help me find anything, I lied and said I was “just browsing” but looking to stock up on some stuff for a trip I was taking.

    In fact, I was in the market for a higher quality “smallish” brush, something akin to the blended squirrel brushes I’ve bought for my class but in a 2 or 4 size, versus a 12, so it’s y’know more handy for small format, travel urban sketchies in a moleskine versus big large format watercolours that we’ve been tackling in class.

    I ended up leaving almost empty handed, just one tube of white gouache (which I’ve been eyeing for a few months now) and a mid-grade synthetic brush size 4 that caught my eye and for which I thought I’d give it a try.

    framing devices

    I saw a clever use of taping that has struck me as a great framing method for my upcoming "travel journal" sketches: the faux photo look.  Tape off a roughly 2:3 proportional rectangle, about the size and shape you might see in an old point-and-click photo style from the 90s, setting it slightly askew on the page.  Paint, keeping into but filling completely the bounds of the box you've created with the tape. Remove tape, and then with a ruler and either fineliner or fine-nibbed pen draw a border with a small white margin around the painted area. Add some incidental shading on a couple of the outer edges of your ink box, and voila! A faux photo on the page.

    I was browsing on one of the socials this morning and that white gouache was stuck in my craw, because a neat little astronomy photo as the header for some article about sciencey-stuff quickly found it’s ways a screencap into my photo library and from there as the inspiration to apply some groovy cloud techniques into a solar view technique and…

    Night sky.

    Spatter some white gouache to finish it off and…

    Well, if you showed me this pic a year ago and told me I’d painted it I’d be as surprised as anyone.

  • 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.

  • 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 the first day of daily drawing.

    If you haven’t been keeping up with my daily notes, then you may also be unaware that I’ve dubbed March 2023 a month called #mARTch and am planning on drawing, sketching, painting, and otherwise being squwetchy all through the 31 days of this month,

    As I write this, the first day of March is essentially three quarters over, but I’ve fulfilled my end of that bargain and already produced a not-terrible watercolour.

    In my planning for thirty-one days of drawing I have been reminded of previous drawing-streak challenges I’ve given myself and recall that a big chunk of the actual challenge comes not from doing the art, but in finding inspiration: something to draw and devote a chunk of time to bringing to life on the page. As such, I’ve been snapping photos of random objects downtown and around the neighbourhood, and one of those was a reasonably lovely sunset… obstructed by a bunch of trees and buildings, otherwise known as a silhouette.

    sunlines & silhouettes

    Sunsets and sunrises are essentially an opportunity to paint light directly. Sure, every colour is either light or reflected light or refracted light or implied light or maybe just lack of light, but a sunset is sunlight transmitting through the atmosphere across a distance that is essentially no different than any other time of daylight, except that the straight line between the sun and your eyes at dawn or dusk cuts through a whole bunch extra air due to the curvature of the Earth.  The result is that much of the shorter wavelengths of light start to get filtered out as the light cuts through that little slipping fraction of sky at the cusp of that transition zone, all the violets, blues and greens more likely to be hitting dust particles or other molecules in the air and vanishing from the spectrum, leaving reds and yellows and oranges behind in a blur of colours we recognize as a sunrise or sunset.  Painting light is a delicate effort, building up those red and yellow colours without leaving muddy messes behind, filling the space with a wispiness that implies clouds and air and light and reminds us in utter simplicity of what it's trying to be.

    I’d love to make sunrises and sunset part of my signature style, but they have been one of the toughest things I’ve encountered so far to paint: blurring and blending and merging colours in a darkened sky.

    I started with a wet-on-wet technique, laying down some generously moist yellow lines just above where I supposed my horizon to be. After about ten minutes of letting that seep softly into the page, more wet-on-wet with some alternating reddy-orange streaks, all of it just trying to touch but with enough room for each colour to hold it’s own on the page. As that started to dry and set, I tried to find an optimal time to fill in the space around it with a very diluted deep blue, and added slowly compounding layers to the rest of the sky and slowly, carefully and deliberately pulling the grey-blue tones into the red and yellow spaces.

    The silhouette was a little more chaotic, and I roughed it out with a fine-liner & brush pen before using a dilute india ink wash to deepen the blacks and add some speckling to imply some detail and dust.

    As always, the photo included doesn’t do the final painting justice and I think it turned out vibrant and balanced.

    Now, just 30 more daily paintings to go.