works of wanderlust

Category: small format

  • in a theme park.

    As it turns out, Disneyland is not a great place to sketch.

    Oh, sure, it might be a great inspiration for sketching. There are a few thousands of people worth sketching. There is colour and shape and light and shadow and trees and architecture and—deep breath.

    There are also about fifteen places to sit, total. You never really stop moving, and if you do it’s usually because the ride queue is jammed up, and all the best sight lines are meant to be snapped with a camera and moved out of the way for the next person.

    Sketching in Disney kinda sucks.

    But also, it was a bit of a challenge.

    In 2022 we went to Florida and checked out Disney World and I had it in my mind to do some sketching there. When we arrived I started carrying my sketchbook around but then between my unwillingness to be fast and loose and messy, I couldn’t afford (nor would my family tolerate) camping on a bench for thirty minutes to carefully draw a building or a ride or something. So, I started snapping reference photos and (being that we spent a lot of down time at the hotel) I did lots of painting in the evenings from my phone screen.

    loosy goosy

    where photography is about pixel-perfect capturing a scene, and yes, watercolour can be that too when the mood strikes, there is a dream-like element to the flow of water and pigment that can be embraced if one is willing to step away from the seeking of realism. I have been trying to relax my brain in this regard for years, always in a little lockstep with the photographic mindset. “how will people know what I’m painting if the colours/shapes/outlines don’t match??!!” I am trying now to embrace my loosy goosy period, that effort to evoke a vibe or a mood or a feeling from a painting while leaving the literal behind. A bit of shape. A lot of squiggles. A lot of water. A dab of this and a dob of that and just let physics take over. It takes some chill, but it can work out.

    In 2024, just a week ago as I write this, we went to California to check out Disneyland, and I decided, fresh small-format sketchbook in hand and some ripe thoughts about style, that I would experiment. Fast sketches were on the agenda. No sitting. No parking or camping somewhere to draw. Pull out the book and pen and with a maximum (literally MAX) of five minutes, get as much sense of a scene as I could onto paper and—

    Well, I snapped a pic, too, and did all my painting back at the hotel. I wasn’t exactly going to hold a sketchbook open on a rollercoaster while I waited for my washes to dry.

    I did the math and for about 28 sketches I clocked in about six hours total over the week, sketching & painting, and filled front to back an entire Moleskine “small” 3.5×5.5 watercolor folio. Every page, usually double wide.

    The paintings are messy. Some of them I was a little loose on the detail. Some I was a little heavy on the colours. A few got some leakage through the seams of the paper.

    Had I spent even an hour on each of those pics to, you know, make them neater or give them more detail then I would have spent twenty eight hours—two whole waking days—painting everything I painted. As it is, I got it all in between rides and during some hotel siestas. Isn’t that the best way to art, huh?

  • of a hundred little bugs.

    Did I mention that I have a biology degree? It factors into this post, so it’s worth mentioning now. Bachelor of Science with a specialization in molecular genetics and minor in entomology, convocation 1999.

    I can’t say that I’ve used it much in my career, though having it has opened numerous doors.

    And occasionally it rears up as a useful bit of dormant knowledge in my head such as when I need to help my daughter study for a science exam, or I decide to open up my sketchbook and draw an insect.

    A couple weeks ago we were roaming around New York City and I was busily drawing urban sketches of the parks and the buildings and the people. We visited all sorts of sights worth seeing for any nerdy, arty sort of guy, including not only museums but also the 5th Avenue branch of the New York Public Library.

    They have a gift shop.

    And I bought a gift. For myself. A gift that was both arty and nerdy.

    I bought a leatherbound sketchbook made with lush Italian paper with an embossed logo from the library on the cover. It looks and feels like I pulled it out of the golden era of philosopher scientists, as if Charles Darwin himself might have lugged it around in his satchel to record his evolutionary observations.

    But what to do with it?

    phylum arthropoda

    As a photographer I have collected hundreds of backyard bug photos over the years. This has come useful in the last few days as the weather turned bitterly cold and the only insects to be found are the occasional housefly who doesn't know better than to knock himself against the icy window pane. Bugs are beautiful subjects and present an amazing opportunity for artists of watercolour. Some will tell you that flowers are the way to go, but the diversity of the insect world is equally as vast and colourful, and leaps beyond blossoms in complexity and interesting reference material. Recreating intricate body designs, dazzling hues and sheens, detailed hairs and eyes, or the feathery hint of translucent wings is a challenge that can be rewarding for any who attempt to paint a bug. From butterflies to beetles, dragonflies, bees, and ladybugs, even a swarm of ants can make an interesting subject.

    The obvious solution (that took me a mere two weeks to spark upon with a golden eureka moment) was something dutifully scientific.

    This afternoon, having paged through ten years of photos and plucked fifty or so macro pics of various kinds of local arthropods, I painted the first of many pages in my new notebook: a ladybug sitting upon the bark of a tree in my backyard.

    I added the name in both English and Latin as a finishing touch.

    And I love the result. Paintings of nature. Of insects. Maybe plants. Possibly even some flowers here and there. Ultimately a kind of quasi-scientific collection of art linking me back to that otherwise unused university degree. Darwin might have been proud.

  • of nature studies and pinecones.

    Autumn arrived like an express train, passing between the trees with a gust of chilly wind and leaving behind a noticeable change in the mood. The leaves changed colour with its arrival, folding from a mature, ripe green hue to patterns of orange and red and yellow and brown.

    These are colours to which I have learned this year to give new names: ochre, umber, rust, and olive.

    While I spent hours of my weekend dabbling in the autumn colours of my watercolour paint sets, looking to match warm hues with the visuals I held in my mind and on the photo roll of my phone after a meandering walk through the nearby river valley, I found a better success in the simplicity of the lingering remains of summer.

    Between snapping epic photos of billowing autumn leaves patched against azure skies, I’d also gathered a small collection of photos of oblivious little pinecones still hanging (or recently fallen) from the boughs of the various evergreens.

    studies and collections

    Repetition is the king of practice, though painting the same thing over and over again could quickly become tedious. The notion of a study unlocks the frustration of repetition from the benefits, at least I think so. A study as I've defined it, is the tackling of a set of similar subjects with a common theme, similar characteristics or some other factor in common. For example, I took a stroll through the local park and snapped a half dozen photos of various pinecones. Some were dangling from branches while some were on the ground. Some were young and green while others were dried up and cracked open.  Four of those photos became the basis for my study, creating four individual paintings with four similar styles. Yet in the spirit of repetition, I mixed one set of paint, used one spread of paper, and painted each in quick succession taking the micro-lessons learned from each go inform the next.

    Groups of things intrigue me, because whether it is leaves or rocks or pinecones, the mind plays a trick on us that makes us create a kind of symbolic idealism for them in our head. It is a default mental state that almost any who do art need to overcome at some point: not painting or drawing what we think we see, but actually painting or drawing what we do see.

    Take a pinecone for example. In my mind I have an idealized image of a pinecone. It’s shape, colour, and texture are all locked in as a mental symbol of a pinecone.

    I didn’t draw that symbol. Rather I drew four pictures of the pinecones I found in my park on my walk, not a one of them really even matching the symbol I held in my head of what I was drawing. And those pinecones were not brown; the hues I used were sepias and ochres and olives and umbers, warm autumn shades that pull the cool breeze out of the air and remind those standing among the scattered remains of summer that winter is just a different shade.

  • 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.