works of wanderlust

Category: watercolour

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
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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.
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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.
September 26, 2023
in a multi-layer circus.
About a thousand people walked by me as I sat on the ground in Piccadilly Circus on London one afternoon in July and did the sketch for this piece. People stop to take pictures of you while your sketching, look over your shoulder, and generally treat you as just as much part of the chaos of the scene when you’re doing that. To say I was nervous as heck would me an understatement, but that’s half the fun, right?

We have returned from our travels.

We spent three weeks visiting three countries in western Europe: England, France and Italy, and at the core of those travels was a wee bit of sketching.

To say it was the focus of the vacation would be false. It was a family vacation with some sketching squeezing into the gaps when possible, and as such I brought along just enough of my sketching gear to consider it a worthwhile effort. Paints, pens, brushes and just two sketchbooks, one vacation-specific in which I’ll likely not draw anymore and just set it aside as a souvenir, and then also my urban sketches watercolor folio into which I put another ten or so drawings over the course of the three weeks.

This was one of the latter. A sketch into my general collection of watercolour urban scene sketches, and to make it, yes, I sat down on the concrete at the edge of Piccadilly Circus in London, England, and with my pen in my hand and my book on my lap just started to draw as fast as I could go.

public performance
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No one wants to make a scene when they are trying to be creative. I mean, no one who isn't literally performing for the crowd.  And I mean no one who is trying to sit at the edge of the action and just quietly be out of the way drawing.  In a crowded place full of action and tourists and a jumble of people and activity, a guy sitting on the ground sketching it all is almost certain to become an object of attention. Me and my sketchbook are one hundred percent in someone's vacation photo collection. People walked over and looked over my shoulder. People stopped to take pictures. People waved their hands at their friends to get them to come look at the guy sitting on the ground sketching. I'm not sure if the distraction made the final result better or what, but it certainly made me work faster and looser and with less attention on some of those things that sometimes cause me to double think and hesitate.  There was no room for any of that, literally or figuratively.
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Of course, I waited until safely back in the hotel to pull out the paints, and flicked open the photos app on my phone to find the reference photo I’d snapped from where I sat (luckily I remembered to do that, what with the circus chaos around me!)

And the pressure from eyes of the crowd, and the nudging from my family to get up and move along with the vacation, and the pressure from myself to not overthink or overdraw or overwork any of the picture, I stood up after about twenty minutes and tucked my book and pen into my shoulder bag, and we moved along.

“What was your favorite part of the trip?” People have been asking since we returned.

“Oh, the food and sights.” I reply, because its relatable and mostly true. “I did some sketching, too.” I add. And as understated as I make it seem now, yeah, those moments because of the adrenaline rush of the crazy vibe swirling around and through my pen, I somehow think those moments will stick in my brain for a long, long time.
July 26, 2023
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
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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.
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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.
June 8, 2023
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
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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.
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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.
May 18, 2023
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
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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.
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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.
May 5, 2023