works of wanderlust

Category: watercolour

  • from a cold winter walk.

    It’s been a few weeks since I posted a sketch.

    In fact, it’s been a few weeks since I painted or sketched anything of any worth.

    That’s what happens when a beloved family member, even one who is a hundred and one years old, falls into a three week decline leading to their passing. Grief can be creative muse, but it was not mine.

    I went for a lot of walks in January, often taking nothing with me besides the dog and my phone.

    My phone has a camera, of course, so I took lots of photos. Photos of the snow. Photos of the dog. Photos of the dog in the snow.

    snow is not white

    Winter around here is nearly six months long, so any hope of avoiding painting the snow or snow-filled scenes goes out the window with my choice of residence. that said, snow is not white. Or rather, snow is rarely white. Fresh snow in the sunlight is blue. Snow along a path is speckled brown. Snow in the shadows is grey or purple or deep shades of blue. Snow reflects the light. Snow mottles with shadow and shape and prints and tracks. Snow glints and shines. Snow shapes itself to the ground or to objects, it clings in random shapes to branches, hanging, drooping, piling, mounding, or globbing. Snow melts into puddles, smooths into ice, and does a thousand other unexpected things, each that makes it a challenge to paint.

    I didn’t paint any of this until yesterday.

    My motivation to paint was low in January. My motivation to sit in the snow and paint in January was zero.

    I have no qualms about painting from a photo, of course. Plein air sketching is of course a lovely way to spend some time during a walk, but watercolor requires water… not ice. So plein air en hiver has not turned out to be compatible with this hobby so far.

    From a photo it was then…

    And my dog, as complex as she is to get right in blobs of browns and shadow, is even trickier when she features in a thumb-sized rendering like in this small-format sketch in my 3.5×5.5 inch moleskine folio (to give you a sense of the size of the original work.)

    Lacking any other motivation for creativity, I took it though. And I’m not unhappy with the results.

  • 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.

  • from the big city.

    I alluded in my previous post that November had us primed for some travel afar and away, and in as much I had picked up a new sketchbook for that specific purpose.

    Over the recent long weekend, the family and I flew across the continent from our frozen little Canadian city, to the big city, the big apple, Manhattan in New York. It was a weekend filled with adventure, food, walking, Broadway shows, museums, more food, parks, and tall buildings. Five days of urban vacation fun, punctuated by no less than seven sketches by yours truly.

    I tried to be bold when I sketched, too.

    On the Sunday morning, while the family was still snoozing away the early hours, I packed up my gear and walked the few blocks north of the hotel and into Central Park.

    Over the course of three hours on my own, I found breakfast, drank a coffee, and stopped three times to pull my sketchbook and pen from my pack and draw what I saw.

    The last of these, the feature image of this post, was drawn while sitting on a bench around Central Park West and 66th Street, a long street running along the west edge of the park and lined across the avenue with beautiful and expensive condominiums. Literal million dollar views.

    pens and ink

    I've been reluctant to dive in headlong with ink-only sketches, almost always warming up my blank page with at least a few pencil shapes to build some confidence for those more permanent lines. That was a luxury I didn't give myself on vacation, tho, whether because I often had a family sitting nearby waiting on my art or just because I was trying to fill the page in the minimum of time for a dozen other reasons. I had thought such haste would leave me unhappy with the final results, but I have been finding a new confidence in ink-only drawings and a life and vibrance that is emerging on accident of only having a single chance to draw the scene rather than tracing over my pencil lines. And I like it, and think I will do more of it.

    My bench wasn’t worth nearly so much, but it proved a creatively fertile outpost.

    Given another hour, a day, a lifetime it felt like something I could have sketched in the most brilliant of detail and complexity. But I sat down for a mere thirty minutes, give or take, and quickly tried to capture the late-autumn scene. Shapes. Lines. Feeling. Warmth. Movement of the hundred or so people who walked by me, many looking down at my page and a few stopping to ask for directions that I was scantly able to provide. My pen moved as fast as it could across my sketchbook resting on my lap, trying to store that moment into a few lines of ink on paper.

    In my little city home there are a million scenes that could be sketched, but being somewhere new and vibrant and alive in a way that New York is just so unlike where I live, it was gnawing and crunching as creative fire.

    Travel was my muse for five days, and more than once lit something inside that I think I’ll find hard to rekindle at home… especially with half a meter of snow on the ground.

  • of a million little leaves.

    The autumn weather and colours brought me on a long wandering walk this past weekend through the rolling single-track trails of our local river valley. Fifteen minutes of brisk strolling in the direction of the parklike preserve finds multiple opportunities to step into a wilderness that changes with the season.

    For a few days, literally only days, each year the trail is a glorious canopy of oranges and yellows, and on rare days it is all set upon an upwards sky that acts as a azure blue backdrop to the autumn changing of the leaves from life into litter.

    I strolled with the dog and paused every few steps as a new splendour tempted my phone camera as a reference that pleaded to be put down on paper in vibrant watercolours.

    persistence and time

    While I cherish the idea of quickly sketching a few lines onto a page and leaving behind a breezy, airy form that captures the imagination, I have also known since my early art days that not every work will come so easily.  Eagerness to stamp a date and a signature on the bottom of a piece and flip the page to the next project is often overwhelming for me, so occasionally finding myself with a challenge that requires literal days of iterative work forces me to think long term, in layers, and across the trudge-like march towards something that will always seemingly benefit from a few more perfectly placed spot of colour.

    Painting leaves turned out to be a massive challenge.

    One at a time, I have drawn and coloured many of them in the past days and months.

    But thousands. Millions, maybe, like an abstraction of light and colour and life and warmth and magic all at once? Capturing that with my amature skills was almost an impossible task.

    I will admit, as I put down the first couple layers of paint and left them to dry I had a sinking feeling in my heart that I’d be either tearing the page from my art book or leaving it there as some kind of reminder-like testament to an ego-driven error.

    I went to sleep that first night, a Saturday, a little humbled by the paint’s ability to break me so thoroughly.

    Sunday morning I woke up and in my morning stupor dabbled a bit more into the piece. The drops of spattered colour had the right hues and shapes as they had fully dried and there was nothing to lose by adding a few more of them. Rather, I resumed my droplet art with some deeper reds and greenish yellow to act as a contrasting underlayer.

    By Sunday night, I was feeling a bit better… but still had a vague sense of… meh.

    Monday, more paint was added. And yet by Tuesday I had decided to be bold and deepen the contrast of the tree branches which were starting to fade into the background blurs of yellow and pinks and reds and greens.

    There wasn’t really a moment when it popped, but at some point I started to feel the persistent meddling in the finality of this piece had begun to pay off, transforming the random shapes into something closer to what I held in my mind’s eye, that reference image captured in my memory as I stood on a river valley trail gazing up into the orange canopy of leaves overhead.

    It just stuck, somehow. Worked. Though I couldn’t explain why.

    It was still imperfect, yes, but definitely not more litter for the autumn trash heap.

  • 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.