Tag: suburban sketch

  • urban sketch, two

    Crossposted on Notes for a Sketch

    It’s hardly worth logging a few messy sketches but I will say since declaring that I was going to start a daily art challenge and do a sketch every day… well, I have.

    The afternoon after my last post I made my way to the art store. There are a couple good ones in the city, but I’ve been supporting the place near Whyte Ave called The Paint Spot. It is a pretty typical art store, crammed floor to ceiling with more art supplies, books and toys than one could ever hope to try in a lifetime. 

    I went right back to the corner and bought a couple big sheets of cold pressed watercolour paper. This is the paper we used in the art classes I took and my winter goals include trying to do some regular painting in the shelter of my basement when the temperatures drop. I can break down one of those big sheets into about twenty to thirty smaller canvases, so with a bank of nearly fifty to keep me busy over the winter I should be able to start honing some winter watercolour scenes come December.

    I also made the mistake of walking past the sketchbook aisle.

    Let me be clear. I do not need any more sketch books. 

    I have a medium-sized shelf filled with sketchbooks that are not even close to half-used up. But I do see a new book and get it in my head that, hey, I could use this sketchbook for just that project. You know, like for example, I walked past the sketchbook aisle and I thought to myself: self, what if I bought a book with the intention of using it for practice art? Like, what if I started the book knowing I was going to fill it with half-baked ideas and doodles and experimental stuff?

    That’s the other problem. I stopped buying cheap books. I’ve become one of those artists who buys ahem-quality-cough-cough supplies. That’s great and all, but bougie as that is I then draw myself into a corner of feeling like the art inside those pages needs to match the quality of the canvas. As in, I’ll buy a nice leather-bound sketchbook then feel this overwhelming sense that every picture needs to be good enough to be drawn in a leather-bound sketchbook. It is a bit stifling, to be honest.

    suburban sketching

    there are no strict rules for what makes and urban sketch, I suppose. one could reflect upon the philosophical nature of an art form that was perhaps conceived as a kind of tourist snapshot art form, visiting a place of architectural urban beauty, a place built by people, and turning it into a sketched scene upon a piece of paper or in a notebook as kind of plein air reference art form. if one lives in a place of cultural significance or often visits those places then urban sketching is a revelatory form of personal expression, finding an excuse to sit for a while and take in a scene, soak it in with ones eyes and translate it to scribbles on a page. my reintroduction to the sport was inspired, actually, by a visit to dublin where I sought out an art supply store so that I could compensate for my lack of planning and find something to urban sketch the city. but if one lives, say, in the suburban outskirts of a small-ish and insignificant city on the canadian prairies where nothing much of architectural consequence exists then one is thereafter reduced to sketching little more than cookie cutter houses and chain restaurants and neatly planned community sprawl. to differentiate that as suburban sketching seems fair.

    So, yeah, art store got a few of my bucks and I bought a nice “practice” sketchbook that I have deemed will be messy and disordered and full of whatever drawings in whatever form I choose. 

    I have drawn in that book four times. 

    And I have drawn in one of my bougie books thrice, contributing there to my daily challenge requirements of a sketchy urban sketch.

    Oh, and you thought art was relaxing, huh?

  • 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.