Car Painting
We had a record 45cm snowfall yesterday. Getting out of the garage this morning was a chore. Shoveling the driveway, spinning tires spitting gravel, the whole nine yards. But! we were rewarded with a brilliant sunny day as payback. You don’t want to pass up a sunny day during Montreal winters. I had to get out and take advantage.
Last winter, after I complained about the lack of outdoor sketching, my friend Shari introduced me to painting from the car. She has a decent sized vehicle. Our car (a soft top Mitsubishi that’s sadly out of place in snowy Quebec) isn’t quite as comfortable for this sort of thing. I actually found the dashboard and window frames pretty irritating. Until I decided to just paint them into the scene. Suddenly they were a lot of fun.
This was about 2 hours, painted on a Macbook Air in CS4 with a Wacom Intuos 5, on location at the Notre Dame des Neiges Cemetery. I have to say, deciding at the last minute to add-in the car interior would have been impossible in traditional media. I ended up extending the canvas a number of times.
Another interesting bonus – the shadows don’t move in December. The sun is so low, it’s raking shadows all day long. I guess winter painters might have known that already – but it was neat to find out first hand.
Wow. This caught the light better than any photo could ever hope to do. Amazing, Marc.
Hey thanks!
Very cool!
Very nice digital painting & great that you did it on a Wacom tablet!
I love how you turn so many different situations into loads of fun. The wealth of fluffy snow is gorgeous. I am commenting from a sunny 32 degrees C in the South African Lowveld…cool for this time of the year….and you have inspired me to sketch our friends around the pool, eating watermelon and making lots of noise. I am also inspired to sort my sketching pack for next week in the bush, where I hope to get some rhino studies. SO THANK YOU for the inspiration!
As an aside… Please remember our rhinos, very endangered by poaching and lack of action by CITES.
Sketching Rhino sounds incredibly interesting. Posting drawings would be a great way to spread the word about the issue. If you get some good feild sketches let me know, I could post them on USK!
Marc,
This sketch is fantastic. I like the contrast between the light outside and the dark interior of the car.
Sitting in a car with lots of tech to sketch a wintery day – I like it! Very cool approach and technique. I see a lot of on-site iPhone and iPad sketches, but this is the first time I’ve seen somebody take a laptop and tablet out of a studio. Great sketch; keep ’em coming!
I’m so used to working in photoshop, it’s much more natural for me than the iPad right now – if figure it’s only a matter of time til the touch devices catch up. But there are quite a few laptop painters these days – here’s on group: http://digitalpleinairsociety.com/