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.