Sunday Sketching

The USK:MTL group recently met for Sunday Sketching at McGill’s Redpath Musuem. We had a pretty good turn out, especially considering the cold. I was pleased to see a little crowd on the steps of the museum when I showed up. They were banging on the door trying to get the museum caretaker to open up on time. (It’s hard to be patient in this weather). I don’t think the staff are used to a big group appearing at opening time Sunday morning.

It was great to see a lot of new sketchers come out – I hope we can continue to build up our group, one day it would be great to be putting on a show or collaborating on a book based on the Montreal sketching community.

[Pen and Ink, composite drawing, roughly 24×36″]

Sketching wise, I stuck to drawing – though this is one of my composites, done on 12×16″ plate finish Bristol using about 7 sheets in collage. It’s sort of a mental game of mine, planing how the final drawing will stitch together. I have ballpoint, brush marker, some rust colored ink and dip pen and pencil in this. The haze over everthing is something I do in the scanning process – exaggerating the smudges left by my hands. I like the tone that develops by accident. This is the sort of thing that would make a good underlay for a painting.

This day, we had a pair of reporters from La Presse show up to shoot some video (one of our French language daily papers, if I dare say, the ‘real’ paper (the others are tabloids)), so I’ll let you know when their footage goes up. I did some drawing under the camera, so we might see some timelapse of my sketch. Fortunately Shari was there to do an interview in French. (I’m sadly not doing anything about my monolingual situation – my art will have to speak for me). Of course it’s also fascinating to me that the paper sends a camera crew, but I suppose it is only a matter of time before there is no more dead-tree paper, and we get it on our mobile devices.  I’m sorry journalists! but I can’t wait. It’s ok, there will still be journalists! Just like artists, they will have more, and better tools at their disposal.