Sketching at Chapeau Mont Royal
The other day Les Amis de la Montagne invited a few sketchers from our drawing group USK:MTL up to the mountain – to attend their annual benefit luncheon Chapeau Mont Royal.
It’s a fundraiser in support of the famous mountain park that gives our city its name. But also, an opportunity (or maybe a challenge?) for the glitterati of Montreal to come out on a beautiful sunny day and show off their most extravagant party hats!
Why not combine civic duty with a chance to show off your unique fashion sense? That seems like a perfectly Montreal solution to keeping our park a vital center in city life.
These were sketched as the reception line flew by (we knew each guest would have to briefly stop to shake hands with the greeters – a perfect drawing spot for the sketcher-paparazzi). I’m using only a 0.3mm pencil on the moving subjects, jotting written notes as to colors, then painting with watercolor that afternoon.
We did our best to play along with the theme. I even replaced my ubiquitous baseball cap. I mean – the most important thing for me is shading my eyes when drawing. Men’s hats right now are experiencing a shrinking brim situation!
So, thanks to Les Amis – and now that we know the score, maybe we’ll be back next year with some fancy millinery arts of our own :)
DVD Review: James Gurney’s Portraits in the Wild
Plein-air artist, educator, and illustrator James Gurney has recently announced the latest in his series of instructional DVDs.
Portraits in the Wild takes on a new subject in the field-sketching series, bringing his ultra-portable mixed media sketching kit to the subject of portrait sketching on location.
By way of disclosure, James sent me a free preview of this latest video, which will be released to the public on June 13th.
I know Mr. Gurney from a few painting outings, and in fact, I’m visible sketching in the background of one of the video clips. As well, my own portrait, sketched at a post paint-out dinner the day before, ends up getting some screen time, as it happens to be on the page next to the demonstration.
Here’s my own doodle from the other side of the dinner table: Greg Shea, James Gurney and Gavin Baker.
This collection of four demos is a natural follow-up to his earlier release Gouache in the Wild, carrying on with a mixed media approach using watercolor, water soluble pencils, gouache and casein all in combination. (Though one of the portraits is a side jaunt into alla prima oil painting).
The first sequence is a genuine Urban Sketching affair – sketching the crowd at a regional car show.
It’s always a challenge selecting what you want out of a moving mass of people. James illustrates the trick of combining the multiple people coming and going, drawing onto gestures of his favorite poses and finding faces that complete the story. Something that will be familiar to readers of my own blog.
Next up is a sketch with a narration by the subject himself. James cleverly gets Scott Corey, a docent at Sturbridge Village, to give a spontaneous monologue while he is being painted.
I wish all models were such great storytellers!
This sequence features a bravura bit of painting where James, with no great fuss, goes into what might have been an 80% finished portrait, and obliterates it with gouache, so that he can repaint for better results.
Next up, we get treated to an alla prima oil painting from first brush drawing to final touches. While not exactly in keeping with his field sketching theme, it’s instructive to see how much his approach remains consistent across different media.
And finally the big finish, a sketchbook painting of a group of singers in a choir – a tricky situation with multiple portraits in constant motion. This one is made even more remarkable considering it’s in a little 5×7″ish sketchbook.
As soon as I saw this painting in the introduction, I knew I was looking forward to the bit where he paints the pattern onto the dress. A sequence he makes look as easy as painting any other bit. Which I suppose is part of the lesson. Painting a girl’s face, or braid of hair, or a patterned dress – the same principles of color, pigment, and brushwork apply.
As with the rest of this video series, Portraits in the Wild is independently produced by James and his wife Jeanette. Purchases go directly to supporting his art practice, his informative and entertaining art-blog, and future releases of more videos.
~m
The Bon Vivant : Café Sketching in Lagos Portugal
I saved this last one from our recent trip to Portugal. It’s one of my favorites, even if it’s not technically the best piece. Just some playing around while waiting for lunch.
That bright red building (The Bon Vivant) was quite eye catching. How could I resist?
I love how, if you just relax and have fun with a sketch – it always shows through in the final result.
Yes, proper perspective goes out the window, but the enjoyment of the gestural brushwork can make up for any flaws in realism.
The internet gives me a quote from Georges Braque which says:
“The hard-and-fast rules perspective imposes on art were a ghastly mistake it has taken four centuries to redress…Scientific perspective forces the objects in a picture to disappear away from the beholder instead of bringing them within his reach as painting should”.
In this case, I really could see that bell tower down the street – if I leaned way out to the left it was just in view. So, perhaps I had to lean the block over to get it in? Not to mention the other choices. Dimming the Bon Vivant’s paint job to a more mellow perylene maroon, slimming down the boxy old building, and giving it some Ottoman empire arches, similar to what we saw on another building that day.
After all – there has to be a reason we’re doing the drawing in the first place – when otherwise a photograph would serve perfectly well.
~m
July is officially World Watercolor Month!
Art blogger Charlie O’Shields has launched an interesting initiative declaring July to be World Watercolor Month!
In the spirit of Inktober or National Novel Month (NaNoWriMo), Charlie is issuing a call to all artists to dive into watercolor. Consider posting your work using the #WorldWatercolorMonth hashtag, and possibly take on his challenge of 31 watercolors in 31 days.
Read more about getting involved, and how to participate in a charity fundraiser to bring kids art supplies.
Drawing the Drawing Robot Drawing
The other day I was sketching at the C2 Conference here in Montreal, and found myself drawing while simultaneously contemplating the death of work in our upcoming automation based economy, and the role of artists after the singularity.
(If you believe in either of those theories).
C2 is a place where you might find yourself believing all that stuff after a few lectures :)
What I was actually doing, while thinking these deep thoughts, was drawing a gang of drawing robots, while they were drawing a live human model.
An odd feeling for sure!
These small robot arms are built and programmed by artist Patrick Tresset.
Each robot has a camera “eye” and some techno wizardry in its processor brain that converts the values the camera sees into densities of pen marks. The results are actually fairly similar to what human artists do – since of course these robots were programmed by an artist who knows how to draw.
When I passed by, the group of about a half dozen arms were part way through their drawings, so I quickly pulled out my own sketching material to see if I could beat them to the punch.
I was only drawing for a few short minutes, but in that time a number of hilarious things happened.
First, I was in such a rush to beat the robots that I spilled some ink on the gallery floor. I’m in the habit of flicking dirty brushes onto the ground when I paint outside – and in my rush I did it without thinking. Luckily it was a polished concrete floor – so I could just casually drop a bit of paper towel and stand on it while I drew, mopping secretly.
Immediately after, I was digging in my bag for a pen nib or something, and I cut my finger. Painfully jamming a hangnail on the edge of a drawing board and ending up leaking blood down my finger tip while juggling multiple wet ink drawings.
I could see the half dozen robot arms working relentlessly while I fumbled.
They would never need a break. Never get distracted, never cut their fingers, never spill their ink.
There is no way to avoid seeing the obvious parallels in the larger global economy. This is what all those auto plant workers or deep sea welders, or the fabled John Henry must have felt like.
But I’m an artist – I was so sure this didn’t apply to me! Supposedly I am the one thing that cannot be replaced by a machine – and here I am being forced to confront my human frailty in this one sided drawing contest with a bunch of mechanical back scratchers bolted onto grade school desks.
But then, as I was turning the corner in my imaginary sketching race, well ahead of the sluggish robot team, I was congratulating myself on starting late and finishing early – totally owning those wind up toys – when I noticed a bit of programmatic theater.
The robot cameras were actually bobbing their heads, like an artist does.
Looking down at the paper then up to the human subject, then down again at the paper. A gesture any artist will recognize from life drawing class.
It was then I realized the true (terrible) nature of the situation.
There is no way the robots were actually analyzing their drawings visually. That would simply take too much artificial intelligence. I am techy enough to know this could not be the case here. It has to be a simple one-shot image analysis algorithm.
That means the camera head-bob was programmed in to make it *look* like the arms were thinking about the drawing.
In fact – the entire process of the pens scratching away while the model tried not to fidget? That was mummery. A puppet show designed to entertain the humans. Look how cute the robot overlords are!
The human didn’t have to hold still! He could have walked away at any time! The robots only need a single glance to capture the likeness of our model (Mr. John Farquhar-Smith of FLUX). (I’m not sure he wasn’t a ringer working for the robots).
In fact – the robots don’t need time to do these drawings at all!
They could have executed them in a blur of motion, so fast they melted the ball point pens. They could have extruded the final drawing as a single stamped shape in a millisecond. They could probably have 3D printed a clone of John’s DNA in the time it took me to figure out how badly I was actually losing this race.
This fantasy that I was speeding past the machines was just a bit of re-assurance Mr. Tresset is trying to allow me. A bit of salve to my ego. I might have walked away thinking – those robots will never replace me! I’ve chosen the one path that is future proof.
But instead, I’ve walked away knowing – it’s only a matter of time until making imagery by hand is a Luddites’ pastime. A poet’s licence.
Eventually, all of us will have to consider what automation means to us. And I suppose, we’ll have to decide how much we care.
For now I can see the humor in it all. But I wonder what I’ll really be thinking in the next decade? It’s going to be interesting times ahead!
~m
Exciting news: If you’re in Montreal next week, Laurel Holmes has a small exhibition of macro photography up at Galerie Farfelu. (39 Somerville, Westmount).
She’ll be showing alongside recent gold and silver jewelry by Lydia Ilarionova and Marin Marino.
The show is up till June 11, and the opening night vernissage is June 2 from 6-8pm. See you there!
This morning we’ve posted big step-by-step article up on the Artist Network TV blog. Every so often we do a follow up to the series of drawing videos I did last year. One of our four video demos is on drawing panoramas – so I wanted to expand on what I show on camera with some new ideas about progressive pen weights and colored line.
Head on over to Artist network, and you’ll find my in-depth article on colored ink and dipping pens.
I talk mostly about a strategy of working your thinnest lines first, building up to blocking in shadow shape with a big-wide calligraphy nib. It’s a fun technique! You get to see your drawing resolve before your eyes, like a picture coming into focus. Plus there’s a lot of what is great about a watercolor painting – but with the more graphic colors of liquid ink straight from the bottle.
Head on over for the full Step-by-Step demo, gear list and more! ~m
I’m always talking about using negative space when painting. (Say for instance, this example). I often call it The Three Big Shapes: Sky, Ground, Subject.
In this short video, watercolor sketcher Anne-Laure Jacquart gives you a *perfect* example of cutting a negative shape.
You’ll see her deftly cut her subject out of the sky and ground in only a few moments work. She makes it look easy!
This is exactly the kind of direct drawing with the brush that makes watercolor the ultimate travel sketching medium.
And – just a reminder – Anne-Laure is the sketcher who is replacing me as the lead sketcher on our planned travel sketching workshop to India.
I hope if you’ve ever wanted to travel and paint in such an exotic location, you’ll consider signing up with her! There’s only 15 total spaces <update: Only 8 spaces left as of May 17 > in the group, so don’t hesitate to get in touch. (Click here for more information on India in Feb 2017).
Video on Location: The Alvor Demo
This just in: During this back alley demonstration painting in Alvor, sketcher Anne-Laure Jacquart was able to get quite a good recording oft my painting in progress.
She’s cut together a 12 minute video, showing it from pretty much start to finish – (skipping the boring drawing part at the beginning :) – even managing some great close up shots of brushwork in action.
Impressive what she’s captured looking over my shoulder!
The other day USK Montreal was out for the first of our Montreal Monument sketching meetups. This time out we were at Place du Canada, right next to Marie Reine du Monde cathedral.
I knew we’d have a big turn out. Spring is here! And it seems like every 4th Sunday we get more people. So I planned to be talking to a lot of people and generally not paying too much attention to my drawing. Just making little sketches and having fun. 
I ended up getting about 15 sketches? Something like that. Some of them quite wild. Many done in 5 minutes or less.
These are sketched with dipping pen nibs and either Higgins Sepia or R&K Blue Mare. I was drawing in two ring bound Canson Mixed Media pads. Why two pads? So I could leave one to dry while I drew in the other.
Here’s the final result, combining ten sketches:
I didn’t have a strict plan, but I knew as long as I got enough coverage everything would work out. That’s the beauty of this method. No single sketch matters. Just go crazy and get lots of drawings.
I’ve been recommending this trick for a while – but haven’t actually played with it recently. I think the last time was in the warm-up for my Craftsy.com class Sketching People in Motion, for which I did this big one at the Corning Museum of Glass. It also comes in handy for illustration projects, and courtroom sketching.
To do the collage, you just scan all your individual sketches separately, then assemble them in one large file in Photoshop. Each scan on its own layer, set to the blend mode Darken. That way they’ll overlap whatever is underneath, and you can mess around re-positioning them as many times as you like.
The only thing to watch out for is making that the scanned paper is pure white – so you don’t accumulate a grey haze of paper tone after five layers of Darken.
Sometimes I’ll print the resulting collage back out and paint over top, but this one was just for fun so it’ll stay a drawing.
Let me know if you give this process a try. Send me some pics if you get a good one. Have fun with it :)
~m
Citizen Sketcher 