Portland Urban Sketchers Workshop
I’m just back from Portland Oregon, where Shari Blaukopf and I spent three days with 26 participants painting on location. We did a wide range of subjects, including heritage buildings, steel bridges, a Victorian house, and even sketching the color and activity of the Farmer’s Market.
We had some record breaking weather – reaching the all time high of 102 Fahrenheit. That’s challenging just walking around, never mind dealing with the watercolor drying instantly. It felt a lot like working in Belém Portugal last year. Everyone was happy to be in the South Park Blocks for our final day sketching under the trees.
There’s more photos of the event up on our Montreal Urban Sketchers Facebook, or the USK Flickr stream.
Onto the demos! I approached things in a similar manner to the recent Santo Domingo workshop. First demoing the drawing stage, then walking through the three passes Tea, Milk, Honey. Between washes, I’d make rounds helping people with their own pieces. So we had about three hours in each location, but more than half the time was running around looking at sketches and giving what tips came to mind.
The demo I think turned out best was the Telegraph Building. A classic subject that gave good opportunity for lit shadows filled with reflected color.
As we approached the Burnside Bridge, it suddenly occurred to me “whoops, this is a terrifically difficult subject”. Besides the bridge itself, with all its ironwork, there’s an entire city on the opposite bank. But we had a game group of artists, very much up to the challenge. Everyone handled it with panache. It was a great example of how to simplify on location. I’ve been saying lately, “Drawing on location edits itself”.
If you start with the most attractive part of the composition and work outwards until you run out of time – the stuff you didn’t have time to include obviously wasn’t very compelling to you, and therefore didn’t really need to be in the picture in the first place:)
Locals will note the complete absence of the convention center and the office blocks behind the bridge. Also that the supporting girders aren’t really drawn – only indicated. I got what interested me – those two concrete piers with their minarets and oddly castle-like bases. I managed to have time to sketch a barge that passed by in moments, but somehow never really got to drawing the freeway on the far bank.
That’s what an artist can do, that a photographer cannot. We draw what we see, not simply everything that’s there.
My personal favorite location had to be the Skidmore Fountain. It’s exactly my kind of subject. The sculptures on the fountain, the colonnade. Great subject!
We hit this spot on a Friday, as it’s the location of the hugely popular Saturday Market. The next morning, the square we’re standing in will be completely packed with vendors booths and tourists. What I didn’t realize is, they start setting things up the day before. So we had the extra factor of workers building giant metal tent frames all around us. But, that’s just part of what makes location drawing exciting!
So – Thanks to Linda Daily who invited us out, and everyone who came to the workshop! We had a great time putting this on, met a lot of awesome people. I’m sure we’ll be doing more workshops next year. Like all of the events in the USK workshop program, we’ll be donating 10% of the profits back to Urban Sketchers.org as part of the educational program that brings local students to the annual Urban Sketchers symposium. It’s great to be able to give that bit back to the sketching community, at the same time as having all this fun!
Return to St. Joseph’s Oratory
One can’t help but notice the Oratory – it’s positioned on the crest of Mount Royal, above a rolling lawn and series of wide steps. The enormous copper dome is visible from almost any part of the west island.
It’s somewhat of an optical illusion. There’s a trick of scale between the dome and the massive pillars at the entrance – at first it looks likes any old chapel on the hill – but if you begin the climb up the steps, you quickly realize just how gigantic it is.
This particular sketch led to a new thing for me. I made a painting on location, as I normally do. Sketching rapidly, and painting with energetic washes.
I’ve drawn the oratory before, but have never really been satisfied with last year’s rendition. I felt this one was a much better version. (You be the judge!)
After bringing it home, I couldn’t shake the feeling I had *still* not captured the scope. The impression of the Oratory is not just the building itself – but the whole effect of its placement on a hill high above you, and the vast manicured lawns and gardens.
So, I did something I’ve never done – (though I’ve been wanting to try this for a while). Instead of going back on location for a re-take, I started again in the studio. Re-drawing the sketch entirely, taking more care planning the composition, and more time with the calligraphy of brushwork.
This new piece is about 5 hours, so twice the time spent on location, and has the benefit of studio comforts. (Not worrying about light, weather or sore feet!).
Overall, I’m excited about this process. I never want my work to stiffen up. It’s always a worry that being too comfortable, or using memory aids like photography or tools like a hair dryer (to speed up washes drying) – that these things might change the work. But I like what’s happening here – I think it still has the living feeling I look for.
Musée du Château Ramezay
Just off of Place Jacques Cartier – where I was night sketching the other day – is the Musée du Château Ramezay. The historic house features costumed docents giving tours and serving lunch wearing 19th century clothing.
I’ve never actually been inside myself – I’m sure it’s full of interesting draw-worthy artifacts. Perhaps that’s best saved for a bad weather trip?
Just the other day we discovered, quite by accident, that in behind is a tiny walled garden.
It’s really quite amazing – on one side of a wall is a huge public square packed with tourists, shops, vendors’ stalls, horse and carriage touts, and on the other is a traditional french kitchen-garden. Beans, squash, cabbage, peas, growing in formally arranged herb-edged plots reminiscent of Versailles.
Everything as it might have actually been in the 1890’s. We took full advantage of the peace and quiet to sketch the back of the Chateau. One day I’ll have lunch on the patio there and do the reverse view, looking down at the garden itself.
Art-wise, what I like about this sketch is the gradation of detail on that row of brick houses across the street. I quite like the way the roof line turned out.
Nightsketching! City Hall
I haven’t gone night sketching in quite a while – but I’m using every moment of good weather before my sketching trip to Portland next week. (The workshop, by the way, has maybe one or two spaces left. [info here])
This is our city hall, Hôtel de ville de Montréal as seen from The Place Jacques Cartier. The square is a bustling tourist destination in the summer. Packed with artists sketching your portrait for a few dollars, kids getting neon light sabers from the vendors, rocker dudes with mini amps playing for change – all that family oriented activity.
But the real attraction is the city itself. The buildings are all dramatically lit making a romantic backdrop for strolling along the river. Even with the crowds of visitors, a summer night on the quay can seem like a holiday in Paris.
This sketch was about a half hour or so, done by faint streetlight. It’s a challenge, not being able to see your colors. You never know what you have until you get home. Have to go by memory of what’s on the palette and trust your washes will be fine. As long as you get value right, color doesn’t matter that much in this kind of scene.
For all that though, the night lighting is a great pleasure. Everything is dramatically lit. Shapes are reduced to the strongest forms, detail is erased. You find yourself making powerful drawings!
What I did on my summer vacation
After the workshop, we headed to the Juan Dolio area for a few days at the beach. White sands, sparkling water and palm trees.
This little hut was my best friend. It’s hot out there on the white sands!
It was good to re-group and apply some of the things I learned from the symposium. Using Eduardo’s advice on negative space to draw those complex walls of palms, and taking the trick of lavender shadows from James Richards. You learn a little bit from each person!
And that’s a wrap, back to Montreal!
Report from Santo Domingo
Over the course of the symposium we went to three sketch crawl sessions, took classes from Eduardo Bajzek and Veronica Lawlor, ran my own watercolor sketching workshop three times, dropped in on the evening portrait party, and talked endlessly about urban sketching. A perfect way to spend a long weekend in the Caribbean with a hundred of your friends.
Here’s one of my multipage PanoSketches from the pre-workshop warmup sketchcrawl.
This is what Kalina was working on beside me:
The stuff of mine I’m most happy with was from Eduardo’s class “Straight to Color”. He had us working directly with shapes, skipping the line drawing phase, and trying to focus on large forms, followed by observing the negative space between objects.
Eduardo opening our minds to big shapes!
My first one was a bit conventional. But…
This is the one where use of negative space really clicked for me. You can see below, in reality, it’s just a mass of foliage. But you can make good color decisions that clarify each major shape and then cut in the edges with the shadows. This really helped me with drawing palm trees on our post-workshop vacation :)
In my own sessions, I was presenting the Tea, Milk, Honey exercise I wrote about the other day. We had everyone follow along a simple step-by-step example, (in this case a window on the Ruinas Monasterio de San Francisco) then let them loose to take on whatever they wanted to do in a larger piece.
My demo window, and then some people doing the window exercise:
Unfortunately, I sold my favorite of my own demos! And forgot to get a photo of it before giving it away! But I do like the way this other one turned out:
This ended up being a nice example of Tea, Milk, Honey. The three steps of successively stronger opacity are clearly visible in the sky, shadow and darks in the vines. As well, it’s a nice example of the amount of area covered by the Tea, as compared to the relatively tiny accents of the final Honey darks.
These ruins really were impressive – unfortunately, we couldn’t go inside (it wasn’t structurally safe) and – on top of that, it was so hot, we had to limit ourselves to views from shade. Nobody was willing to bake their brains out standing in the full sunlight. But still, a great location to do our workshop.
Ultimately, my favorite workshop piece, my strongest visual impression of Santo Domingo, was during the final sketch crawl.
Veronica (in her workshop Decisive Moments) had asked us to do thumbnails of various storytelling moments all around the Parque Colón. Out of all the sketches, the image that stuck with me was the huge cloud of pigeons orbiting around the statue of Columbus.
People come out to the square and chase these pigeons back and forth. They drizzle corn over their kids and turn them into squealing human scarecrows. There’s always a horde of birds swirling around. It gave me a chance to study the pigeons in motion. Like any creature, they have a set of postures that repeat over and over. One I just couldn’t quite get is the ‘chest out, wings back, coming for a landing’ pose. Something to work on!
There was so much more to see in Santo Domingo – you can never get it all while you’re at a workshop. Strangely, I only drew one church while I was here. This is not like me at all. But! We did go to the beach and spend a few days sketching palm trees. More on that later.
I’ll close my Report from SD with some sketches from the nightly Portrait Party:
Workshop Pics from Santo Domingo
So we’re back! Had an awesome time in Santo Domingo. Big shout-out to Orling and the rest of the symposium organizers. The symposium was excellent of course – I learned a lot from both the workshops I took and the ones I gave.
But mainly, it was an incredible time meeting people. It’s not very often you get to hang around with so many dedicated artists. People who’ll sketch breakfast, lunch, and dinner. People who pull out their sketchbook if the elevator takes too long.
It’s always super-charging to be with a gang of obsessive-sketchers. I can’t describe enough, the sense of camaraderie. Knowing no matter how long you want to be out drawing, how far you want to walk searching out the perfect sketch, these people want to go do it too. Really incredible.
First thing upon return, we’ve been crunching through hundreds of Laurel’s photos. I know you don’t want to read my descriptions when you can just head straight to the pics!
The entire collection of over 200 photos is on my Flickr [HERE].
If anyone wants a print of anything up there, just drop us a line and we’ll get you the monster resolution image.
I’m already looking forward to next year’s symposium!
Next up – workshop sketches….
Tea, Milk, Honey – Getting Ready for Santo Domingo
A few weeks ago we had rain during a sketchcrawl. Our backup plan was drawing in the Centre d’histoire de Montréal. I liked the looks of the old firehouse/museum, so when we needed a second location after Le375, well, perfect chance to go back for this.
The museum is helpfully placed right across from a cafe – so one can sit under shady trees and sketch in comfort. Which we did, for about three hours.
I thought this might be my last trial run before leaving for the workshop – but I had some time yesterday, so I whipped up some cheat sheets for my workshop. Just some notes for people, in case I’m not able to articulate it well when we’re painting in 40 degree heat :)
I figure I’ll post them now, and anyone who’s sketching from home can try out the exercise. Perhaps at the 36th World Wide Sketchcrawl, going on July 14th, at the same time as the group sketching event in Santo Domingo.
Sketching in Old Montreal
Anticipation is building for the USK workshop in Santo Domingo!
In a few days we’ll be drawing in the heat of the Caribbean summer. Looks like an excellent group of sketchers. Many familiar names from sketchblogs everywhere. I see people in my workshop from Brazil, France, Germany, Portugal, and Venezuela. Though mostly from Canada and the US. Makes sense I guess, as the DR is easier for us N.Americans to reach.
Shari and I were doing a little pre-Santo Do warmup. She took on the foreboding Silo No. 5 while I exercised the better part of valor, drawing a nice classical building across the street.
We were sitting on this abandoned rail bridge leading into the Silo so we could both see our subjects but still be drawing side by side. In the last few minutes of the painting a security guy drives up and tells us that’s not an abandoned rail bridge at all, and we should move our gear or get ready to join the Darwin Awards. Fortunately I only needed to re-enforce the darks in the hedges and pop in the statue out front.
I noticed (from the battened down umbrellas on the roofline) that there’s a posh rooftop restaurant in this place. They would have a great view of the quays from up there. Turns out this is the club Le375C. I’m not in the social circles to be a member, so I may never see the insides. It certainly looks like a palace for business moguls.
I’d like to have sketched it back in the day. Check out this archive photo! (Before restoration after a fire in 1860).
We did a second sketch after lunch, which I’ll post in the next few days – I’m putting together a small ‘making of’ at the moment. I was trying to do these two in a strict, by-the-book manner while taking notes for my workshop session. This year I’d like to have a little more structure to my presentation. More on that soon!
Moorside: Mackenzie King Estate, Ruined Abbey
Last week we were in the Ottawa area, working on a side project that I’ll talk about in a few days. Fortunately, there was time for a day drawing with John Wright, fellow Urban Sketcher, and all around great guy.
John took us up to the Mackenzie King Estate in Gatineau park. I was not aware of the personal details of Mr William Lyon Mackenzie King and his sweeping influence on Canada. Besides accomplishing a lot of nation building, he had some other strange ideas. Such as consulting the spirits about policy, being overly dedicated to his mom, and supporting Hitler (but not Nazi’s. Some kind of fine line going on there). Whatever! I gather the guy was no friend to my Japanese immigrant ancestors, so I’m not looking into this in any great detail.
But, he did leave us a national heritage embodied in the federal buildings in Ottawa, and on the grounds of his country estate, Moorside. Apparently his friends would send our quirky PM chunks of ruined architecture to install as architectural follies. It gives the whole place a romantic Edwardian feeling. There are three major installations, one of which would look especially amazing in the Ontario fall colors.
As we painted the reconstructed walls they call The Abbey, a family came by to conduct a memorial scattering of ashes. They asked us not to stop drawing, just to carry on as if they weren’t there. There were some solemn moments with a few nice words about the deceased and a friend of his playing the bagpipes. It certainly added a strange melancholy mood to an otherwise high-key spring painting. It was an intensely Canadian feeling. Bagpipes, stoicism and Mackenzie’s crazy ruins. These are the kinds of things that happen painting out in the real world.
Citizen Sketcher 