Painting in a crowd, Place Des Armes
Yesterday I spent the afternoon painting with Shari in Place des Armes. The square is finally in use again after a massive re-construction project. At lunchtime, it was absolutely packed with downtown office types enjoying the sun. A bit later we had tour groups showing up from all over the world. I’m starting to see cultural trends. Asians seem to love art, and often come up to talk. South Asians seemed mainly worried their kids were bothering me (I don’t mind), and Europeans often do drive by, “hey good job’ comments without stopping. Or hang back in my peripheral vision, so I’m never quite sure but I think they’re taking pictures :)
I had an incident with a rogue gust that tipped over my easel, dumping out my paint water. If you’re painting often enough, I guess it’s going to happen. I supposed it’s my own fault for taping half sheets to this tripod that’s meant for quarter. This might have meant a trip to buy an overpriced water bottle, but fortunately, the base of the Maisonneuve statue is a fountain! I think I was a bit discombobulated after that. The painting turned out a little more chaotic than I’d like.
I’ve been feeling lately that I need to get the people and cars into the paintings. Usually I avoid cars as much as possible. Somehow they seem anachronistic next to the subjects I choose. But, it is part of life as it exist in the city, and I should be learning to paint any situation. So, this is the first pass at handling the presence of people. Clearly I’ve simplified the crowd into silhouettes – the lighting situation at mid-day helped with that. This is going on my list of things to work on. I want to be able to tackle the complexity of a street scene a little more gracefully in the future :)
Old Trick, New to me: Drawing with Clear Water
We were in the Toronto area on a business trip the other week, had a half day free, and thus: The Soldier’s Tower at the University of Toronto Queens Park campus.
There is a tremendous amount of drawing a person could do here in Queen’s Park. I’m hoping I’ll be able to make it back summer. If there’s anyone planning a sketching event in Toronto, let me know!
The watercolor continues to reveal new properties to me. I had a small breakthrough on this one, finally seeing some of the advantages of masking edges with clear water. My first step this time was to cut around the silhouette of the tower and attached buildings with plain water. The damp areas of paper allow the first wash to bloom and spread organically, but it stops like magic at the dry edge. Glad I finally experimented with that. It’s a useful addition to the arsenal.
Want to see some progress steps? Here you go:
Select/Deselect
Another of my little self-memos is a note just saying “Select/Deselect”. That’s just a compact way of saying “You have to do a bit more than focus on what’s interesting – you should also intentionally de-emphasize what is not”.
In this case there is a big complex tower behind this arch. It’s three stories of bay windows, decorative carvings, and a peaked roof. It’s not like it wouldn’t have been fun to draw. But, if what catches your eye is the arched gate dappled with leaf shadows, then you have to consider every other element as a potential distraction.
I’ve selected my subject and ruthlessly deselected everything else. I didn’t even include the tree making the shadows. If you feel like you’re losing energy before finishing a sketch, (I certainly did with the last one at the Islamic library) or if you just feel your pieces are cluttered or overworked, this is something that might help.
This last one – I got nothing clever to say. I was on they way home, there was a bit more light, and I thought hey, that just looks fun to paint. Sometimes that’s all there is to it!
Don’t Document; Design
Some part of my brain has always been into rules and systems.
I’ve always jotted little notes while painting. Things like last weeks bon mots “Don’t Document; Design!” or “Change Plane = Change Temperature.” I like it when I come away with a new theory to field test for a while. I’ll push a rule a little further each time until I’ve found the limit of it’s usefulness.
Sometimes a thing is in my head for long enough and gets internalized – sometimes I decide it’s an edge case that’s not going in the book.
So here we have the old Presbyterian college at McGill (now the department of Islamic studies). It’s quite a complex structure. Lots of unusual angles. Many bits and bobs. Possibly, a fun, expressive drawing wasn’t the perfect match for this place? Or who knows, maybe they need to lighten up in there.
Anyway, here I’m seeing how far I’m willing to go with expressively inaccurate drawing and pushing temperature shifts all the way to complementary colors. The jury is still out. Maybe I went too far. Maybe not far enough. More experiments are required.
Next post — the take away is: “Select/Deselect”.
Peerless Watercolor
Here’s something you might consider if you need the lightest possible watercolor kit. These are paper thin sheets of film coated with intense watercolor pigment. You’d only need this little booklet and a waterbrush. Great solution if you’re climbing Everest or something :)
The last couple days I’ve been out painting Lady Meredith House, at the corner of Pins and Peel, in the heart of the Golden Mile.It’s well situated on a steep corner and has a fantastic roof line, studded with witches hats, tall slender chimneys and decorative brick work.
I pass this house frequently, and have always wanted to paint it, in fact, this is actually my third sketch at this location.
By that I mean, I just did three days in a row in the same spot.
Why? A little bit crazy I guess. I’m having some sort of perfectionist fit this week. Normally I’m quite free about sketching – whatever I get is fine. Some turn out, some don’t. It’s all part of the process.
But these days I’m feeling I have to up my game, as I’ll be painting live at the Urban Sketchers workshop in Santo Domingo this July, and at my own 3 day sketching event in Portland this August, (in partnership with fellow Montrealer Shari Blaukopf).
Normally I might have been happy with my first sketch. But this time, I couldn’t live with it. There are numerous flaws. First among them is dead, monochromatic color.
I used a single color (Burnt Sienna for the brick, and Payne’s Grey for the roof – and pretty much just layered them darker and darker each pass.
Yes, this is a dark building, so it doesn’t take reflected color the way a light colored structure will. But, still no excuse for drab earthy tints. My take away from the first failure was: use stronger colors and let them mix on the page! Never just add grey to make shadows – use a complimentary color to make a complex dark mix. And whatever you do – don’t be boring! Unified shadow shapes does not have to mean monochromatic passages.
Second major problem – the house is just plonked there, like it’s in the middle of a farmer’s field. I like a strong focus of interest, but simply leaving out the environment doesn’t work. The house just sits there like a lump.
It’s too big on the page, there’s no sense of space. It’s such a static, dull, leaden composition. It’s almost not a composition at all. I’m not too happy with all the fiddly (also monochromatic) bits of foliage either. It looks like a bed of lettuce under that turkey.
This is my second attempt. I addressed the boring composition – climbing up behind the wall of the Irving Ludmer Research facility (which I painted last year). This gives me an interesting design element in the foreground.
I did a better job planning the surrounding trees, and included a bit of environment (the lamp post, the house behind). Unfortunately however, I was so excited about this foreground I ended up jamming the house up against the top of the page.
As well, the bricks are still too monochromatic. It’s better, but still just variations of Burnt Sienna. I realize now this is the first time I’ve painted bricks – so this might be a natural learning curve :)
I could have said, okay,okay, I’m getting somewhere, onto the next thing. But – what can I say. The good weather lasted, so there I was on day three, doing it again.
In my third (success at last!) version I have the more dynamic composition, the more lively color – and I addressed two other things that were bugging me. More attention to the rule “Contrast of Shape” inside my brushstrokes – so there are some big sweeping marks in the trees and sky to contrast with the small details in the house – avoiding a tendency to make a lot of similar shaped strokes, and helping to focus the eye toward the detail at the center of interest.
I also realized I wanted to think about each plane of the house as having a different color and temperature. To break up those damnable bricks into shapes (planes), and better describe the complex structure. Every time a surface changes direction, it should change color and temperature.
It’s also interesting that the version I like the best is the least accurate drawing. What can I say? I find this an elegant fanciful building, so when I finally let go and drew it expressively (in this case, elongated and with pushed perspective) it really started to speak to me.
Sorry for the long post, I hope it’s helpful to some. I’ll leave you with a classic Fisherman’s Trophy Shot – the “yes, I really painted this on location”.
Short piece of coverage on Spacing Montreal
Just an interesting tidbit: Spacing Magazine, (a group organized around urban planning related topics) is doing a series of spotlights on Urban Sketching – starting with a few of my sketches of Montreal. Nice to get a little coverage from them. I hope to do a bit more with the Montreal group. I always enjoy their feature where they show two shots of street; present day next to a turn of the century photo.
Now why would I try that? Sketch: Sunrise at Niagara
[9×12″ canson block, shot on iPad, some digital contrast enhancement]
We’re in Niagara, it’s been rainy and overcast all day. But there was a small window of blue sky at sunrise. Normally this wouldn’t be something I’d attempt painting – but Laurel announced she was getting shots of sunrise – so I could come along, or – well actually I was coming along if I liked it or not :)
Besides it being six bloody o’clock, it was 2 degrees C and 143% humidity down by the falls. This is pretty challenging atmospheric conditions for watercolor. So – here’s what I got. Was a bit like painting on a stay-wet palette. I can’t paint moving water at the best of times. So I’m really posting this one for the curiosity value more than anything.
I didn’t want to carry a lot of stuff last weekend. It was raining, and I knew we’d be moving around from place to place. Here’s a shot of how I do my large format sketches on letter sized paper.
Everything is getting scanned for the blog anyway, so I don’t mind having to patch it together in photoshop. Often I’ll draw people or cars on separate sheets and add them to a drawing. I collage the sheets together using the layer mode ‘darken’. Often I’ll put a curves or levels adjustment layer over the top to eliminate any shadows from paper edges.
USK Montreal – report from Sketchcrawl #35
Just back from my first Sketchcrawl as part of Urban Sketchers Montreal! If you’re in Montreal, and looking for a sketching buddy – friend us up at facebook.com/UrbanSketchersMontreal.
We were a small but dedicated group today. Put in five hours of drawing, chit chatting and having lunch. Generally a congenial way to spend a rainy day.
First stop was the Centre d’histoire de Montréal. When it rains, it seems sketchers seek museums. This place is probably typical of smaller civic museums. The final resting place for a random assortment of 19th century ephemera.
The star of the permanent collection is a huge statue of Lord Admiral Nelson (freshly relieved of one arm). Back in 1805 some group of city elders felt it was a good idea to memorialize England’s naval hero, who’d so recently trounced the dastardly French.
This might have been a wee bit divisive at the time. But on the other hand, the French Canadians could take some solace in the fact they sniped him out of his shoes at the peak of his triumph. Took the wind out of *his* sails.
So, our particular Lord Admiral Nelson now oversees once high-tech portable sewing machines, beaver top-hats, worn leather shoes and various other examples of Montreal urban history. I’ve placed him above the view from the third floor of the museum.
We finished up at Concordia, in a small student lounge with a cool aerial view of St. James the Apostle church. Was a fun shot to draw, even though we had to sketch through the moiré pattern of a giant graphic pasted on the windows.
Was great hanging out with a few of Montreal’s Urban Sketchers. Hope to see a more locals out next time!
Citizen Sketcher 
