I feel the need to assert my status as ‘still alive’. It’s been so long since last posting, that you might reasonably wonder if that’s the case. The truth is, I’ve managed to land a few weeks of freelance work and am now neck deep in deadlines! Nothing has changed in games – still the same crazy schedules :_

But, overall that’s a good thing I suppose. It’s slowing me down right now, but in March I have a week long drawing trip to Havana planned. A suitable reward for being chained to my computer for a bit. It’s too cold to draw outside anyway.

However! cold dark winters are a good time to go back into the sketchbooks. Here’s a couple more experiments with digital watercolors. I’ve had these two old favorites pulled out for a while now. Been wanting to do something with them for ages. The drawings were done at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco a few years back. This was a traveling show, so you won’t find these suits of armor there now, but the permanent collection is well worth a drawing trip on its own.

These are (as with the previous post), scanned watercolor sketches layered under the original black line art, and contrast tweaked in photoshop. In this case I’ve done a tiny bit of opaque sketching on top. Basically what I would have done with prismacolors in the old days. I really like this effect. As much as I love painting – I also love the pen and brush – those rich blacks and squiggly lines! So why not fuse them together?

By the way, 8×10″ prints of these are available in the sketchbook pages section on my Etsy Shop.  It would be wonderful if you stopped by and maybe found something you’d like to own. It would help out with our travel expenses for the upcoming sketching trips

BUT. It was supremely cold, and many places were closed, and the will to make this happen got fainter the further from home. Ultimately we went to a humble cafe on the corner of St. Denis and Mount Royal. Chosen, not for the superlative chocolate cake, but for the corner location and the big windows. The weird color is my rendition of sodium vapor light. Not quite on target – but hey, it’s festive

Happy New Year!

The other day my friend Shari took me on a sketching tour of St. Anne de Bellevue. It’s a scenic town on the western tip of the island. I had no idea there were places like this around Montreal.  I’m from the prairies, so what do I know?

It felt much more like a New England fishing village. Lots of narrow curving streets, small shops and eateries and the water always close by. I’m sure I could find some boats around here if I poke around.

Up in the back streets you’ll find a few of these interesting pre-war houses. Plenty of big brick mansions not too far away – but I was struck by this cute green and yellow ‘dollhouse’. Had to smile at the huge trees in the yard. Much larger than the house itself. I’ve been seeing a lot of talk about returning to building small homes like this. They’re efficient to construct, and don’t grab more space than a person really needs.

Shari introduced me to painting from the car. This is a good solution for the cold Canadian weather. And it’s the urban sketchers equivalent of a detective on stake out! Street sketching is already somewhat like spying. Might as well get into the role.

I’ve been experimenting with a “new technique”. Well, a slight variation anyway. These might not look that new at first glance Actually they’re quite old! Some of my favorites from San Francisco. So these must be at least three year old drawings. What I’m playing around with here is a trick to allow me add watercolor to my old sketchbook pages.

A lot of my early on-location drawings were ballpoint pen and brush marker on ‘cover stock’. Sort of one step above photocopy paper.  I really  like this combination. Black and white line is great for a rapid sketch, and the smooth paper is very nice for drawing. Pens just zip along the surface. For a few years I was carrying a stack of this stuff everywhere.

But when I get a pen drawing I really like – I regret not being able to add much color. You can paint on cover stock if you’re careful – but it won’t take much water before it buckles.

There was a time I might have been tempted to color sketches digitally. That can have a nice effect – but it’s not what I’m looking for these days.

What I’ve done here is print a ghosted image of the original sketch on a 140lb watercolor paper (using my new Epson 4900 printer’s manual feed).  Then I tape it down and watercolor over the faint line drawing, as if I was painting a pencil drawing. I scan that back in, and composite the original black line drawing on top of the new color image. (Using a multiply layer in photoshop). I can also experiment with tinting the line drawing – I used a bit of a purple line on these. And it’s possible to significantly enlarge your drawing while doing this -  if you scan it at 1200 dpi for example.

I’m going to try a bit more of this to see what else I can come up with.

I recently met Montreal artist/designer/educator Shari Blaukopf through her sketch blog at http://shariblaukopf.com/ where she’s taken on the Sisyphean task of a *daily* sketchblog. I consider myself obsessed with art – but I’m leery of committing to a daily. That’s quite a challenge! Check out her deceptively light sketches.  They look simple at first – but they’re so casually perfect, you can tell she’s got the designer’s eye for composition, as well as the painter’s touch for mark making.

We decided to hit McGill’s Redpath Museum for an afternoon of sketching. Sketch artists socializing is quite a funny thing. We get together for the purpose of ignoring each other for 20 minutes at a time.  Whatever works I guess. Even anti-social art types like to hang out It’s always neat to see the other person’s version of a place.

The Redpath is a kind of museum they just don’t make any more. The Victorian idea of the Cabinet of Curiosity inflated to a whole building. There’s everything from Japanese armor to Dinosaur skeletons crammed into one large room.  My favorite thing is the taxidermy animals. This is essentially a creepy thing – having a wolf just sitting there in your living room. At least these ones are fairly sedate – no dramatic recreations of predators pouncing on prey. Worse luck!  I found myself enjoying the way this poor wolf was held back by a little red rope, eternally watching the caribou go by.

When I’m rich and famous I’m going to fill the house with taxidermy animals. Don’t tell Laurel – we’ll just add a few at a time. Maybe she won’t notice.

But I really enjoyed it. You don’t have to worry about the light changing for one thing. There’s no directional shadow at all. It kind of made the drawing more subtle. Like a calming effect on my normal desire to go for maximum contrast.

I was on the west side of town, in an area they call NDG – short for Notre-Dame-de-Grâce. Which is both the name of the town, a street in the town, and the church on the street in the town. They’re all NDG.  Three times over.

And to top it off, the church is at the intersection of Rue NDG and Ave. Prud’homme.  M. Prud’homme was no doubt an interesting guy. Besides owning the land at the center of NDG, he was the town’s Justice of the Peace, the Captain of the Milita, and eventually the Mayor.

By the way – I’ve made this sketch available as an 8×12″ archival print on watercolor paper, over on my Etsy shop.

Nearby the titular NDG is another fascinating structure. The confusingly named River’s Edge Church. (I could not see a river nearby). A little research tells me it was originally L’église St-Augustine de Canterbury. There are some large shamrocks prominently carved above the bell tower – so is it stereotyping to think that it must be part of Montreal’s Irish Catholic heritage?

In any case I really enjoyed it’s fanciful tower – and will be back for a more detailed drawing some day!

We are in the midst of our holiday campaign, Give a Little, Get a Sketch. The offer is only on till Dec 31st.

The way this works, if you chose to donate (via paypal) and support UrbanSkethers.org and our symposium program,  you are eligible to receive one or more high resolution scans, suitable for printing high quality prints at home, or at a photography store.

Donors can choose  1 print from our pool as thanks for a donation of any amount at all, and can choose another print for every increment of $20! So you have to print them yourself – but really, it’s a great way to get some art for you or a friend this holiday season.

As well, there’s one more level. Donations of $75 or more, can choose from a special gallery of prints, where we mail you a signed print, individually made by our volunteer artists (that’s me! – and a few other great folks).

Find out more about this on UrbanSketchers.org, and help support our always-free continual stream of drawing on location!

One of the highlights of our recent trip to Portugal were these little grilled sardines. We always ask what the locals recommend, and these were a clear favorite. They’re just sea salt, olive oil and delicious little fishies.

By co-incidence, we happen to live in a (partially) Portuguese district in Montreal. It was great to find you can get these in cafes here too. I was inspired to dig out the sketches from the trip and make a painting of my favorite meal in Portugal!

By the way, this is one of the new prints I’ve made available on the Citizen Sketcher Esty Shop. If I sell any prints of these fishies, I’ll go out for dinner and make another painting. Buy a print, and choose what kind of food I draw next!

I’ve put up a selection of my favorite plein air paintings, and will be continually adding new prints. I’ll be making higher quality scans of some old stuff, and of course, I’m always making new work. I make the prints myself, on an Epson 4900 using archival inks rated for 100 years light fastness, on 100% cotton rag watercolor paper.

I’d appreciate any support you can give, purchasing a print, spreading the word, or just adding me to your Etsy favorites.  This is all part of my goal to be a full time sketch artist by the end of next year. You can help support my location drawing and blogging habits

Just for fun, I made a set of five miniature watercolors available individually or as a set for $10 off! I’ve always liked tiny paintings. The relative scale of the brush marks and the paper to the size of the painting makes for an interesting abstraction. Plus, you can put them in an outrageous frame you’d never be able to afford for a full sized piece Each one comes double matted in black, making the 1 ¾ x 3 ¾” prints into easily framed 5×7″. These were painted up in Mendocino California as part of a gouache and watercolor workshop with my friend Erik Tiemens.

Here’s an un-edited bit that I think is worth rescuing from the cutting room floor.

2) When did you first start drawing on location? How did leaving the studio and drawing in “plein air” affect your practice?

…

If I can go backwards to my job in games, that kind of drawing is entirely done in Photoshop. I was mostly doing fantasy gaming stuff – Elves and Dwarves etc. Now, drawing digitally is great fun. It’s so easy. When it comes to inventing things that don’t exist, things you want to look convincingly real but aren’t available to take a photo – doing it digitally can’t be beat. It’s just the most flexible way to work.

But of course there’s 3D rendering. Which is a tremendous opportunity for artists. But if you’re the sketching guy it’s the Sword of Damocles over your head. You’re sitting there pouring effort into your drawings, trying to visualize imaginary things, and meanwhile the 3D guys are just racing past you to the finished product. And making it look amazing.

The same power tools that made digital drawing easy, make photographic realism easy as well. For a while I was experimenting with digital photo collage (example tutorial) as a method, but it’s not really a long term solution. You just have to embrace the 3D if you’re going to operate at a professional level. And while that is absolutely art – it’s art done with mouse clicks and technical skills not with instinct. So that’s not really my thing. (Yes, that’s changing every day with new software, but it’s still a long way off).

Basically I had to choose – go more digital, or cut bait and get out.

I decided it was time to really learn to draw. Instead of going back to school, I went to life drawing. A lot. Like, two or three times a week. For a few years. That’s about a thousand drawings a year. I was just doing a ton of 5 ,10 and 20 minute figure drawings.

Once you start drawing from life, the complexity of drawing really opens up. Drawing from imagination is by definition, refining a formula. You’re doing the ‘style’ you do, and just getting better and better at it. Which is cool and all, don’t get me wrong. But drawing from life – you’re not going to be satisfied with your own shorthand. You’ve got reality right there, laughing at you.

It’s an addictive combination. The never ending challenge versus your growing fluency. It can turn into a self-perpetuating obsession I get the feeling it’s a lot like being good at a sport, or playing music – but I wouldn’t know too much about those things.