Alfred Pellan: Quebec Artist

Posted on July 21, 2015 by Larry Marshall

Alfred Pellan is well-known to the Quebec art crowd as a guy who produced surreal imagery, kinda-sorta Picasso-like (I’ll probably be stoned for saying so). Born in Quebec City, he became closely associated with École des Beaux-Arts de Québec. Like many Quebec artists, he also studied at École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He died in 1988.

There’s a bust in honor of him in the Jardin de St. Roch and I drew it. I struggle with pencil shading. I’m sure this is in no small part because I do it so rarely but to make matters worse I decided to try to do it with red pencil. My buddy Yvan does it so smoothly so I know it’s not the tool, but the guy I see in the mirror every morning that is at fault.

Nevertheless, here is my attempt. It was drawn on 8 1/2 x 11 Strathmore Bristol (vellum) using a 2mm lead holder and Turquoise red lead. There was also a couple hours involved.

We Continue The Statue Quest

Posted on June 9, 2015 by Larry Marshall

We gathered at Quebec’s Place d’Armes to sketch the large fountain, or at least the statue that stands atop it. For some reason I just wasn’t in the mood. I’m not sure if it had to do with the subject or my new obsession of sketching in these small, mustache notebooks and their toned paper.

In either case, I decided to continue experimentation with that book, trying different approaches. I turned my attention to one of the buildings. I had luck adding a bit of color previously so I thought I’d see if I could use my waterbrush with dilute ink in it. It worked better than I thought and I’ll use this technique again. No ghosting or bleedthrough on the back side.

At this point the sun left us and I was wearing shorts and a t-shirt. I’ve been amazed at how much being cold has a similar effect on my desire to sketch. What happens is that my attention span goes to near zero so I cope by doing a lot of really quick-sketches, just trying to grab proportions of the people walking around. I won’t bore you with a bunch of scribbles but here’s an example of people walking across a street.

I’ll include this one too as it’s an example of what happens when you decide to draw a guy standing, while talking to a couple people sitting on a bench. I was a minute into this sketch when the people stood up and the three of them walked away (grin). It was time to turn the page and I did.

Once the statue sketchers had finished, it was decided that we’d head to another location to sketch the bust of another guy. At least the sun had returned.

I still wasn’t excited about sculpture sketching and I continued to work in tiny format. It was an opportunity to try red lead in a Pentel Kerry 0.5mm pencil. I did the sculpture sketch quicker than I should have and I generated a head that was too tall, but it gave me time to do a second sketch of a hotel entry on the other side of the street. It was fun and, once again we had a great time.

I’m BAAACK!!

Posted on May 7, 2015 by Larry Marshall

Did ya miss me? I’ve been roadtripping and so haven’t been posting. Got back late last night and I’ll be posting a short series of posts about my trip, at least as it relates to sketching.

In the meantime, here’s a pencil I found in Toronto. I paid a ridiculous price for it ($3) but heck, who can resist a pencil that says Draw With Me? As it turns out, it’s a good quality pencil and looks to be hand-sharpened rather than ground to a point by a machine. I will accommodate its request.

People In Motion by Marc Taro Holmes

Posted on January 31, 2015 by Larry Marshall

I’m a big fan of Marc Taro Holmes. His precise and yet loose (how does he do that?) building drawings are a wonder to behold, at least for this street sketcher. Marc works larger than I do, looser than I do, and a whole lot better than I do but I can’t get enough of his work.

His recent book, Urban Sketcher: Techniques for Seeing and Drawing on Location rests next to my butt location when I watch TV and while I’ve read it twice, I find myself flipping through it, studying the drawings, as my wife and I watch…yawn…American Idol.

But what I’m not, however, is a sketcher who searches out people to draw, attends life drawing classes, and the rest. Sorry folks, but I find people boring. Buildings are just cooler. That said, when Marc, in conjunction with Craftsy, offered a course titled People in Motion I immediately signed up. I was going to get to see Marc draw…yippee!

I’m really glad I did. Marc is not only a great artist/sketcher, he’s a well-organized, articulate teacher with a willingness to provide lots of information in high-density form, showing you every step of his approach to drawing people. People or xylophones, what Marc teaches in this class will help you draw them quicker and better.

He provides several ways of doing it but his primary method is a four-part approach. I suspect that more often than not, Marc himself smushes the four parts together when he’s on the street sketching, but for learning what he’s thinking as he captures people dividing up the thought processes and results of them on paper, is an ideal way to get the points across. And you know what? Marc has even got me, yeah…go figure, ME interested in drawing people.

I encourage anyone who would like to capture ANYTHING quickly onto paper, to at least view the intro video of this course. Better, just take the course. It’ll be money well spent.

Sketching Rendevous At The Musee de la Civilisation

Posted on January 26, 2015 by Larry Marshall

I’m a member of the Collective des ateliers libres en arts visuels de Québec. And yes, the name’s too long but they do a great job of organizing life drawing workshops throughout the winter months. I’m not very interested in drawing people but this group causes me to wish I were. In the summer there is a great weekly event where we gather in a local park and draw people, mostly portraits. They’ve also started to organize outdoor, group events with other sketching targets.

These stage masks are part of a very large raised-relief sculpture that is part of the Olympus exhibit. The holes for the eyes and mouth look sort of odd in this context but it is what it is.

So it was last weekend when we all gathered at the Musee de la Civilisation to sketch the Olympus exhibit. It was a great day as it’s always fun to get together with people who like to do the things you do. We sketched all morning, broke for lunch and sketching talk, and then some of us returned to sketch some more.

I worked in pencil the whole day and I’d forgotten my pencil case so I was using a Pentel Kerry (0.5mm) in my Stillman & Birn Alpha (10×7) sketchbook. I love this pencil. It’s pretty spendy but being able to put a cap on the pencil end (the entire red portion on the rear is the cap) is really nice for street sketching. I do wish I’d bought the 0.7mm though.

Truthfully, while I love the Alpha series for my pen sketching, it’s got more tooth than I like for pencil. I prefer their Epsilon series for pencil, though I’m not much of a pencil driver regardless of paper. But I had a lot of fun and the museum was warm, unlike my normal stomping grounds of Quebec streets.

You can’t have Greek Gods without snakes.