Our gang was back at the museum cuz, “baby, it’s cold outside.” I decided to draw a stone guy who was making an offering at a funeral, or so sayeth the plaque associated with him. Hope you like him.
Fabriano Artistico CP (7.5×11), Platinum 3776, DeAtramentis Document Black
Not long ago I posted this decorative square and talked about how we’d started drawing these squares in a chapel. I also mentioned that I was going to work on methods for painting/shading them.
These wood-carved squares are probably not even noticed by most visitors to the chapel because they’re dark mahogany and blend into the mahogany wainscotting that runs around the chapel. Yvan ‘discovered’ them and we’ve both been thrilled with the idea of drawing them. I find them challenging. Yvan just makes them look beautiful (grin).
We’ve continued drawing them and I have been experimenting a bit with approaches to shading them. The process is teaching me quite a bit about watercolors and their use, at least the way I want to use them. Which one looks best to you?
There is an exhibition of carriages and sleighs at our Musee de la Civilisation and it’s about to end. We’ve drawn of it in the past but the room is so poorly lit that it’s hard to see what you’re drawing.
But Yvan and I decided to brave the dark a bit more and to draw some of the carriage lanterns before they were pulled from their dark places and sent back to the well-lit storage barn where they are stored.
These are fun to draw because of their complex shapes but I can’t guarantee that my sketches are correct. Often I couldn’t tell whether something is square or round because the room was so dark, so these are more a guess than anything.
Part of the reason for this blog’s existence is to give me a place to document my sketching journey. Today is a day of recording, not one of presenting good sketches.
I was out for a walk yesterday, in Quebec City, where January high temperatures average around 20F (-7C). Of course, the low temps are, well lower. So typically, street sketching doesn’t happen in January.
But as I walked, on the 8th of January, I realized just how warm it was as I took my hat and gloves off because I was overheating. Some minutes later I came upon one of the impressive old mansions here and I decided to see if I could do a quick-sketch while standing on the sidewalk, in January.
I grabbed my 4×6 toned paper sketchbook and went at it, very quickly, and very loosely trying to capture the house’s complex structure. I failed miserably but it didn’t matter. I had sketched on location, outdoors, in January. I’ve joked with a few climate change denialists that I was planning on selling citrus and palm trees to the residents of Quebec City in the not so distant future. Maybe I was right.
Since that sketch is so poor, I’ll try to improve the esthetics of the post by showing you my latest “mustache book,” As much as I love these little books, the felt glasses and mustaches glued to the cover leave much to be desired so I glued one of my sketches to the cover and then covered it with laminating material. What’cha think?
I know. It’s hard to believe but not everyone is a sketcher. Some misguided souls spend their leisure time doing things besides pushing pens and brushes around paper and discussing the virtues of Hansa yellow vs Cadmium yellow.
One such person is a guy I used with work with. Let’s call him Jim. Jim likes to spend his time standing in cold water, throwing a string with a piece of fluff on the end of it into just the right place with the idea that he may catch a fish. Sometimes he does, sometimes he doesn’t. It’s not that important.
It’s called flyfishing and, if some of my trips are any indication, it is properly named as you can catch a lot of flies on such adventures, or rather they catch you.
Flyfishing has much in common with sketching. It’s a process-oriented thing, where the joy is in the doing, not necessarily in what is produced. Just like a sketcher who does produce a good sketch, flyfishermen are pretty excited when they do catch a fish. And just like how the sketcher turns the page and starts another one, the flyfisherman typically releases the fish and starts the process of trying to catch another one.
And so it was for my friend, Jim, as he stood in Lyons Den Channel Pool on the Miramichi River in New Brunswick. His cast was well-made. Jim was in the zone, enjoying the ambiance of the place, enjoying his time on the river. Then it happened, Jim hooked the biggest salmon of his life, an 18-pound fish. His heart was probably still pounding after landing it, looking at his success, and as he released the beautiful fish back into the river. It was time to make another cast, but maybe, like I do once I complete a sketch, he took a short break before returning to the river to make another cast.
Jim sent me a photo of that fish and when he did he mentioned that he’d spent some time looking at my blog and that he was appreciative of my sketches. I couldn’t resist the thought of sending him a sketch of himself and his big salmon and so with the photo displayed on my laptop, I went to work. Here is the result…a man, his success, and I hope, an indication of the enjoyment that comes from doing something you love.
