Sketching At Paillard In Quebec City

Posted on December 20, 2013 by Larry Marshall

The first restaurant I sketched was the new Paillard in one of the Quebec City Malls. You can read about it in a post about the brown-paper sketchbook, if you like. This one has few walls and I sketched it while standing outside the restaurant.

But there’s another Paillard that is more famous, if restaurant fame is measured by being part of tourist’s agenda items when they visit Quebec City. This one, the original Paillard, is in downtown Quebec City, the “old” city, on rue St. Jean. This is not a really old cafe where poetry was read and music played in the 60s like Chez Temporel. In fact, when I came to Quebec City long ago to do a post-doctoral fellowship, the location of Paillard was a grocery store ‘down the street’ from my apartment and I shopped there regularly.

But in the intervening years I moved away and Paillard took the place of the grocery store. It has become a ‘hot spot’ for tourists. It’s a large, brightly-lit and roomy melange of a bakery and a café. Their pastries are wonderful but the real star is their frothy coffee drinks, including one of my favorites, the bol de café au lait. I’m mostly ignorant of differences between latte, cappuccino, and the other frothy drinks are but in the case of café au lait I think it’s heaven. While I normally drink my coffee black, I’ll break with tradition for a bol de café au lait. It’s strong coffee with lots of frothy milk added to it and I add a bit of brown sugar to the mix. But it’s the bol part of the equation that’s important…it comes in a soup bowl so you get a lot of it.

I’m rambling. Sorry. Claudette and I went to sketch Paillard the other day and we had a great time. I got my bol de café au lait and a muffin. She was less of a cochon (pig) and got a regular café au lait. We were there early and pretty much had the place to ourselves. There were a couple people sitting behind me and Claudette started sketching them. With no people in my sight line I drew food and chairs and tables. Ultimately I did quickly sketch a woman who was ordering something, maybe her own bol de café au lait . Here is my tribute to Paillard.

Stillman & Birn Alpha (4x6), TWSBI MIni, Platinum Carbon Black

Stillman & Birn Alpha (4×6), TWSBI MIni, Platinum Carbon Black

Sketching At Chez Temporel

Posted on December 11, 2013 by Larry Marshall

I first came to Quebec City to do a post-doctoral fellowship. That was to last two years and it did, and I left as I took a research position in Ontario. More significant, though, was that during that period I met my wife.

I knew nothing of Quebec and even less French than I know now. You can’t do much with a vocabulary that consists of bonjour, champagne and pamplemousse. Why I knew the word for grapefruit is still a mystery to me. If you’ve ever been in a city where you don’t speak the language, you know that sticking to tourist areas and shopping where prices are clearly marked is a survival skill. I ate at McDonalds a lot because I could order by number. And so life was for me. Many parts of the city were off limits to me.

When I started dating my wife, she took me places I’d never been. One of those places was Chez Temporel, a small cafe off the main streets. Its facade would not be out of place in Paris and, at the time, the inside could easily have been a place where writers and artists went to talk and philosophize. In fact, according to history, Chez Temporel hosted poetry readings and folk music on its second floor.

I discovered bol du cafe au lait (bowl of coffee with milk). I’d never heard of drinking coffee from a bowl and, typically, I put nothing in my coffee. But I LIKED this stuff, particularly the large volume of it that came in the bowl. My remembrance of that first bol might be sweetened by the memories of a budding love affair but that’s another story, for another time.

Today I’m reporting on a more recent trip to Chez Temporel, this time with sketching buddy Claudette. We arrived at 9:30 which, on a Monday, is a great time to go there to sketch there if you want to sketch the restaurant itself. Not so much if you want to sketch people as this is their lull period. We had a great time. Claudette did sketch the few people who were eating. I sketched this:

Stillman & Birn Alpha (4×6), TWSBI Mini, Platinum Carbon Black

Sketching the Past – episode 2

Posted on December 7, 2013 by Larry Marshall

Recently I posted a sketch I’d done of a caboose, done from a photograph taken when cabooses were part of our landscape. In that post I floated the idea that if I was going to be forced to sketch from photos by winter, that maybe I should sketch things that used to be part of our landscape but that have largely disappeared.

Well, never say stuff if you don’t mean it. My sketching buddies, Fernande and Claudette picked up on the idea and said, “You should sketch a bee-douze“, and I said, “Huh?”

They were surprised that I didn’t know what a “bee-douze” was even though they know my French isn’t very good. It wasn’t a French problem, however. “Bee-douze” is simply “B-twelve” in English but I still had no idea what they were talking about and I don’t think a lot of Francophones would know either. But Fernande and Claudette both grew up in a part of Quebec called “La Gaspesie”, a rural part of the province. They were taken to school in a “bee-douze” when winter snows prevented alternative transportation.

And you know what? The B-12 is an important part of our technological history as it was a big money-maker for a company called Bombardier who invented snowmobiles and who are now one of the world’s largest suppliers of modern passenger train cars and executive jets. Oh, and they still make snowmobiles via their recreational vehicle division called Ski-Doo. Maybe you’ve heard of it.

The B12 gets its name from the fact that it could zip along above the snow, carrying 12 people. Not the prettiest vehicle ever built, it gets high marks for its unique, almost Flash-Gordon-like round windows and teardrop shape. I had fun drawing this one.

Stillman & Birn Alpha (9x6), Pilot Prera, Platinum Carbon ink

Stillman & Birn Alpha (9×6), Pilot Prera, Platinum Carbon ink

Muffin And Coffee At The Cafe Supreme

Posted on December 3, 2013 by Larry Marshall

We had a mild day (it wasn’t windy) and so I thought I should take advantage of that fact and headed off for a long, very long walk. It was 5F. I walked to a mall that was a considerable distance away, the plan being that I’d hop a bus to get back.

The walk was fun and with my big fur-lined hat with flaps (the proverbial anti-chic magnet) and a coat that is heavy enough to be used as an anchor, I was toasty warm. When I arrived at the mall, I decided to reward myself for my effort with a tasty muffin and a cup of coffee.

I thought about the Pat Ng and Liz Steel approach to restaurant drawing and decided that I would draw the sign for the Cafe Supreme before ordering. So I sat down and did just that. Then I got my muffin and coffee and, in spite of temptation, they remained intact while I drew them.

Stillman & Birn Alpha (4x6), TWSBI Mini, Platinum Carbon Black ink

Stillman & Birn Alpha (4×6), TWSBI Mini, Platinum Carbon Black ink

The coffee hadn’t even cooled; my approach was going well. So, with a mouth full of muffin and a swig of coffee, I started drawing a portion of Cafe Supreme itself. A bright red coat, wrapped around a woman walked up and started to order so I drew it, put a head and legs on it. There need to be more red coats in our world. I finished up by drawing the bits and pieces that make Cafe Supreme the place it is. Winter sketching is sure different, but it’s fun too.

Drink And Sketch, Drink And Sketch

Posted on November 28, 2013 by Larry Marshall

On my way back from a discussion with a bank manager I stopped into a place for a cup of tea and the possibility of sketching an interior scene. It wasn’t the Taj Mahal but what the heck, it was great practice. Here’s the result, done in a Stillman & Birn (4×6) Alpha sketchbook. I used a TWSBI Mini as my pointy device.

While the counters, coffee and tea didn’t move, the people did as one after the other, a person came to the counter, paid for something, and left. I’ve been asked several times about how I set up a sketch like this and I thought it might be time to oblige.

It’s fashionable in internet-land to proudly state that one doesn’t use pencil. Ink is the only way to go. Well, I’m an ink guy and most of my sketching is done in ink. But I’ve also learned that laying down a few bones beforehand allows me to concentrate on the drawing of each section of a sketch and prevents my ideas from running off the page.

So, I start with a pencil, a 3H pencil to be exact. I draw lines to represent the major vertical and horizontal components. I’ve indicated the pencil work for this sketch in red. Once done, I can look at the paper space and compare it to the scene, ensuring that things are going in the right direction. Note how few lines are actually required. This is not drawing; it’s organization.

In this case I also wanted to place a person and I could use counter height and the verticals to locate her. I’ve indicated three small pencil lines in yellow that define the top of her head, her shoulders as well as the bottom of ‘her’ coat. The reality is that the coat was drawn mostly from the first customer but also the second, who contributed the legs/shoes. A third provided the head, but as I had these little lines in place, it was easy to cobble together a person for my scene. Given how light the pencil lines are, I rarely see a need to erase them when I finish so no eraser was harmed in the creation of this sketch.

Could I do this with dots from a pen? Sure. When I did Brenda Swenson’s 75-Day Challenge (limits you to ink only) that’s exactly what I did. But it’s far easier to see the scene structure with some lines than with a few dots and a .5mm pencil isn’t that heavy so I carry one for this purpose. Besides, if layout underpinnings was good enough for the master artists of the 18th and 19th Century, why shouldn’t it be good enough for me (grin)?

The next day I was meeting a friend for tea at one of my favorite haunts and this guy, all scrunched down in his chair caught my eye. I sketched him and then just kept going, ending up with this scene.