Sketching For InkTober 2015

Posted on October 19, 2015 by Larry Marshall

Every year the internet is treated to a stream of sketches in the name of Inktober and this is is no exception. I don’t formally take part as I already draw constantly in ink and so I just continue to post my normal drawings. But I was out the other day, having filled a Pilot Prera with DeAtramentis Document Brown ink and I thought about Inktober and did several sketches while on my walk. Here are a couple of them.

Right now the St. Charles RIver is at very low levels. I thought these rocks warranted a sketch.

Bassin Louise did a major service upgrade this year with the addition of these power stations that allow boats to plug in. Now that the boats are being removed from the water for winter, the stations are available for me to draw. So I did.

Maybe I’ll do a few more of these before October is over. I enjoyed the ink/pen combination and the tiny nature of these sketches.

Megacerops In Ottawa

Posted on October 18, 2015 by Larry Marshall

My daughter was coming home for Canadian Thanksgiving (it’s in October) and rather than have her take a train, I wisely reasoned that it wouldn’t cost any more for me to drive to Ottawa to pick her up and bring her back to Quebec City. Yes, it would mean ten hours of driving but heck, I could spend a couple hours sketching in the nature museum (I have a membership). And yeah, maybe that is a bit crazy but I am, as Steve Martin used to say, a “wild and crazy guy” when it comes to sketching.

So, at 3:30AM I drove out of town so that I could arrive at the museum when it opened at 9AM. This insanity was rewarded with a wonderful early morning sketching session where I got to hang out with a family of Megacerops. Well, actually they were life-size models of them. They roamed Manitoba and some of the plains states, but they went extinct a while ago, maybe even before I was born. They sure were big, though, and he wouldn’t fit on my paper and I decided that this end was better than the other end.

Stillman & Birn Beta (9x12), Namiki Falcon, De Atramentis Document Black

Stillman & Birn Beta (9×12), Namiki Falcon, De Atramentis Document Black

When I finished I had to leave to meet my daughter for lunch. We had a great lunch and then continued to chat until her afternoon class. At that point I repeated my 20-minute walk back to the museum, intent on doing more sketching.

It was not to be. When I arrived I learned about something called a PA day. I don’t really know what PA means but it happens in schools. What it meant to the museum was that every young kid in the Ottawa area was at the nature museum, or so it seemed. The nature museum is designed for kids to get excited, have fun and with so many of them there the decibel level in the museum, accompanied by the frenetic movement of little bodies around the rooms suppressed any notion I had of drawing. I made the best of it by actually visiting the museum like a normal person, reading the plaques and learning a few things about the exhibits.

So, please do me a favor. Look at my Megacerops a few extra seconds; I drove ten hours to draw it (grin).

Coffee With Claudette

Posted on October 16, 2015 by Larry Marshall

Claudette and I went for coffee at Paillards on rue St. Jean. During the tourist season it’s impossible to get a seat there as it’s a great place for lunch or just to have some fine Quebec pastries. But it’s also a fun place to sketch people.

I ordered a café au lait and thought about drawing it but remembered that I’d done that last time I was there. Our session there was a short one but we got to meet a fellow sketcher who was visiting from England. It was fun and the coffee and company was good. Here’s a couple of pages that resulted.

Rainy Day Sketchcrawl A Big Success

Posted on October 12, 2015 by Larry Marshall

The morning of this month’s Croquis de Quebec sketchcrawl bordered on the depressing. It was the proverbial dark and stormy night only it wasn’t night, but it was certainly stormy. I headed to our sketchcrawl in full rain gear, thinking that only Yvan and I, the organizers, would show up as people are reluctant to sketch in the rain. Go figure.

The sketchcrawl was to be in a park near my house so the walk was short. Yvan had arranged for us to be able to take shelter in Maison Dorion-Coulombe to eat lunch. This house is the office of the Societé de la riviere St. Charles, the group that manages the very long (I think it’s 32 km long) Parc lineare. I headed there, and found Yvan, huddled at one end of the long porch that fronts this beautiful house. We lamented our bad luck (the next day was supposed to be warm and sunny) and I sat down to draw some pumpkins that were sitting on the porch.

Stillman & Birn Beta (6×9), Namiki Falcon, De Atramentis Document Black

Yvan got up and said he was going inside to chat with them about our “event” and returned very excited. He was almost at a loss for words as he’d discovered that inside was a cornucopia of things to draw. Inside there were plants and a host of stuffed birds and mammals. And in a large aquarium was a large turtle named Donnatello. He and I talked for quite a while.

Things just got better and better. Cassandra, the woman who runs the place had no problem with us moving the taxidermy and situating it on one of the tables so we could draw it. The cushy chairs were quite a step up from my tripod stool, too. I found that they sell tea, coffee and soft drinks and I ordered a coffee. It was some of the best coffee I’ve ever had. Now this was sketching at its finest.

Still, a sketchcrawl of two is a bit of a hollow adventure so it was pretty special when our friends Pierre and Celine came in, followed shortly afterward by Guylaine. The sketchcrawl, without the crawling, was on. We spent the next few hours sketching, talking and even spent some time sitting around a table eating lunch. The time passed too quickly. Here’s a sketch I did of a Northern Saw-whet owl.

Stillman & Birn Beta (6x9), Namiki Falcon, DeAtramentis Document Black

Stillman & Birn Beta (6×9), Namiki Falcon, DeAtramentis Document Black

Sketching At Quebec City Hall

Posted on October 11, 2015 by Larry Marshall

Quebec’s city hall is a gorgeous building that spans a hillside, the south end being somewhere around 20-25 meters higher than the north end. It was built back before humanity decided that what a building looked like was unimportant as it was made operational at the end of the 19th Century. It’s got pointy roofs with lots of gables, turrets and a very fancy entrance.

It’s also got a relatively new open area along the south wall, with a shallow pool and fountain and a whole bunch of inviting chair and table sets that, I’m sure were put there for sketchers, though it seems that downtown employees and tourists alike use them when they eat lunch. That’s ok. We sketchers are willing to share.

It was a sunny and, for this time of year, warm day as I arrived downtown. I decided to sit and look around, my sketching equivalent of a dog circling before lying down. I noticed the decorations over some of the windows and decided they would be my target. They were beautiful. They were challenging. What more could a sketcher ask for?

I was trying a new ink, Noodler’s Red/Black. I had filled a Lamy Safari with it and while it’s not my favorite pen, it was handy as a test bed. Red/Black is a washable ink, and each ink has it’s own properties when it comes to how ink lines will respond to water so there’s always a step into the unknown when you add water.

For the second time I made the mistake of trying to do this step with a waterbrush and, more than a little bit, lost control over the washed ink. Real brushes are the only way to go for this if you want to maintain any semblance of control – I’m not a fan of so-called “happy accidents.” But it was a fun afternoon and I hope to repeated it soon, but with more control over the water.

Stillman & Birn Beta (6×9), Lamy Safari, Noodler’s Red/Black