Nun's Island - take 2

I found what seems to be the only survivor from Brazil - a piece of watercolor paper with washes done for Behzad's workshop. I decided to try the Nun's Island view again and here is the result:

I suppose composition-wise it is not the best. The tip of the island is like that - few buildings with big spaces in between,  but the fall colors looked great and this is why I stopped the other day. I guess I could have skipped the buildings...I'll keep trying, I like this idea a lot.

Sketchcrawl

Last Saturday few of us met for the Sketchcrawl. The day ended up being colder th at I thought and I had to take refuge at the Grande Biblioteque. I finally settled on doing quick sketches of the people in the street as I did in Suhita's workshop.

 Quick line sketch (maybe 5 min) of a church - I keep forgetting its name - on Ste Catherine next to UQAM.

Metro sketches

The skool assignment was to go out and draw stories. I did not have time to go anywhere, but I was riding the metro the other day and it was not very crowded. To pass the time I decided to sketch people around me. I did not have any paper; I ended up using the daily newspaper - whatever pages had less print. I added some acrylic paint at home.

I am always amazed at how things turn out - combination that I would not have thought off on my own. For example the green line from the newspaper ended up looking like a table for the computer; the turkey is chasing the old man; a ghost is coming through the window...if i had time and energy I could try writing a short story about each of these...

Siamese elephants

True to my promise to play with watercolor shapes, I created some shapes ... and I got this:

Isn't this amazing? I had no intention to draw elephants and my previous attempts to such endeveour resulted in terrible sketches... and now here they are .. two of them ... and a shoe!

Added some accents - not sure it made the sketch any better ...

I only have Photoshop Elements - and I don't know much about using it. I cleaned the background a bit and saturated the color of the shoe:

Dancing elephants ... or maybe Cinderella turned into an elephant at midnight ...

Paraty church

This turned out better than the original sketch done on location. I used the same modified approach from the previous post. I will give it another try though starting first with the shapes. There is another building in the foreground and I want to include it in the sketch because I think it would improve the sense of depth of the image.

Here, I started with big shapes of color and I could not add the white building after the fact. However, the building could be a different color also. To be investigated ....

Nun's Island view

The weather was good Thanksgiving day so I went for a walk around the neighborhood. At some point, I had a nice view of the Nun's Island tip. I did a quick sketch directly with watercolor using Behzad's technique from his workshop in Paraty.

The difference was that i applied the washed to somewhat match the view as opposed to randomly putting color to the paper and then trying to work with the resulting shapes. Usually when I do this, I end up with animals or faces and rarely with landscapes or still lives.

A previous attempt resulted in a terrible sketch. I wanted to darken the colors and I used an approach suited for acrylic paintings where I glazed many times with darker colors. Except that with watercolor this is not a good idea because the transparency of the colors was gone and all I had was mud.

In this sketch I tried to keep in mind the "tea, milk and honey" idea - only 3 passes of color. In the end it becomes a juggling act so that the first layer is not too light and not too dark either to allow for subsequent development of shapes.

Santa Teresa street lamps

I am going through the pictures I took in Brazil. Very, very slow process. And I am also trying to sketch them as i go trying to reconstitute the lost sketchbooks.

I spent the last day in Rio in the Santa Teresa neighborhood - I might have mentioned that in a previous post. Around lunch time, a few of us stopped at a small corner coffee shop/neighborhood store for a coffee and a soft drink. Some of us decided to sketch the street lamps. Here is my second version of the lamps:

 I glued an used coffee filter at the bottom of the page to cover up a botched up sketch of a car.

I do like this second sketch, if I say so myself ...

How to make porridge and Brazilian coffee

The first assignments in Sketchbook Skool storytelling semester was to illustrate a recipe and a how-to manual. Easier said than done.

How to make porridge:

and Brazilian  coffee:

 It was a good exercise in simplification, something that I should do more often. And it could be a good beginning for a story indeed.

Les journées de la culture

This past weekend there were "Les journée de la culture" and I participated in an activity with Huguette Bernais. It was fun and I came out with this abstract landscape:

 I thought about adding some ink lines, but I am holding onto that for now. Maybe there will be another incarnation of this. I think I'd like to mount it on canvass or wood eventually. To be continued...