squwetchy I went for a stroll #downtown via the #university with the goal of making some art. Success! Three new sketches.

squwetchy I made a bunch of art today but this was my favourite. #urbansketch [read more...]

squwetchy Oh another #urbansketch from another Starbucks window, makes for day two of my #dailyart challenge. The bank and parking lot are not especially exciting I admit, but that’s #suburbansketching for you, huh?

squwetchy My personal October challenge is to do a daily #urbansketch … which means finding a nice urban scene and sketching with the old pen and ink. Of course, i’m gonna try and post all of them, good or bad. Good thing I don’t have comments on this site, huh?

Today’s sketch was brought to you by being blocked in at the Starbucks parking lot by a delivery truck and settling in to do a little view of the pizza restaurant out the window. Urban sketching, more like #suburbansketching

squwetchy #autumn colours by the suburban pond on a windy friday [read more...]

squwetchy If this looks familiar it’s either because you live in Canada on this -18C day, or because it’s the same painting I thought I finished yesterday and posted on Instagram… but with some #snow added into the scene. #watercolour

squwetchy dabbling in a simple #monochromatic #watercolour this morning inspired by the cold temperatures outside!

squwetchy I cannot quite put my finger on it, but something about that job I just quit was blocking me artistically. Hell, I didn’t even notice it happening until the other day, while out walking the dog, the kid mentioned that I hadn’t been painting much lately, and I realized—no, actually I have painted nothing at all, not one thing, since I started working part time. It’s as if the two things occupied the same processing register in my brain and could not exist simultaneously.

Having quit the job and finished work yesterday, and having noticed the pattern, I decided to spend an hour in the basement with my paints this afternoon. The result is a bit derivative of my work from last winter, but since it is the first thing I have painted in four months I will give myself a break on that.

squwetchy I sat atop a waterfall and painted this plein air #watercolour with water from the creek.

squwetchy A plein air #watercolour painted atop a mountain. #waterfall

Now that I’m back home and actually have decent paints… a proper brush … few mosquitoes buzzing in my face.. and less rush, I want to try this screen again.

squwetchy A theme park might literally be among the worst places in the world to try urban sketching.

There is nowhere to get more than five minutes of peace to draw. So I embraced that: I went with the intention of seeing what I could accomplish in the least amount of time possible. I adopted a loose af sketching style and a sloppy/abstract watercolour style and spent literally no more than 5 minutes sketching— standing in a queue, waiting outside a bathroom for my fam, after lunch—and then painting with super-limited time and supplies back at the hotel.

The result was 28 sketches over the week (i filled a sketch book!) and about 6 hours total invested in drawing and painting. They are not neat nor tidy. They are not photo perfect by any stretch. They are vibes. Impressions. And the whole collection, despite a few flops and a leaky sketchbook seam, is an awesome souvenir.

squwetchy For our penultimate #watercolour #flower class we did this little red rose. Given that a) this week is our last class and b) I usually only do my homework to show off in the next class, this might have been my last at home assignment painting for a while. That said, I’ve been snapping pics of flowers for a couple weeks now and I bought a pass to the local botanic garden so hopefully it will be a summer of painting plein aire in the park.

squwetchy #watercolour #flower at the the #botanicgarden

squwetchy A practice rose by any other name? #watercolour class number 7 means that I really only have one more homework assignment, huh? [read more...]

squwetchy About six hours later I decided this #dandelion #watercolour was a little lacking in depth, so I spent another hour or so adding lots of shading, some subtle some not, and now I think it has a lot more oomph. What say you? [read more...]

squwetchy #dandelion #flower in #watercolour

squwetchy Week 6 of my painting class and we’re onto orchids Can you see the lovely purple gradients that make up every surface of these petals? There is so much going on here from a technique perspective that it’s no wonder we barely got through it all in our 3 hour class.

squwetchy Week four of my #watercolour class and we dug into some interesting new techniques for this elaborate people flower. Some lifting and some layered/blending washes had some interesting optical effects related to what goes the illusion of transparency on the petals. I have been pushing in the boundaries of my backgrounds for all the pieces I’ve completed for this class …which was above and beyond to the assignment, and just something I’d seen done online. The instructor really likes it tho and has been ribbing me and calling it The Brad Technique and some of my fellow students have started to imitate it.

squwetchy I did some unplanned meditative painting last night before bed. Just put on an audiobook, watered down some blue paint, and starting with a wash and some selective lifting just let my imagination go wild. I have been a little bit fascinated with the idea of ethereal forests emerging from the soft wet-on-wet blur of layering washes of tree silhouettes and this is a good example of how that can blossom into something interesting by simply adding carefully layered tree textures over and over into a still-damp paper. The trees sort of soften into each other as you work and then you go back over them to build up colour value later by layer. I was just mucking around here mostly but even as I worked I kind of regretted not going about it in a more planned way because the result was actually materializing for me. Sadly, my iphone is a little weak in photographing such nuance and it keeps trying to amplify the textures and grain of the paper, inflating the contrast that is not there as strongly when you are looking at this in real life. There photo does not do it justice.

squwetchy Oh sure, you say, after all those pretty flower pictures now you go and post some depressing #dystopian #watercolour scene from a Fallout game or something, but see the thing is this was inspired, colours and all, by a photograph I took this morning of the creek valley filtered through the haze of all that forest #firesmoke, so… put that in your pipe and… well.

squwetchy Apart from the small paint splatter accident mid way thru, my #watercolour #flower painting homework for week two turned out better than I’d expected. to be honest, I didn’t really like this picture when he showed it to us last night and the results that he got were a little flat and uninspired for my own personal tastes, which has less to do with the artistic quality and more to do with the lesson that was being forwarded in our second class. I tried to duplicate the results as best as I could, and then soften the background a little bit more than he had in his original piece, which was a fairly abrupt matte black. Watercolour flowers week 2 homework used about fifty bucks* worth of yellow paint but the results seem worth it. *tho not really

squwetchy Sometimes I run my paintings thru an AI filter to see if the algorithm and smoothing of some of the details improves it. Oddly enough there is something to be learned from this that helps me see colours and tonal elements more clearly. It’s like putting your writing thru a grammar checker so you can see where the run-on sentences are. The flaws stand out and you can see what you did wrong for next time. #flower #filter

squwetchy Take two: This is the second attempt, my “homework” attempt at the same #flower image as my last post from my #watercolour course night one.

squwetchy It has been almost a year since I took a #watercolour class at the local recreation centre. Last spring I took a course from a local teacher on painting Canadian landscapes in watercolours which taught me a whole bunch of new techniques and ideas for improving my personal sketching and painting. This spring, I signed up for a second course by the same teacher, but this time our focus is #flower painting in watercolour. we are encouraged to document the process each class by taking photos of the various stages of the artwork as we paint it as a group, but our instructor insisted obviously that none of those pictures that would hint or give away course materials be posted anywhere so while you will see a number of finished Paintings as a progress through the course over the next few weeks the closest I can give you to show some of the background is a picture like this of me documenting the colour I used to mix for one particular stage, which I don’t think gives much away.