Queen Fresh Market

Sketching from a parking lot

 This perfect little grocery at the top of my street has super produce and other necessary ingredients, which inspires healthy appetites and good cooking. Morning light makes the sign and the oranges glow, so I screwed up my courage and went out to make a sketch. Using the photo I was able to isolate those wonderful blacks on the iPad. The underpainting will be cool- a mixture of burnt umber and Prussian blue, which will dry fast.

Cropped and sketched from photo

Amazing how three dimensional it is already, just wiping out underpainting!

A nice sketch, but the perspective on the awning needed correction.

High Park Hillside Garden

 

My friend Ileen and I stole a couple of quiet hours in High Park today, to do some oil painting. We found a spot next to a bridge that had been chained off for no apparent reason. the changing light made me quit after about an hour and a half, so as not to blend too much trying to accommodate the light. I want nice chunks of paint colour to rest where they’re placed, to make a kind of colour poem. The red underpainting peeking through helps pull it all together. Ileen pointed out that Tom Thompson used red underpainting, and I googled who invented it- Titian?


Check out Ileen’s painting! @ileensart

China Town and the Salt Mines

 What does Chinatown have in common with the salt mine? One, they waited a long time for me to paint them, and two, they both had strong under painting. It is proving a challenge to paint the water over red. 

Goderich salt mines, underpainting

The initial drawing is covered up entirely but I try to leave sparks of the underpainting peeking through in small amounts. Blocking in dark areas is fairly quick and very satisfying!

Chinatown, sketch, underpainting and 90% finished,
These are Acrylic, 8x10 on stretched canvas.

My brushes are a mixture of sizes. I want less fussiness so I choose the largest I think I can work with. Ideally, each small painting, if successful, could be made bigger with a similar approach. The Salt Mine, Goderich has subject matter I love. I wish it could look more like Hester Berry painted it! Ah, well, perhaps in time. I think the umbrella in China town needs more bright saturatied colour, and the hats and sign lettering need addition, as well as the flag lettering details. The blue sign at the to needs the top truncated to get the cantilever in the architecture back.

I’m using a new medium for these, by a Canadian company - “TriArt” that offers better UV protection, and improves the stroke.

The Buzzing Tree

 Walking the neighbourhoods near me is a regular thing now, with no gym membership. My daughter and I usually walk together and choose different destinations. For a change we went up to Beaconsfield, where there are curvy streets and cul-de-sacs. At one point we heard a strange and quite loud buzzing noise like machinery of some kind. Curious, we followed the sound to another street and a glorious old tree in full blossom. It was completely full of bees, furiously working on the nectar. So many bees, and so loud!

 I photographed the house across from the tree and later painted it. It has complimentary orange and pthalo in the sunlight with lots of planar shifts from one section to the next when viewed from behind. The lessons from my last entry about underpainting prompted a little experiment in colour and a more detailed underpaint. The bricks are under painted in light and dark blue while the sky is orange, with neutrals on the pavement and roofs. This is a cheap paper panel.