Sketchdump

Woof.  It's been a while!  One gets busy and goes on vacation and the garden starts sprouting and before you know it it's mid-June.  As always I go out with the local Urban Sketchers on the first Saturday of every month.  It's nice to chat with other artists and get to draw somewhere where I don't usually draw.

The weather finally warmed up in April so we were able to start sketching outside.  Our first trip out was to Churchill Square in downtown Edmonton.

The Art Gallery of Alberta:

What a weird building this is.  It makes me thing of the time that I had to design a building for an illustration and I scribbled random shapes until they looked futuristic.  The client liked it.  I think this is how they design buildings now.  (Of course my random shapes did not have to stand up and not fall on people so I am not going to knock the difficulties of actually making one of these things.  I'm just knocking the concept process.)

A guy having coffee with his friend in the square.  His friend kept moving, though, so I had to leave it at this guy.

 City Market is always a good bet for drawing:

 A singer and a vendor.  The singer was really good!

The girl I sketched on the LRT.  The guy was a friend of one of the sketchers and he had such a great face that I was requested to draw him.

That was it for April.  I sketched a couple things from life in between.  I want to finish that dang sketchbook so that I can start a new journal book.

This was a hare we caught napping in our yard.

We named it Loafcake for a number of reasons.  If it seems like it's listing to one side, that's because it was.  I'm astonished it didn't fall over.

My shoes, for Everday Matters Challenge #1:

These may be the coolest shoes that I own.  They remind me of my mom, who had great taste in shoes.

May's Sketchout was at  Jackson Power Gallery, where one of our sketchers had an exhibition.  It was quite interesting.  She does encaustic, primarily, and transfers photographs that she has found in the provincial archives onto various materials.  This exhibition was about pioneer women and included excerpts from letters that they had written to friends and relatives.  They were often very isolated and lived in very primitive conditions.  It was very cool to experience a bit of history.

This was a clothesline strung with photographs transferred onto cloth.  The objects beneath were related to pioneer women's life somehow -- there were broken teacups, surgical instruments, medicine bottles and dried bean pods.  Fans made the cloth flutter and the objects tinkle.

This was an industrial building seen from the window of the gallery.  (It was kind of a nasty day for sketching outdoors.)

This lamp was part of another, related exhibit by another artist.  He had recreated his grandmother's parlour using old family furniture.  It was a tiny room and there were four or five sketchers crammed into it at any one time since it had both knickknacks and comfy chairs.

"Lamp" was the second challenge for Everyday Matters, though, so I had to come back and draw it.

Later in the month I got a chance to sketch this girl on the LRT.  I love finding neat people to draw on the train.  I wish I rode it more often.

And that's it for the last couple months of sketching.  Next up some miscalleneous art, and then my sketches from Vancouver Island and then a boatload of paintings.

Sketches

A couple quick ink sketches from life.

Barcelona Sketches - Boat

A little sailboat just off Rambla del Mar.

Montreal Sketches - Lotus Pond

Montreal's Botanical Garden is one of the best I've seen. My only regrets were that we didn't go early enough in the morning to see everything properly, and that my camera ran out of batteries so that I had to bug Neil to take all my reference photos.

This was a contemplative wooden footbridge in the Japanese garden, which was gorgeous.

Montreal Sketches - Square St. Louis

I've got all sorts of random sketches in varying states of finish wandering around my sketchbooks. Here's one from my Montral vacation back in 2010:

There were trees growing in my line of sight so I ended up having to improvise a few things. I also didn't have the time to finish most of the inking on-site so I did most of the inking from a reference photo I took (trees and all). Today I looked up the location of this house on Google Maps and you can see the whole thing clearly on Street View. I'll have to remember that the next time I drag a sketch back to the hotel room to finish inking!

Old Factory

Did some sketching from life while I was on vacation this summer. These are the remains of the Five Roses Flour factory on the waterfront.

Big, rusty, and looks absolutely gorgeous in the light of the setting sun.

Found another batch of sketches from the convention in April:

Heritage Festival Sketches

Some sketches from the Heritage Festival back in August:

Conference Sketches

Some people from a conference I went to last April:



I'm sure I had a few more pages like this but I think they got stepped on.

Three-Colour Study

Actually, it was supposed to be another two-colour study, but the instructor wasn't quite quick enough with the instructions and I was a little too quick with the paint.



The class material list said to bring ultramarine, raw sienna and burnt sienna to class. I didn't own any raw sienna so I had to go out and buy some (along with all those greens and purples for the last study). When we started painting in class, the instructor said that we could use ultramarine, burnt sienna and a little bit of orange. I didn't have any orange, so I decided to use the raw sienna that I bought. I started painting the background blue, and then the instructor said "you'll need to use the white of the paper". Of course by that time I had covered my whole board in blue paint.

Anyway, it turned out very nice in the end, but I was the only one to use raw sienna so the other students accused me of cheating (as a joke -- we all laughed about it) and started calling me Raw Sienna. So now that's my artist name! Also possibly my porn star name and hippie name, if I ever decide to take up a life that requires a pseudonym.

I had to mess around with this painting quite a bit in Photoshop, because there was too much light coming in from the east. It's quite dark, but the colours are a little more subtle in person.

Green Study

This was the homework assignment for the week, a study using different greens and violet for the shadows.



This week I learned that my little studio is freezing cold and the paint doesn't dry nearly as quickly as when I'm in class. This painting worked out a little better than the last one. I like the blue-green glass jug on the right. The plant pot (bottom left) was very frustrating.

Foosball

Some friends playing foosball at another friend's going-away party. The music was really loud and it was very difficult to have a decent conversation with the people around me.

Another One Rides the Bus

Back to sketching on the bus a bit:

Blue Study

This was the in-class assignment, a monochromatic study using cerulean blue, white and black:



I didn't like this one as much. We were a little rushed, because there was also a survey being done at the start of the class and we did another study in greens after this. I didn't like the way the in-class green study went and it's on a huge sheet of gessoed paper (ugh, gessoed paper -- like painting on slick plastic; I do not like it) so I'm not going to post that one.

Monochrome Study

So this was my first homework assignment for painting class:



A monochrome study in acrylics, on 16x16" hardboard. Teapot, apple and cream jug.

Cups & Eggs

Hey, here's my value study from my first painting class!



Acrylics on illustration board. The actual painting is a little larger than my scanner, so the composition here isn't the best, but it's close enough. I'll be doing another one of these this week and a monochromatic study next Thursday.

My painting class is a lot of fun so far.

Oh yes, and I have some sketches to scan. Hopefully I can get around to that soon. I'm still keeping up with my sketch-a-day resolution!

Phobulous

Finally went and got a haircut. Due to misunderstanding about dinner with my husband, I ended up at our favourite Vietnamese restaurant waiting in line for a table. Amused myself by sketching plant:



If by some miracle you end up in Edmonton, I definitely recommend Phobulous on 109th and 87th. It's tiny but the food is great.

Bus Time

It was the bus ride that would never end. We were stuck in between the hospital and parkade for nearly an hour.

Funky Bus Girl