sketching

I’ve been using the Stillman and Birn Alpha book for daily sketches as well as for notes and clippings. I love the size and format of the pages and I like having one book for everything.  I’m trying to sketch everyday and do some experimenting. Tomorrow I’m going to try the tulips again, but mix my greens rather than use greens from the pans. I have a Sennelier Vert Olive which I tend to overuse. I love it going on, and then wonder what I was thinking when I see the finished sketch. All three of the sketches in this post were done with a Sailor pen and I like the looseness its upturned nib brings.

I sat in my car today for an hour for this one below, with the afternoon sun pouring in. Another favourite Belleville house. Today I was just trying to get the angles right, with all its dormers and verandahs. I want to go back and sketch it again, orienting it better on the page, including some foreground. I’ve been watching Paul Heaston’s class on Craftsy. It’s worth checking out. While I will never draw in as detailed a fashion as he does, I want to incorporate his well-explained concepts to help plan my sketches and the design of the page.

Meanwhile, I am finally back in the studio and will have some new things to show you before too long.

I spent four days in Amsterdam on my way home from Kenya. Amsterdam is one of my very favourite cities and I love to have the time to walk, to visit the museums and to sketch.  It’s all there in such a small radius, long-surviving architecture from 1600’s to the latest in art and design.

The Van Gogh Museum was particularly exciting for me this time as VG’s sketchbooks were on display. It was such an eye-opener–you could see his process and his thinking by digitally paging through his sketchbooks. Below is the real thing in a view from one of the showcases.

I did some sketching too. It was +8 degrees when I was there so it was warm enough to sit out for a little while and sketch. The exercise, for me, is getting to know the buildings, exploring the curls and corners. And my concentration and struggle for the whole time there, was how to follow the angles while keeping the drawing loose. And how to convey those windows, how to keep them from looking like black holes.

I was staying right on Dam Square, so this wonderful building was in my sights regularly. And below that a few pages from my sketchbook.

I’ve been keeping journals almost all my life, since the red faux-leather one with the lock that I got for Christmas in Grade 8. My friend A still has all her old journals dating that far back and pasted in them are notes we sent each other over the aisles in the grade 8 classroom and much much more. Unlike A I have long since trashed those early journals and many subsequent ones.

But I started keeping an illustrated journal in 2009 when I discovered Danny Gregory’s book Creative License. And since then, I have been recording regularly, refining my sketching and notes and working out an approach and a style that is comfortable and sustaining. I’m thinking about all this because I’m heading off to Kenya and then Amsterdam and I want to use the journal to record as much as I can of my experience of those amazing places.

Coincidentally, Ian Brown, has an article on keeping a personal notebook in today’s Globe. He says a notebook “is to record details that reach out as you pass, for reasons not immediately apparent. A notebook is full of moments from days that have yet to become something…I like to read my previous year’s notebooks…and from those fragments I gather a sense of the time that poured by. It’s never what I remembered or planned.” Brown is talking about written notes, but his comments apply equally to a sketchbook. Your sketchbooks record what literally ‘catches your eye’ and give a rich sense of your days.

For the new 2015 travel sketchbook, I plan to concentrate on volume rather than striving for that perfect sketch. I want it to be full of thumbnails and random thoughts and quotations from what I am reading. Ironically that is what the 2009 sketchbook contains. Lots of things cut out and pasted in or copied. The sketches are basic and tentative but the content gives a rich sense of my days. Over the five years since then I’ve worked on sketching but with my main focus on improving the sketch, I have often left out the things which make the record rich.

Here is a page from the 2009 journal. The drawings, as rudimentary as they are, bring back that day and its thoughts with surprising immediacy. And I love the phrase everything grows beautiful with attention. I have no idea where it originated, but I felt it applied to that lovely old plain Jane church I was trying to capture–and of course so much more. I’ll be beginning the new sketchbook this week, recording my preparations–let’s see how it goes…

It was a beautiful Ontario winter day today and I had a half hour to spare. So I parked in the Court House parking lot and set up my sketching kit in the front seat of the car. Although it was a beautiful sunny day, it was still -7 C, too cold to sketch outside.

This is the east end of one of the most delightful buildings in Belleville, the Bellevue Terrace, a series of six three-storey townhouses, built in 1876. When I first moved to Belleville, this was the place I wanted to live. Sadly I have never even been inside one of the units, but have always admired the ‘Eclectic High Victorian’ design, especially the concrete window hoods and sills. And in a city that does not value its history, we are so lucky to have this terrace, protected by the Ontario Heritage Act.

Earlier in the week, I started a quick sketch of the old Napanee Post Office from the parking lot of Mac’s Milk. I want to take the time to do justice to the whole of this wonderful sandstone building which was designed by Thomas Fuller, Chief Dominion Architect from 1881 to 1896, whose firm designed the centre block of the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa. The post office was built in 1887 and its over-budget final figure of $52000 was the subject of a federal investigation. But we have this glorious piece of architecture today, whose exterior as well as some of the interior features are also protected by the Ontario Heritage Trust.