BirdBrain Designs

We were in Kingston yesterday and I had time to sketch while my husband worked on our son’s sailboat. I set my stool up beside the market vendors behind City Hall. I got the sketch done and the first layer of paint on before it was time to meet the rest of my family at the Tett Centre on the shores of Lake Ontario. The Tett is a beautifully renovated limestone building originally part of the Morton Brewery and Distillery Company. It now houses many of Kingston crafts and artistic groups. In addition it has a super café with tables right beside the lake.

As for the sketch…I’m still working on natural-looking windows and perspective as you can see. 

We are taking a trip through the Hebrides in the fall. This is a location I have wanted to visit for a long long time. My aunt lived in Stornoway and my father’s stories of his visit there intrigued me. I’ve been to Scotland four times. The first time I was 2 1/2 and the last time was about 10 years ago when my sister and I walked the West Highland Way. But it is the northern islands that have always had a sense of magic for me. So I’ve been reading Peter May’s trilogy about Lewis; above is the second book in the series. These books are mysteries but they also beautifully evoke the landscape, the weather and the customs of this rugged land. The book on the right is a wonderful sketching tour of the Hebrides by Mairi Hedderwick. She travelled the islands alone in a van and sketched everyday for 195 days! The book is a chronicle of her late 1980’s trip accompanied by lots of her delightful sketches. I am enjoying reading of her experiences on the 40 islands she visited. And although our trip will not be as extensive, I am taking inspiration from her and plan to sketch as much as I can when I am there.

In the meantime, here are a couple of pages of my sketchbook from last week. The red house sketch was done standing beside my bicycle and the paint added later. The yellow house was done from the car. Neither position is ideal for getting proportion and line…but they do document the moment. You will see as I decided, I’m including more text and clippings.

In April, my friend Anne and I went on a sketching trip to Goderich. I posted a couple of sketches here and planned to post the others, but did not get to it until today. Since the start of that trip I have been using the Hand.book Travelogue sketchbook in the 8″ x 8″ size and I like the format very much. It’s not too big to tote around yet gives ample room so that the sketch does not feel crowded.

Below is the Goderich train station. It was a sunny, very cool April day down by Lake Huron and we sat bundled against the wind to sketch this wonderful building. It had been moved from its previous location, because like so many railway stations in Canada, it is no longer in use. But it has been beautifully restored and houses a restaurant now.

What follows here are some of the cottages on the Goderich streets. You can see I am still working out how to do the windows. It’s an on-going search. 

The weather was lovely this past long weekend and we spent the day Sunday around Lake Ontario. I finished the sketches on site and added the paint once I got home.  The bluebird boxes strung up on a fence were just too quirky to resist. And the charming building? I stood on the side of the road to sketch–adding paint later. I continue to work on  the colour of shadows and foliage. Still, these sketches are a great reminder of a beautiful day.

 

I’ve been starting to broaden the focus of my sketchbooks. I am still sketching my surroundings and trying to get better at that. That’s number one. But now I am getting back to including other ideas and notes, as well as tickets, notices and print excerpts. I’ve had a journal of sorts since I was 12 when my father made me a varnished wooden box with a lock on it and a C in gothic script painted on the top.  And now I want to get back to keeping more of a record. When I looked at one of my first sketchbooks from 2009 I saw the richness of including ideas and excerpts, something that has been missing in my recent books where I concentrate solely on sketching. In fact, the idea for my next rug came from some notes and a poem excerpt in that 2009 journal. So I am getting over my notion that I’m ‘wasting’ watercolour paper by writing on it and including extras on my pages.

There is a good article in today’s Globe and Mail about travel sketching by David Gillet, The pencil is mightier than the flash. I found it reassuring to hear: “It’s not about great art or skill. Drawing is something everyone can do. I don’t use an eraser or straight edge when I sketch: misplaced lines, doodles, quirky shapes are all part of it.” And again…”The physicality of putting pen to paper…There is a visceral muscle-and-nerve connection to the scene in front of you when your mind observes a shape and tells your hand how to bring it to the blank page….To sketch a scene challenges our notions of what really matters as we move through a new city or react to the beauty of a great windswept plain.”

The weather was a bit more spring-like this week and my friend Anne was here for a visit. We headed out two of the days to find something in the area to sketch. Our first day was in Wellington on the shores of Lake Ontario. This is the tiny Anglican Church on the main street. My angles are wonky, especially around the front door, but I just went with it, hoping to right it a bit with the paint.

 

Day two was threatening rain, so we sat in the arches across from the City Hall, dodged the rain drops and quickly sketched a wing of that great building. The sketch takes up a small section of the page in my sketchbook but when I look at it, I remember the conversation and the weather and the discoveries I made about a building I’ve been looking at for 30 years.

So many reasons to sketch and record.

 

I was in Toronto this week to hear Cheryl Strayed and watch the film of Strayed’s book Wild. Here is an article recounting a different interview on a different continent, but it captures the essence of what I heard on Monday night. Powerful, funny and enlightening. The film was powerful too, but not a patch on the book or listening to Strayed in person. Here is a link to Strayed’s reading list for the hike.

Over the two days I was there, I had time for a couple of sketches. The first is at our local train station which you have seen before. It is one of my favourite buildings in the city and I am always happy it is still there as it sits empty these days. This sketch is from the vantage point of the new station and the perspective was a challenge. I only had the time before my train arrived to do the drawing and I added paint later. The second drawing was done in a café looking up University Avenue just before going to the film.

At bottom is a super quick sketch of a not-very-interesting building. Again it is done from a café the day after the talk. I am often in this café when I’m in Toronto because the building across the road, although uninteresting to look at, is full of all kinds of hardware, rivets, interfacing and zippers I need for my leather bags.