Location Sketching On Ile d’Orleans

Posted on September 26, 2013 by Larry Marshall

“In 1814 we took a little trip,

along with Colonel Jackson

down the mighty Mississip.

We took a little bacon,

and we took a little beans,

and we fought the bloody British

in a town called New Orleans.”

These lyrics, sung long ago by Johnny Horton, tell of the final battle of the War of 1812 where Americans defeated a British invasion force. The song was a big hit when I was a kid and every time I head to Quebec’s Ile d’Orleans that song rattles around in my brain. Truth is, the French had their own battle against a British invasion and Wolfe, the leader of that invasion force, nearly died when his ship ran aground just off the coast of the island, and within cannon distance of the French forces.

But war is not the topic of today’s post. Rather, it is about a trip I took recently to Ile d’Orleans to sketch. I use ‘trip’ loosely as it takes all of fifteen minutes to get there as you can see Ile d’Orleans from Quebec City and vice versa. Going to the mall takes longer.

Ile d’Orleans is a big island in the St. Lawrence River, just as it widens from its narrowest point, at Quebec City, on its way to the Atlantic Ocean. There are six municipalities on the island, though I have a hard time determining where one begins and another ends. What I know is that the island is gorgeous and I love my time there. A lot of vegetable and fruit growing goes on, and it’s a very popular tourist location.

I’ve sketched on the island but I’ve never gone there alone, with the singular goal of sketching. This day, I was on a mission. The sun was out, I had sketchbooks a plenty, and I’d arranged to have our car for the day. I arrived on the island about 8:45 and drove to the backside of the island to a pier that juts out into the St. Lawrence. I discovered it when I was with my buddy Nicolas and we were like a couple kids, chasing the Queen Elizabeth II as she passed along the southern coast of the island on her approach to Quebec City.

Moleskine watercolor (3×5), Pilot Prera, Platinum Carbon Black

I walked out onto the pier, set up my stool and began sketching. You know what? Sun doesn’t help much when there’s a 20-30km/h wind blowing across a large body of water and its hyper-cooled air is cutting you in half. I was COLD!!! At one point I went back and sat in the car for a while to warm up but, finally I finished the sketch. I was a bit too much in a hurry, do you blame me, and ended up with some paint blooms in the foliage because my previous wash wasn’t yet dry, but them’s the breaks.

I was really cold when I finished and so headed for a place I knew that serves wonderful brioche and good, hot coffee. Unfortunately, the winds had blown out their electricity – no coffee. So, I bought a brioche and sat in the car, with the heater running, to warm up.

Stillman & Birn Zeta (5×8), Pilot Prera, Platinum Carbon Black

Across the street from the café is a church and a cemetery. I keep telling myself that I should draw more in cemeteries as I love the shapes of the grave stones and their helter-skelter orientations, probably caused by the annual freezing and thawing of the ground. I found a view I liked, went back to the car to get my stuff and I was soon sitting in the cemetery sketching. This was a little better as there was a stone wall around the area that broke some of the wind. I was only semi-frozen when I finished this one.

I was getting ready to leave. Actually I was turning around in the church parking lot when my eye caught a “Privé” sign and a lamp post. I love to have such things in my sketches and so I decided to sketch this scene. Once again, however, I would be fully-exposed to that darn wind coming off the St. Lawrence. I am old but even I can learn new tricks. I positioned the car so I could sketch while sitting inside. About halfway through I was wishing I had a hacksaw to eliminate the steering wheel but it worked out ok once I got the hang of it.

Stillman & Birn Zeta (5×8), Pilot Prera, Platinum Carbon Black

There’s so much to sketch on the island that I could go there every day and not get bored. In another couple weeks the trees should be putting on their annual ‘fall colors’ light show and I’m going back ‘real soon.’

Sketching On Location – Matthew Brehm

Posted on September 24, 2013 by Larry Marshall

I have few inherent talents. I can’t throw a ball 100mph. I can’t devise new laws of physics. But I’ve got an intense curiosity and my persistence factor is off the charts. .

I have come to art late in life and my solution to the ‘you’re old; you don’t have much time’ dilemma has been to read everything and anything about drawing, coupled with a whole lot of doing. Nick Meglin (Drawing From Within) is right when he says that the book that will teach you the most about drawing is your sketchbook.

But there are insights one can glean from books and those ideas and techniques can have small or large effects on how quickly you can progress. Besides, I’m an ex-scientist and that translates into a view that understanding what smart people think is good for me.

A few things have come from wandering through dozens of ‘drawing books’ written from the 1800s onward. It’s clear there is a difference between how drawing was once taught and how it’s being taught now. If one reads 19th Century drawing texts one is taught to draw everything and to do it from observation, probably because most jobs for artists actually required that skill. Modern texts from the art world all seem to assume that artists draw naked people or draw from their imagination in a studio. It’s barely acknowledged that anyone goes out and draws planes, trains and automobiles anymore and, if one looks at the art hangs as ‘modern art’ in museums, they don’t. Deanna Petherbridge suggests, in her Primacy of Drawing, that a renewed interest in representational art is causing a renewed interest in drawing. I hope she’s correct.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that the sketching world is full of very good sketchers, drawing from observation. They are masters of their craft; they are my heros. A surprising number of them are graphics illustrators, comic book and animation artists and ARCHITECTS! Liz Steel, Gerard Michel, Tia Boom, Matthew Brehm, and my buddy Yvan Breton all come from architectural backgrounds. And when you talk with them it’s easy to see why. Their schooling required them to carry sketchbooks and draw everything and anything on location.

I’ve finally been able to buy a copy of Matthew Brehm’s book Sketching on Location and it is one of the few books on location sketching I’ve seen. And is it ever good. I reviewed Freehand Sketching by Paul Laseau (another architect) and underscored his distinction between location sketching and sketching from photos/imagination. Brehm makes the distinction and provides an extensive toolkit for those wanting to draw from observation. He begins his book thus:

The differences between drawing from observation and drawing in a studio are greater than most seem to understand. The best example of this is “perspective”, a term used by artists for everything having to do with showing depth on a 2D surface, it seems. A quick scan of art books can yield authors saying they perspective to create perspective. But mostly the word is associated with a lot of geometry, mind-boggling geometry. The result are people who say “I can’t draw buildings because I’m not good at perspective” but who can draw gorgeous figures, flowers, etc. where the very same “perspective” exists.

And why does this view exist? Because nobody ever told artists the Catch-22 of linear perspective when applied to location sketching. If you’re going to determine the vanishing point for a building wall, you’ve got to ‘see’ the angles, at least the top and bottom horizontals before a vanishing point can be determined. If you can see the angle, why do you need the vanishing point? While it’s useful to understand the basics of linear perspective, when doing observational drawing the building is right in front of you. You don’t have to make up the angles; you just have to see them.

Brehm uses the term ‘composition’ as a way to build connections between objects, determine the observed angles, sizes and to identify convergences that make it much easier to capture a scene that is in front of you. I know these methods as ‘scaffolding’ but the ‘rose by any other name…’ cliché applies here. He does discuss linear perspective as well, but from the point of view of its more limited uses in observational drawing.

These sections of Brehm’s book alone are enough to change how you approach observational drawing. But his approach to other, more typical drawing subjects (eg – value, color) all emphasize, as one might expect, how they are used by the observational sketcher rather than a studio artist. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in drawing real things, in real places. This book will help you almost as much as your sketchbook.

It’s My Birthday!!!

Posted on September 21, 2013 by Larry Marshall

Have you noticed that as you get older the time between your birthdays gets shorter? Have you also noticed that you’re not as thrilled by them as you once were? Maybe it’s just me. I still act like a kid but I’m old and getting older doesn’t impress me much.

But I just had a birthday that I liked a lot. I’m now a two-year-old sketcher. That’s right, near the end of August 2011, I discovered Danny Gregory’s books and his notion that doing art wasn’t about talent and that it wasn’t about creating great art.

He had the audacity to suggest that anyone could enjoy doing art because the process of doing art, not the end product, is what’s important. As one who has always tried to be creative, but also one who was told he had no ‘talent’ for art, this came as a revelation to me. It was a life-changing event.

And so I started drawing cubes. I’m an analytical type, an ex-scientist, so I felt that if I was going to draw, I needed to start with boxes. In hindsight, I’m glad I did. I drew a gazillion of them. I’d draw one and then try to draw another rotated a bit in one direction of the other from the original. It seemed I was buying a new watercolor book every other day, determined that I’d learn to paint.

But I learned something very quickly. Most watercolor books go like this:

1) Start with a sketch…

2) add a wash…..

3) do something else…

4) finish up with details.

And, to me, this is akin to saying “Want to decorate your own house? Ok, first do all the carpentry and plumbing” but it is the standard way that watercolor books are presented. If you can’t draw, they’re all pretty useless in my opinion.

So I decided that I would spend the first year “learning to draw”, whatever that meant to me at the time. I’m still trying to learn to draw and now figure I’m not going to master it anytime soon. But I do believe that by emphasizing drawing over painting I did myself a great service. For the past couple years I’ve used watercolors but mostly like crayons, filling in areas in my pen and ink sketches as a 5-year old does in their coloring books.

I wish I could share with you some of my early attempts at drawing, but I cannot. All my early sketching was done on photocopy paper and ended up in the trash can. I saw no need to keep any of it, at least until I mentioned this to more seasoned sketchers in an Internet forum. There seemed to be a collective gasp, followed by “Don’t do that. You’ll want to look back some day and evaluate your progress.” They were right and that day was today. I guess that advice came in October 2011 as from then on, everything is in sketchbooks, the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Here was my first attempt at a ‘real’ sketch. I did it from a photo as in October of 2011 I ‘knew’ I’d be eaten alive by passers-by if I dared sketch on location. At the time I was pretty happy with it. I guess I still am given that only a month prior I was struggling to draw cubes (grin).

But, since then I’ve filled a sketchbook or three. I’ve become quite passionate about urban sketching. I carry sketchbooks with me wherever I go and I sketch constantly, or so it seems. I can’t seem to get enough. While I’ve got a lot to learn about art in general, and watercolors in particular, I’m sure having a lot of fun and that’s what art is supposed to be all about. Just ask Danny Gregory.

Le Carnet Des Escaliers De Quebec

Posted on September 19, 2013 by Larry Marshall

Sometimes it seems there is a gap between the art world and the exploding popularity occurring in the sketching world. Regularly we hear people define ‘sketch’ as an ‘unfinished work’, a definition that might have been fine when Monet was noodling his ideas about lily pads. But this is not what modern nature sketchers, urban sketchers, travel journalists, etc. are doing. Our sketches are finished works and they’re ending up on stamps and in books. They’re being sold, either as originals or as prints.

Sketching has become a representational art form unto itself. There are new books on sketching or containing sketches being released so regularly that it’s hard to keep up with them. Typically modern sketches are done in sketchbooks, in limited periods of time. Often the artist is sitting on a tripod stool, on location, possibly chatting with passers-by. For most sketchers, their emphasis has shifted from the creation of art to hang on walls to simply enjoying the process of art. Some sketch with precision. Others sketch in very loose fashion. Some border on doing caricatures of their world. Somehow, in spite of these different approaches, there is a unity in what sketchers do, mostly related to the process of doing.

While different from studio art, sketching nevertheless shares many aspects with it and I sometimes lament the fact that so many artists don’t understand, or even know of in this growing part of the art world. But something happened in Quebec City last week that was one of those “we’ve come a long way baby” moments.

It came in the form of a book launch for a wonderful book titled Le Carnet Des Escaliers De Québec. The book was a collaborative effort organized by Natalie St-Pierre. It contains 180 pages of great sketches that represent the majority of the staircases that exist in Quebec City. As an aside, we have a LOT of them because of the nature of the city, including several containing hundreds of steps. The artists involved were, Natalie, Hugette Asselin, Guylaine Côté, Louise Denault, Magelline Gagnon, Louise Grenier, Sylvie Riverin, Monique Rousseau and Pierre Toupin, the token male in the group. Marie Dagenais wrote the text for the book.

The book is not just a great compilation of sketches, however. It’s truly a tourist guide to the stairways. Maps, beautiful sketches themselves, locate all of the stairways ane descriptions and histories of each stairway provide insights into Quebec and its development.

The quality of the book is sufficient reason to write this post but the book launch says something about just how far the sketching world has come. This launch was held at City Hall. It was an invitation only event and was hosted by the mayor. Now if you live in a small town, you might expect a mayor to host a book launch by a group of locals. But Quebec City has 700,000 people in it; our mayor is a busy guy and yet he spent an hour at the book launch. Roughly 100 people were in attendance and we were served amazing hors d’ouevres and wine, along with great conversations. It was truly an inspired and inspiring gathering.

Sketching The Good And The Ugly

Posted on September 17, 2013 by Larry Marshall

I’d arranged to meet sketching buddy Claudette downtown and so it wasn’t completely nuts when I started walking in that direction in spite of the fact that I was walking in a cloud. It wasn’t raining but a mist was collecting on my glasses and clothes. Walking fast beat the cold away, though.

When I met Claudette we sort of looked at each other and both of us were disappointed with the morning. We decided to walk through the old port area looking for something to draw but I think neither of us had our hearts in it. It was pretty miserable, depressing weather and we ended up ready to cancel completely.

Claudette spotted a cast lion that was part of the entrance to a building and as we looked at it we both decided it would be worthy of a sketch. What I saw was how we humans have lost site of esthetics in favor of convenience and modernity, or whatever word you want to use. Someone had destroyed much of the beauty of the lion casting by installing a large electrical plug below it and wrapping a wire up around it. A real artist would probably have drawn the lion, leaving the plug out and ‘improving’ their drawing. I’m more about documenting city life and thought this debauched piece of art could be the subject itself.

I did make the mistake of doing it in too small a format for a shaded pen drawing like this and both the lion and plug suffered from a lack of space for proper shading. Nevertheless, here’s the 3×4 sketch, done in a Moleskine watercolor book. I used my Pilot Prera and Platinum Carbon Black.