Sketching At Hotel-Dieu In Quebec City

Posted on August 11, 2015 by Larry Marshall

Everyone comes to Quebec City to see the “old city”, the portion of the city that has a wall around it. It’s a UNESCO Heritage site and the architecture dates from the 16th Century to the present, though “present” is held back by significant building codes to retain this special place.

I live in the old city. Not literally, but I spend so much time walking and sketching there that I claim it as a residence. And last week, Louise arranged to sketch a statue that is inside the grounds of Hotel-Dieu, a hospital in the old city, so I tagged along with her, Claudette and Yvan.

Hotel-Dieu, a hospital with a reseach program associated with it, was founded in 1637. I can only imagine what it looked like back in 1637 but since that time it has grown in patchwork fashion and is now represented by a hodge-podge of buildings – new and old. You can see evidence of this when you enter some of its more modern portions only to see that they partially encompass old, stone construction in places.

But we were there to sketch a statue and it resided in a courtyard-like area that, itself, was the roof of an underground facility of some kind. The statue, to me, was a disappointment and so I decided to sketch what is now an entrance to a larger building. I’m not sure what it was originally as you pass through it, come out the other side, and then enter the large building from a small courtyard. But it’s got a very odd shape and worthy of a sketch or three.

Stillman & Birn Beta (9×12), Namiki Falcon, De Atramentis Document Black

When others had finished up their statue sketching, we headed for a small park near the Hotel Frontenac, the “trademark” of Quebec City tourism. We were there to sketch the statue on top of a large fountain in the park. I’d done that before and wasn’t in the mood so I got out my toned paper ‘moustache’ book and started looking for targets. Here are a couple of those sketches.

Everyone was nearing the end of their sketches and I only had a few minutes left so I just started drawing pieces of the fountain, which sort of spread across the paper like ooze from an oil spill. The fountain is truly a complex affair and I only captured a small portion of it but there’s limited space in a 4×6 format (grin). Like all sketching days, this was a good one.

Speed Dating – Sketcher Style

Posted on August 10, 2015 by Larry Marshall

I’ve mentioned that I’m in an experiment mood these days and with the Nouvelle France Festival event coming up (the equivalent of duck hunting for a sketcher, with lots of targets that are all moving too fast) I was walking along my river (riviere St. Charles in Quebec City) pondering how “extreme” the sketching is at that event. I was remembering how last year I had a great time but went home with lots and lots of bad and incomplete sketches, though I think I did post one or two.

Anyways, as I was thinking about this I arrived at the Palais du justice de Quebec, or rather Le parc de l’Amerique-Latine that sits between the court building and the river. This park is filled with statues and busts of some of the ‘greats’ of Latin America. I know almost none of them, but as a sketcher, I’d drawn several of them.

It occurred to my aging and weary brain that I could use this cluster of targets for rapid fire target practice, sketcher style. Sort of training for the Nouvelle France event. Yeah…I know…you’re right. But as Steve Martin used to say, “I’m a wild and crazy guy!”

I decided to give myself fifteen minutes to draw as many of the busts as I could, using only a pointy device and sketchbook. No arms tied behind my back to make it hard and no need for camouflage to sneak up on the targets. Nope, just me, my fountain pen and fifteen minutes. I set a timer on my phone and got to work…frantic work, at least for me as I’m very much a plod along sketcher. Precious seconds were wasted walking between targets and setting up my tripod stool. I need more training as a tripod setter-upper.

I finished a third bust at 14 minutes so used the last minute to draw an extra eye, at a more leisurely pace. It was an interesting and fun exercise. I hope it’ll help me be successful when Festivale de Nouvelle France rolls around. Do you do crazy stuff like this?

Sketching Alone In A Garden

Posted on August 6, 2015 by Larry Marshall

I went to a large garden the other day. It was overcast but warm and windless and the garden was nearly deserted. I wandered around and finally decided to draw a scene that included an arbor that bordered one side of a central area in the garden. I thought I’d show you the steps I took in drawing it. The sketch was done as a two-page spread in a Stillman & Birn Beta (6×9) sketchbook.

I laid out all of the objects in the scenes, most represented only by an irregular, but properly proportioned blob, but it’s during this stage that I get all my proportion thinking accomplished. This solves two problems for me. First, it’s too easy to start concentrating on details if I start with pen and then proportions take a back seat until it’s too late. Doing this in pencil mentally separates it from “drawing” for me. The second thing is that when I do pick up my pen, I no longer have to think about sizes of the objects relative to one another. I know they will fit into their blobs and so I can really have fun while drawing.

One could say that this is actually two steps. I drew everything with a Namiki Falcon and DeAtramentis Document Black ink and then I added some darks with a Kuretake #13 brush pen. If the darks are a second step, it’s a step I don’t do well with. If it’s not a separate step, I still don’t do well with it. I just don’t ‘get’ where I should put the darks and/or what marks work best to depict darks I see in the real world. But in the end, this is what the ink drawing looks like.

I’m really at a loss when it comes to watercolor techniques. I can mix colors but I really have no clue what to do with them once they’re mixed (grin). Nevertheless, this is what the sketch looked like when I was done.

I don’t always work this way. Sometimes I skip the pencil stage and try to do the proportion/perspective stuff while drawing with ink. I know the internet is fond of saying that ‘direct-to-ink’ is what real men do and that it’s faster. While I think that nonsense, in my experience, it takes me longer to do a drawing like this when I skip the pencil step than when I include it. Note, however, no erasers were abused in the creation of this drawing until the end of the ink stage when I run a kneaded eraser over the entire drawing to remove all the ‘blobs’ of the pencil sketch.

Sketching In The Sun – Part Two

Posted on August 4, 2015 by Larry Marshall

Yesterday I promised that I would scan and post the other sketches I did when out with Louise and Claudette. We walked to rue D’Auteuil, a street just inside the wall of old Quebec City, and a street on which I lived while doing a post-doctoral fellowship here back in the 80s.

On this day, however, the goal was to sketch the bust of Dante, at least that was the goal Claudette and Louise had set for themselves. I seem to be in ‘Let’s try this’ mode right now so I sat on a bench and did a series of small thumbnails of stuff I could see from this one location. It was something that Liz Steel did in her Foundations class and it seemed like a fun thing to do. I just drew small frames and drew inside them with my Namiki Falcon. It was as fun as it seemed when Liz did it.

With Dante sketched, we ate lunch and then headed for coffee. Coffee drinking took us to the Plains of Abraham where we enjoyed a nice time sitting the park and chatting.

Once we were sufficiently caffeinated, Louise and Claudette decided to sketch the Charles De Gaulle statue, something that did not interest me so I started walking around, enjoying the ambiance of Jardin Jeanne D’Arc and all its flowers. Nothing caught my eye enough to cause me to stop gawking at flowers and so by the time I returned to Mr/ De Gaulle, Claudette and Louise were well along with their sketches. I decided to quickly sketch Louise sketching and had some fun, quickly generating the scene around her. This was a very good sketching day.

Statues In The Sun

Posted on August 3, 2015 by Larry Marshall

I’m getting behind in my scanning and writing but last week, Claudette, Louise and I met in front of the Quebec Parliament to sketch. Louise needed to sketch a particular statue, which happened to sit in open sun…a hot sun, on a very humid day.

She’s tough. I’m not, so I started looking around for a subject/shade relationship I could live with. Most of the single statues in that area are in sun with no shade so in spite of the target rich environment, there were few dark places for a sketch sniper such as myself to hide.

I decided to use the opportunity to do an exercise in cross-eyed complexity, at least for me and sketched a monument with a series of statues associated with it. At least I could sit in the shade. I did some other sketches this day but I need to scan them so I’ll talk about those tomorrow.

Stillman & Birn Beta (9×12), Namiki Falcon, De Atramentis Document Black