COVID isolation has resulted in my covering new artistic ground as a substitute for daily urban sketching jaunts in old Quebec and elsewhere. But here in Quebec City things have relaxed a bit as Canada has gotten things under better control. We’re all shopping in our masks but we can move almost freely outdoors.
A couple weeks ago the Artistes dans les parcs group was supposed to have an event at a small park not too far from where I live. The plan was to paint the old alley ways in that neighborhood. Unfortunately, the event was rained out.
The next week I decided to walk there just to see the area as I’d never sketched there before. As I walked the street I looked down one of the alleys and saw a scene that grabbed me. It wasn’t the subject (an old garage structure surrounded by trees, but light/shadow situation. The trees on the left side of the alley were nearly black from being in shadow while the garage and the trees on the right of it were brightly lit.
I decided to try to paint it in gouache, a medium I’m trying to figure out. Frankly, I was in a bit over my head. I’m still working on Shari Blaukopf’s light and shadow course and trying to get my head around painting light rather than stuff. To do it with gouache was, well, intimidating. But in the end the exercise was extremely informative and fun.
In hindsight the sketch would have benefited from my “moving in”, making the garage a larger piece of the puzzle. I started with a minimal pencil sketch and then tried to do washes to mark out the various values. I think this was a mistake, but only because I was in watercolor mode, which to me means I was working light to dark. I’m sure that an experienced painter wouldn’t have a problem but quickly I realized that I would have been better off laying in the darks first. I had a hard time adjusting lights and darks to fit the scene. I found myself longing for some Alizarin because my Pyrrol Red just couldn’t take my cobalt/yellow green dark enough to match the light grays I’d used to represent the whites of the scene. Looking back, I realize that my REAL problem was that I was ignoring my tube of ivory black gouache, which would have solved the problem quickly. I just don’t think about black as being part of the arsenal. Pretty dumb when using an opaque medium.
As I said, I had a lot of fun. One little epiphany I had during this effort was about my artist brain. When I’m working with ink and wash, I think about proportions and relative locations of things, but most of the rest (perspective, edges, etc) is handled automagically by my subconscious. It’s that ‘in the zone’ thing we talk about. I realized that while doing this painting, I was getting no help from my lizard brain. I was having to think about everything and it was HARD!
I remember that feeling from years ago when I was faced with trying to learn to draw. How could I think about all that stuff at once? Truth is, you can’t. It’s impossible. You simply have to do it enough that some of it becomes automated to the point where all you have to do is think about how big to make stuff and where to put it.
