The Vikings Showed Up In Quebec

Some 500 years before Columbus, the Vikings were wandering around what is now the east coast of Canada.  They came by ship of course and some of their descendents decided to make the trip again.  Thirty-six days crossing the Atlantic resulted in them showing up in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

20160616vikingship

They decided to visit Quebec City and they showed up last Friday.  I thought it might be fun to draw the ship so I headed down to the harbor area.  Unfortunately, a lot of other people decided they should go to the harbor area too, armed with cameras, bicycles, strollers, and there was a guy with a wagon.  There were enough people to make it difficult to stick your cell phone in the air to get a shot of the ship without a dozen heads in the picture.  Sitting down to draw the ship caused one to get a great view of a lot of…well, let’s just say the view of the people was lower than those heads.  The best I could do was to stand, actually having to move around to get a glimpse of the nose of the boat as I did this quick sketch of the dragon figurehead.

Field Notes, Platinum 3776

Field Notes, Platinum 3776

Sketching Around Bassin Louise

A popular place in Quebec City is Bassin Louise, the sheltered harbor area where people keep their sailboats and mini-yachts.  There’s also a large market complex that is popular with tourists and locals alike.  And that’s where our sketching group was on Tuesday morning.  We’re finally getting decent sketching weather so we’re taking advantage of it.

This is a view I’ve wanted to sketch for a while.  It’s nothing special but the trees frame up a group of building shapes that has always attracted my eye.

Stillman & Birn Delta (8x10), Platinum 3776, Platinum Carbon Black

Stillman & Birn Delta (8×10), Platinum 3776, Platinum Carbon Black

Sometimes I’m attracted by a shape, sometimes a texture.  Unlike a lot of artists, I’m not driven to find “great scenes” but rather I like things that look like they’d be fun to draw.  I think this sketch illustrates this point.  I was walking along the harbor and found the sacks that cover furled sails create an interesting draped fabric shape and I thought they’d be fun to draw one… and so I did.  Ain’t sketching fun?

Stillman & Birn Alpha (5x8), Platinum 3776

Stillman & Birn Alpha (5×8), Platinum 3776

While Out For A Walk

Lots of people get their exercise and their dose of mental health by wandering through forests.  I’m more likely to do my walking through our old city, an almost fantasy world from the 18th Century.  Soon it will get really crowded as the tourists start to show up but right now it’s a restful place to walk.

This was a blustery day, putting a chill in my bones as I walked along so I was reluctant to stop to sketch.  I was looking for something I could sketch quickly, before the wind took its toll.  There are a series of large stone sculptures that form a fence near the seminary.  I hid from the wind behind a large statue and did this sketch as quickly as I could.  Hope you like it.

Stillman & Birn Alpha (8x5), Platinum 3776

Stillman & Birn Alpha (8×5), Platinum 3776

A Visit To The Pre-Winnebago Days

An outdoor theatre group was in town for a week and one of their props was this old trailer.  I remember these when I was a kid, long before people started driving Winnebagos the size of a barn down our highways.

It’s not the most beautiful trailer, and I didn’t create a particularly beautiful sketch of it, but memories are contained within and I hope the sketch conjours a few of your own.

Stillman & Birn Alpha (8x5), Platinum 3776

Stillman & Birn Alpha (8×5), Platinum 3776

Ferns In Captivity

I live on a part of the Earth where you can go into forests and find wild ferns hanging out as part of the forest understory.  So much so, in fact, that fern leaves, before they’ve unrolled, are collected and sold as Fiddlehead greens in our grocery stores during late spring.  This is novel to a guy who grew up in Arizona.

Of course you can also find them kept in captivity, kept by those with greener thumbs than mine.  There were a bunch of them in the same place as the Chinese statues I talked about in my last blog post and I drew one of them as they live in really nice clay pots.  I should have posted the sketch with the statue sketch but I forgot all about it.  I post it here to make up for that omission.

Stillman & Birn Delta (8x10), Platinum 3776, Platinum Carbon Black

Stillman & Birn Delta (8×10), Platinum 3776, Platinum Carbon Black