A Visit To Baie St. Paul

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Shari Blaukopf recently spent several days in the Baie St. Paul area painting up a storm.  As I read her blog posts I thought of times when Chantal and I had visited the area and how much fun it was.  While we couldn’t go for several days, we decided to do a day trip there and back.  That meant a two hour drive in each direction so we wouldn’t have much time there but heck, it would satisfy our wanderlust.

The drive was enjoyable.  Just getting out and driving through forest and field was a treat.  When we got there we hunted down the place Shari mentioned that made 100% cotton paper.  It was nice, but I found the papers too thin (seemed mostly for writing) and too expensive.  So, we walked across the street to the Maritime Museum of Charlevoix, another of Shari’s stops.  It’s an interesting place, a place where cargo ships were stored during winters.  Since the display ships are all out of the water and sitting at an odd angle, I didn’t draw any of them (excepting a small, quick sketch of the tugboat that showed up in a previous blog post).

Instead I was thrilled to find tractors and stationary steam engines on display.  These provided power to move the ships around.  And so I drew one of the steam engines.  The sketch isn’t my best.  I found the subject more complex than I thought it would be and didn’t devote enough time to blocking in its proportions and relationships.  Oh well.  We had a great time anyway.

I’m both fascinated and frustrated by the effects the COVID scourge has had on my feelings and decision-making.  One of the really fun things to do in Baie St. Paul is walk down Main St. (don’t think it’s called that), visiting the high-end boutiques and art galleries.  Of course we had to do that – or did we really.  As we were wandering I felt that I shouldn’t be there.  The very notion of being in a store “just to look” has left me and all I wanted to do was get out of there.  Chantal felt the same way.

Ultimately we had our first meal in a restaurant since February and I had to chuckle over the fact that our choice of restaurant had little or nothing to do with what they were serving and everything to do with how few people were in the restaurant.  Such is life these days.  Hope COVID is treating you well.

The Girl On The Beach

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I know there are many parts of the US that are in dire straits from COVID and the lack of governmental concern over it.  But that’s not true of many places. In Quebec City, where a mask-wearing mandate, social distancing, and good government response allow us to go and do pretty much as we please (unless you’re a party animal I guess).  And yet Chantal and I are still reluctant to range far and wide.

We’re living a hermit existence, but like everyone else we’re going nuts looking at the same walls day after day.  We decided to succumb to the urge to go somewhere, anywhere, and headed to Ile d’Orleans, a large island just east of Quebec City in the Ste Lawrence River.  There’s 42 miles of road that runs around the perimeter of the island and we figured we couldn’t get in too much trouble as long as we stayed in the car.

And for the most part we did stay in the car.  We wandered around a park that’s sort of a mini-botanical garden on the north side of the island and we stopped at a couple of the small marinas where we walked out to look at the St. Lawrence.  Most of the fruit and vegetable stands were closed and the couple places that were open we too crowded to tempt us.  Because of this, I took a couple photos but sketching wasn’t practical.

At one of the marinas there was a beach with only a couple people on it so we walked around a bit, taking in the fresh air.  A girl was sitting at the edge of the water, creating a wonderful scene.  Here’s my sketch of her enjoying her own form of solitude.

Why I Don’t Do Sketchbook Tours

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A couple people have asked why I don’t do sketchbook tours like so many people do.  My first thought is that I’m not set up to shoot video, but I could be if I wanted to do so. No, the real reason is that my sketchbooks are not done to be presented.  Lots of people approach each page as part of the whole, a place where a significant sketch must be completed to fit with the rest.  Others do everything with carefully organized graphic and text presentations.

I’ve tried doing both and, frankly, both approaches seem far too limiting to me.  I want to be able to scribble down whatever I want and however I want.  My sketchbooks are more about trying stuff, having fun, and generally putting in the work to improve my ability to draw.  I don’t feel I can do any of that while trying to produce something for presentation.  If some presentable sketches come from this, so be it but that’s not my goal.

And since I’ve been talking about the Hahnemuhle Cappuccino notebook recently I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and talk about it some more while I show you a couple pages I did this weekend.  They reflect how this paper responds to different media and how miserably disorganized my sketchbook pages are (grin). I’ll discuss these pages in the order in which it occurred.

We were at the Maritime Museum of Charlevoix this past weekend and we were sketching.  At one point I decided that I needed to sit down (my knee still limits my energy/mobility) and so I did.  Chantal took the opportunity to investigate views to a church she wanted to draw.

In front of me were some rocks so I got out the Cap. notebook and drew a small cluster of them.  I used thin watercolor washes to give them some life.  Then I started drawing a woman who was standing far away. This was a signal to her that she should walk behind a ship.  She did and I was left with a scribble.

I sat for a while, enjoying the sunshine and the fact that one of the virtues of the pandemic is that these museums are nearly devoid of people.  But eventually I started doing a quick, scribble of an old tugboat.  The point of view was weird but I was comfortable and didn’t feel like moving.  Besides, I was just going to draw the cabin roof and a few windows.

I didn’t worry about proportions and ended up with a tugboat with a shortened bow.  I also had a tugboat that had bumped into my little rock drawing, so I drew a square around the rocks.  It wasn’t a great sketch, but like all sketches it was fun to do.

Then Chantal came back.  We got into a discussion of faking perspective because she’d been trying to sketch a church.  The little scribble in the top left was my pen brain trying to assist my mouth brain in describing things.  After that lively discussion I put the sketchbook away and we continued our visit.

When we got home I decided to see how the Cappuccino would handle gouache.  So I painted the tugboat.  I didn’t worry much about staying inside the lines or doing careful shading.  I was only looking at how the gouache and paper interacted.  It does quite well, by the way.  For me, one of the advantages of gouache is that you use much less water and the paint sits on the surface so paper quality/type isn’t nearly as important.

Someone on YouTube mentioned using a Tuscan Red Col-Erase pencil and presented a few portraits done with it.  Looked good to me so I hunted down my box of Col-Erase and drew the guy you see here.  The drawing isn’t finished but I’m finished with it.  As a proof of concept this was a winner and I’ll investigate further my Tuscan Red pencil.

So, you see, none of these partial sketches are tour-worthy.  None of them are even finished drawings. They reflect me learning, trying, doing.  I place most of the emphasis on that last word.  Do you have sketchbooks like this?

Small Figures Make Great Sketching Subjects

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Lots of us are dealing with COVID isolation by sketching our backyards and stuff in our kitchens.  We’re no longer locked down and it’s pretty safe to move around because people are reasonable and we’re all wearing masks.  Still, I’m reluctant to spend much time sketching on the streets.

I took advantage of the fact that I have a collection of Schleich animal figures.  If you’re unfamiliar with them, they are very detailed and well-painted figures and each if beautifully proportioned, unlike so many of the animal figures made for kids.  I’ve bought many of mine from art stores but the satisfying ones I got for pennies at local flea markets.  Here’s a batch that Chantal gave me for Christmas.

I was about to watch a baseball game and so I grabbed my panda bear and drew him while the Blue Jays played baseball.  A great combination.  This is in my Hahnemuehle Capuccino notebook and rather than using watercolor I grabbed a black and white colored pencil to add some “color.”  Pandas are very accommodating when it comes to color.

Drawing Brushes

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Sketchers are fond of drawing their paint brushes.  They do them large; they do them small.  They do them in full color and they do them with simple lines.  I was sitting on our deck sipping coffee and my eye caught this brush, the common one in use around our place right now.  Here is my brush drawing for the year.

This was drawn quickly, between coffee gulps, in a Hahnemuehle Cappuccino notebook.  I bought it a long time ago but when it arrived I didn’t see much use for it since the paper is only 120gsm so you can’t put a lot of water to it.  But it’s really smooth paper and a dream to draw on with fountain pen, particularly since I’m used to drawing on rougher watercolor paper.  It will handle a bit of water as long as you don’t ask much of it and the beautiful hardbound cover and thin format are nice too.  I’ll carry it around for a while and see what happens.  Here’s an example of how it handles light watercolor washes.