Larry D. Marshall's Blog, page 97

Taking A Coffee Break, Sketcher Style

It was sort of cold when I headed out to sketch a couple days ago.  I’d nearly froze to death the day before while sketching a small restaurant.  So, I decided that I should find some place indoors to sketch and I headed downtown.  When I got there I wandered around a bit and then went into the Second Cup, a chain of Starbucks look-alikes.

It was not very busy so I decided this was the place for me.  I got a cup of coffee and sat at a high table near the periphery of the shop.  I got out my pad of Patrick-paper (a sketchbook sent to me by Patrick, hence the name) and started sketching.  I started with the one person in the scene, drew a few lines to identify some major horizontals and then just started adding stuff.  And then I added more stuff.

When I finished the ink work I paused to drink some of my coffee.  It was still warm.  I added the color, took a breath, and drank some more coffee.  It wasn’t very warm.  I guess I’m going to have to acquire a taste for cold coffee as I’ve certainly acquired a taste for sketching in coffee shops.

Pre-hibernation Behavior Of A Quebec Sketcher

I think this may be my last outdoor sketch of the year.  I was out this morning.  The temperature was 3-4 C and it was windy.  I did the basics of this sketch as quickly as my slow hand allowed.  It’s a tiny, old ‘casse-croute’ (typically this means they sell fries and poutine) on Dorchester street.

By the time I had the structure drawn, I was frozen so I headed to the library, which was nearby.  I’d snapped a photo of the building and used it to add details and color.  I think this marks the beginning of indoor season for me.

Stillman & Birn Zeta (6×9) sketchbook, Pilot Prera, Platinum Carbon Black

Sketchcrawl Sketches And Then Some

We held our fall sketchcrawl last Saturday and I reported on it on Monday.  The post was getting so packed with graphics that I decided not to post the sketches I did during the sketchcrawl.

I did do a couple, however.  Being a fan of mundane urban accessories, I decided to draw one of a dying breed of accessory, the phone booth.  It was convenient as it was situated at the meeting place for the sketchcrawl so I could sketch and still meet people as they arrived.  I learned this trick from my buddy Yvan.  I did it in a Stillman & Birn Zeta (6×9) using a Pilot Prera and Platinum Carbon Black ink.  I found that I’d forgotten my watercolors so I did the color with Faber-Castell “Albrecht-Durer watercolor pencils.  I like these as a substitute for watercolors because I can completely eliminate the lines made by the pencil.

In front of the Farmer’s Market was a large pile of pumpkins, stacked on hay bales.  I drew a portion of those in my Singapore special toned-brown sketchbook that was sent to me by Patrick Ng.  I’m still learning how to work with this paper but I’m really enjoying it.  I used the Pilot Prera and watercolor pencils on this one as well.

I thought I’d throw in a couple other sketches I’ve done recently.  The garage sits at the end of a little park I sit in while waiting for a study group I run to convene.  I don’t think I ever posted it.  It was done in a 3×5 Moleskine watercolor book.

When I was doing that sketch, they were tearing up the street in front of the park.  By the next week they were ready to re-pave it and they’d just finished laying new curbing along its length.  To do that, it seems, they had to remove the fire hydrant, which was hanging from a mechanized shovel.  I’m a fire hydrant afficionado and this was akin to a bird-watcher seeing a rare bird.  I had to sketch this and so I did, in my Stillman & Birn Zeta (6×9) with my Pilot Prera.  This was the tenth fire hydrant sketch I’ve done and certainly the most unique.

Hope you enjoy these.  I sure had fun creating them. — Larry

Tea Time In Quebec City

I became officially old last Sunday.  The significance of this is that my bus pass is now less expensive and I’ll pay $2 less for a ticket to a Capitales baseball game.

But, we had a wild celebration of the event anyway.  I was served a nice brunch, prepared by my wife and daughter.  We talked about lots of stuff, most of it not too important.  And then my wife suggested we go for a walk.  Maybe 65 steps, she said, in celebration.  We concluded that 6500 steps might be a somewhat more reasonable length for a celebratory walk.

And so we set out for our 6500 step walk.  We had a great time, though it was a bit windy and one hat nearly ran away on us.  But we passed by the art store, where I bought a tube of Quin. Gold and we continued onward…step…step…step.

We decided to stop and have a pot of tea at Camelia Sinensis, our favorite tea house.  The life of a sketcher’s wife is hard.  As the tea arrived I said, “I should draw that”, pointing at the tea service.  She patiently agreed and spent the next ten minutes watching me quickly sketch the service.  The pot only left the tray once as I sketched it and as she refilled her cup.  I’m sure she was thinking “what I put up with…sheez” and at the same time I was thinking, “I’d better hurry up before she thinks I’m ignoring her.”    Such is wedded bliss.

So here it is, my more than a little bit wonky sketch of a Camelia Sinensis tea service.  My first day of being old was a good one and, by the way, we made 9300 steps during that walk.

41st Worldwide Sketchcrawl – Quebec City

This is the second year that we’ve done the October worldwide sketchcrawl.  It’s a challenge for us because, by this time of year, it’s generally pretty darn cold.  Last year I learned a new French word – frissoner – which means to shiver.  So, only the intrepid among us are up for outdoor sketching in October.

This year was a bit different and our weather on Saturday was really pretty nice… for us.  You can see that we’re not wearing shorts and t-shirts,

but Robert and Celine are merrily sketching a large building that sits high on a cliff above the Farmer’s Market, the site of our sketchcrawl.  Celine even manages to sketch while wearing these,

which is something I’ve never managed to do.  We made up for a lack of temperature with an abundance of laughter, talking, and sketching.  It was a great day and by my count, we had 14-15 people in attendance.  I remember, during the planning of our first sketchcrawl (June 2012), we wondered whether anyone would show up at all.  We’ve come a long way.

I did get to do some sketching and had great fun doing it but the most fun was talking with several of the newcomers to our ranks who were interested in my use of watercolor pencils (Faber-Castell Albrecht-Durer) and wondered what sketchbooks I used (Stillman & Birn).  We chatted about sketching in general, about having sketchcrawls more regularly, where to sketch during the Quebec winter, and a lot of other things.  This was a sharp contrast to my more typical loner stalking of sketching subjects in Quebec City.

Gilles Charron was one of the guys at his first sketchcrawl.  He’s been a watercolorist for a while and lamented that he should have been drawing more.  He made up for lost time, though, doing these two sketches during the event.  Aren’t they great?

 

 

 

 

Yvan Breton and Celine Poulin organized the event and a big thank you is launched in their direction.  I don’t have a photo of Yvan at this event but his art speaks volumes about his talent.  I do have a photo of both Celine and her artistic talent.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I think I’ll skip posting my own sketches from the day as this post is filling up fast.  Maybe I’ll post them tomorrow.  For now, I leave you with a look at the art and faces of some of my friends

and some of the sketches they did during our sketchcrawl.  Thanks to all the participants; you made the day very special.

Art Deco Period Houses in Quebec City

One of the things I love about Quebec City is that there is an obvious location of the founding period of the city.  Our “old city” is a UNESCO Heritage site, as it is the oldest walled city in North America, officially founded in 1608.  The history is rich and evident.

And as Quebec City grew, people moved beyond the walls and the city spread outward as lava flows from a volcano.  This outward movement was limited by the St. Lawrence River to western and northwestern expansion.  The result of this slow expansion is a “map” of how architectural trends changed over the years from 1600 to the present and, as a sketcher, it can be examined much as an archeologist examines layers of rock.

I’ve spent most of my time sketching inside the old city, as the architecture there is both early and a combination of French and British influences.  But, if one wanders away from the walls of old Quebec by just a few kilometers, one hits the motherlode of Art Deco architecture.  Bay windows and corner towers give way to rounded walls, flat roofs, and frosted glass decorations – a completely different world from the French architecture of our Chateau Frontenac, the architectural symbol of Quebec City.

Here’s my first art deco house sketch but it won’t be my last.  I love the cobblestone-like rounded wall and the door.  I’m looking forward to mining the art deco layer of our architectural history.  Sketching in Quebec City is exciting and fun.

Stillman & Birn Alpha (9×6 landscape) sketchbook, Pilot Prera, Platinum Carbon Black ink

Quebec City Street Scenes

Quebec City, particularly the older parts of the city, has many street scenes that are worthy of a sketcher’s time.  Often the streets are narrow and the buildings are connected to one another.

These form great urban scenes and the only thing that limits a sketcher is time and the place to sit while doing the sketch.  Time, scene and place to sit came together and I sketched this autumn scene.

Stillman & Birn Zeta (6×9); Pilot Prera w/Platinum Carbon Black ink

A Simple Act Of Kindness

Here in North America our society is becoming more and more coarse.  The rhetoric of our politicians has become downright rude, we all walk around with headphones one, barely acknowledging one and other and, frankly, too many of us are too afraid of too many things.  So it’s hard to continue to believe an axiom that makes life bearable – that people are good.

But then something happens and things snap back into perspective.  That happened to me when I went to my mailbox and pulled this from the box.

It was addressed to me with a flair that one rarely sees.  It came from Singapore.  Singapore???  Who did I know in Singapore?  I immediately thought of the Urban Sketchers of Singapore but I’ve never met any of them.  Who could be sending me something?

And so I opened it in the hopes of gaining some insights.  Indeed, the contents were sketcher-oriented.  There was a nice toned-paper sketchbook, a leatherette cover for that sketchbook, two Uniball Signo UM-120 pens, and a couple refills for those pens.  WOW!  The motherlode.  Being old I don’t think as quickly as I once did and I was still baffled about who might have sent these items.  And then I found the little card, from Patrick Ng.

Patrick is a great guy, who went out of his way to obtain a couple Hero pens for me that I couldn’t have purchased without his help.  And we ‘chat’ on Facebook, where we are ‘friends.’  He had been shopping for materials and remembered me, remembered discussions we’d had about the toned-paper sketchbooks made by a friend of his, and he bought me one, and a cover for it so I could fill the sketchbook, get another one and replace it, reusing the cover.  He’d sent a couple of the pens he uses regularly because he knew that Uniball don’t import them to the US.  People are still good, and Patrick is one of the best.

The first thing I did was to test  bunch of pens on the paper, which must be 200lb tan-color paper.  It’s not heavily sized but it does take watercolors quick nicely.  You notice the lack of sizing when you try to do larger washes.  But being able to use the paper as a mid-tone and working on both sides towards dark (pen) and lights (colored pencil) is lots of fun.

The first full sketch I did was this one, done in Parc Brebeuf, a park not far from my house.  The ring-billed gulls like to sit on lamp posts and this one sat around while I drew him…or her.

I decided that since Patrick had been so nice to send me a sketchbook, the least I could do was walk a mile in his shoes, in a sketching sense.  He does a lot of sketches inside restaurants and coffee shops.  Sometimes he does them on toned-brown paper, sometimes not.  They are always wonderful sketches.

So, I took one of my Hero 578 ‘asian calligraphy’ pens (tip is bent upward), my new sketchbook, and headed to a mall.  It was morning and not very busy, which suited me fine.

I actually sketched this while standing up, just outside the restaurant, resting the sketchbook on the wall in the foreground of the sketch.   Me, standing, looking in at the restraurant was likely to be disconcerting so after I’d done a bit of the sketch I walked to the three women featured in it and showed them what I was doing.

Normally I would not do such a thing as typically this causes people to start posing.  But in this case, it was necessary.  The sketch was lots of fun and very much in honor of Patrick Ng.  Thanks, Patrick.  You really made my day, week, month.

Fall Is Here; Just Say No To Snow!

Fall officially came to Quebec a couple weeks ago.  Many of the trees, and certainly Mr Weathermaker, didn’t get the memo.  We’ve had very warm temperatures for a last couple weeks and the trees are very confused as daylength tells them to drop their leaves but the temps are saying “not yet.”

But, slowly and as surely as politicians will screw things up, winter is approaching.  For me, a street sketcher, it’s a time of transition.  It’s a time when I start figuring out what/where I’m going to sketch once it gets too cold outside to do what I love – sketch on the streets.

To that end I’m thinking about museums, have convinced myself that I should try, again, to sketch from photos, and that I should use Google Maps “pegman” to sketch in exotic places while snow blankets my world.  We’ll see.

toned paper; Pilot Prera and Prismacolor white pencil

In the meantime I’ve been doing some sketching.  I received a handmade tan-paper sketchbook from my buddy Pat Ng in Singapore and did this sketch to sort of break it in.  The gulls love to sit on the lamp posts around here so I had plenty of source material for this sketch.

This sketch was done in celebration of the show the trees put on for us every year.  Fairly simple, I combined a Uniball UM-120 black pen (.5) with a Uniball UM-151 brown-black (.38) pen and did it in a Stillman & Birn Alpha (4×6) sketchbook.  The fence lets me call it an ‘urban sketch’

I spent Monday night looking at a bunch of sketches done by Liz Steel, a very talented architect/sketcher.  She talks about how she works very quickly and why.  The next day I was walking down a street and saw this little house.  I decided to try out Liz’s philosophy/approach and while I didn’t produce anything near the quality of her sketches, once I buried the ‘ooooo…that’s not right’ and ‘oops…left that out’ I found the results interesting and I’ll probably do some more like this.  Took less than 10 minutes, including the time to get out my watercolor kit and waterbrush.  It was done in my ‘el cheapo’ 3×5 notebook and my Uniball UM-120 (.5) pen.

Sketching, no matter how it’s done, is fun and after two years of doing it, I can’t imagine a day without it in my life.

 

Another Trip To Ile D’Orleans – Pt 2

I left you, in part one of this saga, with me very relaxed in a small park, having just sketched a lamp post.  It was a very nice day and only 10AM, so I got in the car and drove to the other end of St. Jean, which is a really small town so it only took a couple minutes.  I returned to the place where I’d sketched this during a previous visit to the island (Ile d’Orleans).

This time of year our maple trees put on a show for the tourists and we become overrun by cruise ships that come in from the Atlantic just to see this spectacle, so I decided to do another sketch of this area that featured the blazing colors of our forests.  While this sketch was done from the pier, I moved much closer for the new one, concentrating on just a couple of the homes so that the trees could dominate.  I did this new sketch in my Stillman & Birn Zeta (5×8) using a Pilot Prera filled with Platinum Carbon Black ink.

Click to enlarge

I’m a slow sketcher and something this size takes me a while – a while sitting on a little tripod stool on rocks, in the sun.  You get the picture.  I was pretty tired when I finished so I started driving down the southern coast of the island, looking for a nice place to eat a lunch and just relax.

Along the way I was doing what sketchers do; I was taking ‘inventory’ of potential things and places to sketch along the way.  I’ve got to spend more time on the island as there’s a lot to sketch there.  As I was driving I noticed a sign that said “Parc Maritime” and way down below the road I could see what looked like a couple boats and a parking lot.  It seemed as good a place as any to eat lunch so I turned around, found the entrance, and drove down to Parc Maritime.

A half hour tour later I had learned that the town of St. Laurent revolved around this facility in the early 20th Century and that it had been a major hub for the construction, repair, and storage of the cargo vessels that ran around the St. Lawrence, mostly moving wood products.  It had been an enormous facility employing everyone in St. Laurent and a lot of people who came from surrounding towns during the summers.  This is a great place to visit, an amazing place to sketch.  I was told that I could return to sketch anything I wanted as long as I paid the entry fee (grin).

I was pretty tired and hungry, though, so I wandered the forest, looking at remnants of the lisses, which were row after row of large railroad track-like thingies they used to slide large ships out of the water and then move them laterally along the shore for storage.  This is a really nice place, hidden from view for the most part by the fact that it’s now tree covered and well below the main road.

When I finished lunch it was getting late but I decided I had to sketch something so I chose a small chaloupe, a heavy-duty rowboat.  There is a shop on the premises where they built them and I’ve got to get back to sketch all the cool benches, tools, and a water-powered bandsaw contained within.  But today I limited myself to one of the boats.  This one was done in my small Moleskine watercolor (3×5).  Hope you like it.

It will soon be too cold to visit the island.  These days, on the weekends, there are just too many people as it’s apple-picking time and people who want to do this form kilometer-long lines of cars, all waiting to drive over the bridge and onto the island.  This is not for me but maybe, during the week….   We’ll see.

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