Life Drawing at Dr. Sketchy Vancouver

Here's a couple sketches I did Sunday night at Dr. Sketchy Vancouver.

For anyone not familiar with Dr. Sketchy, it's life drawing mixed with burlesque dancers, acrobats, or costumed performers. It runs twice a month in Vancouver, and is definitely worth checking out. Artists and non-artists are all welcome!

Watercolor Workshop with Lin Souliere

This past weekend I had the privilege of being able to participate in a 3 day plein air watercolor workshop with Lin Souliere. She's an amazing Canadian artist, and a member of the Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colour, so I knew I was in for a real treat! She also happens to be my mother-in-law, and I've been wanting to participate in one of her workshops for years! :D
 
On the first day we all went for a hike on the Bruce Trail just outside of Lion's Head to find our painting spot. This is one of my favorite trails on the Bruce Peninsula, everywhere you look is absolutely beautiful and inspiring! Having never done plein air painting before, I wasn't quite sure where to start and what to paint. Fortunately Lin did a lesson and talked us through how to approach finding an interesting subject matter without getting completely overwhelmed by our surroundings. Our main focus for the day was to get comfortable and confident while sketching in the forest, and to start introducing watercolor to our sketches.

I mostly did some very small pen/marker/pencil drawings at first, and then started to introduce a bit of watercolor. I also ended up focusing primarily on closeups of plants since I didn't think I'd have time to complete any large landscape sketches/paintings. In the end, the day was a perfect warmup for the next 2 days of the weekend.

A couple of plant sketches.

On the second day we went to Tobermory, and Lin started things off with a watercolor demo. She painted the light house just off of Big Tub Harbour, and made it look quick and effortless! After that, we all set up our equipment and spent the rest of the day painting the gorgeous landscape around us.

Lin doing a demo and making it look easy!

Here are a couple of the paintings I did while in Tobermory:

Paintings of Big Tub Harbor, Tobermory, ON.

And a picture of my painting supplies:

On the third day of the workshop, we all went to Barrow Bay and painted the old general store. I discovered that I'm pretty slow at painting with watercolors, so I didn't get a chance to finish either of the paintings that I started. I'm happy with them as works in progress though! Even though I did take reference photos, I don't think I'll go back to either painting and I'll be leaving them as-is.

The old general store in Barrow Bay, ON.

Close up painting of peeling paint on old door.

For more info on Lin Souliere, check out these links:
http://www.dragonflyridge.ca/the-art-of-lin-souliere.html
http://www.dragonflyridge.ca/workshops.html

For info on the Bruce Trail, look here:
http://brucetrail.org/

Oil Painting Class III

Today I had a good lesson in knowing when to quit your painting before you kill it. Well, actually I kinda failed that lesson today. I should have stopped painting and come back to it on another day instead trying to finish it all off at once. Oh well, lesson learned... well probably not. I'm sure that's a mistake I'll make over and over again. Hopefully less with time and practice. Knowing when to stop can be really hard to figure out sometimes, especially when you're trying to "fix" a piece of artwork. Part of me is still tempted to go back and try to do something to make my painting work a little better, but I think I'd rather just start a new painting now. Besides, I really hated the colour of the tablecloth. With a passion. I think a white table cloth would have been a little nicer than the bright, practically fluorescent cloth that was chosen. But that's just me being picky.

Here's where I left off last week.

And this is with a bit more glazing and some painting.

And this is what it ended up looking like. Oh well, done and time to move on.

Looking back, I like this painting the most back at the glazing stage. I think that if I were doing a painting outside of class and wasn't restricted to a set amount of time, I'd do more work to the underpainting and glazing.

Even though I didn't like the end results of this painting, I sure did have a great time painting. I'm excited to find out what the next still life will look like, and I'm crossing my fingers for a different table cloth! :D

Oil Painting Class II

Today was week 3 of oil painting class, week 2 of actual painting. Last week the lesson was on how to do an underpainting, and this week we started adding some glazes and doing some actual painting. I'm enjoying it far more than I ever imagined, but I keep running out of time. I need to learn to work a little faster. :P

Here's a picture of the underpainting I did last week for my still life

And here it is this week after some glazes and painting.

Oil Painting Class

A little while ago a friend of mine and I had a conversation about how much we'd love to learn how to paint with oils, so we both decided to take a beginners class together. The first class was today, and it was pretty good so far, even though we didn't get to doing any actual painting yet. I'm looking forward to picking up all the materials I'll need sometime this week, and I can't wait to do some painting next class!