A photo I took from our balcony awhile back.
Tonight I played around with it using the photoshop program.
Is it art?





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Another photo - just a simple crop, this one.
I like the bit of red showing in the blue-grey grid.
It almost looks like a painting.
So why do I spend the time to painstakingly layer oil glazes on canvas, carefully building the colour until it's just right...?

Hey, it's actually beginning to look like I'm doing something here!
I've been getting a little impatient because my work on these 25 little canvasses has not seemed very interesting so far. The glazing process always seems to come off with a slow start - the first 2 or 3 layers don't do much for me; it's when the translucent colours begin to interact, when they begin to peek through in each added layer & the richness of the building colours begins to show, that's when I start to get really into it.




Not all of these are beginning to excite me yet; some are still in the early colour stages.



These 2 began with a cool red, then palest blue, then a bit of warm red & now finally violet. The pale blue doesn't really show well in this photo, but it's there. I may delineate some of the raised line texture with another blue - I'm thinking a slightly different blue would offset the under-blue. Then maybe a really intense, darker violet -carefully- to add a little contrast. Possibly a final touch of vermillion?

But then again, perhaps I'll radically change these two to make them all yellow & blue-greens in the end...

These are the life drawings I did on Tuesday evening - time lag due to manual camera film processing wait.
These drawings are not as well done as the previous Tuesday's works, it seems. No offence guys, but men are always more difficult to draw!







The first preliminary sketches - 2 minute poses.
Model's name is Michele.














Detail of above.
Sketched with a pencil.
F grade - really hard pencil, so felt a bit like a pen.
Worked ok.










More portraits - 15 minute poses.
Found his body hard to draw -
not many angles.

I think I got more in the little 2-minute portrait than in these longer ones...







Charcoal wash: a broken bit of charcoal in a small dish, add water & scrootch an old brush on the wet charcoal, or dip in the water, depending on desired strength.
The no-mess charcoal method.

Still can't draw hands very well...

The film I've been using in that old manual camera has finally been processed, so today I have loads of photos. How nice.

I'm making 2 posts for June 10 because tomorrow - well, in about 2 hours - JP & I will be heading out to Vancouver in the trusty old jeep. If we leave at 3am we should arrive around 5pm.
14 hour drive - whew! But lovely to start driving in the pre-dawn & watch the sun rise just as we come into the high mountains... & after that I will probably fall asleep for the rest of the journey, since I am not sleeping now.

I have packed drawing materials only - no painting stuff. Sometimes a break from painting is just the thing to produce new inspiration. Also oil paints are a bit messy for travelling with.



I'll leave off with this progression of my process for the time being:

1st layer: green acrylic.


6th layer: violet oil, thin glaze mix.
This over a myriad of tried colours, none of which worked well. Brush & wipe & brush & wipe & brush - until the surface is a muddy mix of ugliness.

7th layer: yellow ochre oil, thick colour mix.
Hmmm. Wipe away just a little of the yellow on left side of ladder shape so it's not so blocky...



This canvas has been awkward - never really did like the sewn composition & that will complicate things.
What to do with those unbalanced diagonal lines? Ahhhh. Balance with painted lines.

I think I like it now.
Sometimes my paintings go through an adolescent period before they become mature.


(it's difficult to see in this photo, but there's a tiny bit of that original green still visible though the translucent glazes)

I began this drawing while we were driving & realized that drawing - like reading - in a moving vehicle makes me queasy. So I finished it at our friends' place when we arrived last night.



When I realized that I couldn't draw while looking at the paper due to car-sickness, I decided to try some blind drawing. Not looking at the paper was better for my stomache! Well, I did look a bit, just to make sure I was not drawing over & over the same spot on the paper.

I think I may be a better artist with my eyes closed....

There is a mattress somewhere in an alley in Vancouver that looks like this:


It has been wrapped in plastic & tied. It looks like a map...





& here is the portrait of my friend Liz which I did last night with a black China Marker in my sketchbook.


The light was very low & I could barely see the paper, which can actually be helpful when drawing.