World Inspired Landscapes: Brazil

 The amazon river is lined with white sandy beaches, small villages along and the occasional big city like Manaus. When the ferries go by the locals watch with interest, and some intrepid entrepreneurs paddle their dugout canoes to intercept the ferry and climb on board to sell goods. It seemed dangerous indeed. In the last Brazil post I mentioned a video where we saw this whole documentary on the people who live near the river and their culture. 

The foliage was created with benzi orange (PO36) and phthalo green (PG36) which give some intense olive greens, and perylene green was used for the shadows (PBk31). With my new earth palette, I was able to easily include goethite (PY43) for the amazon river water with streaks of cobalt blue (PB28). French yellow ochre (also PY43) with some Italian deep ochre (also PY43) was perfect for the sandy beach. Burnt umber (PBR7) provided the tree trunks and stilts upon which the colourful houses are built to protect them from frequent floods. 

I was committed to getting the Brazil chapter just right, and I hope this one fits the concept. Most of the world inspired landscapes have avoided traces of humanity, but in this case I felt the people who live and travel along the amazon tell an important story. The scene is also striking, we get to appreciate how vast this river is and the wonderful earthy colours of its abundant water and beaches.

One last comment on the design, which I worked out in my sketch book, the composition uses one of the old tricks the Japanese print makers such as Hiroshige and Hokusai developed in the 19^th century. They added strong elements like trees and roofs in order to provide a sense of depth, along with triangular shapes at the foreground to liven up the composition.  

World Inspired Landscapes: Brazil Amazon with Ferry, 9.5 x 11" cold press, watercolour, May 2021 (No. 2663)

Paints Galore

After some thoughts on paint mixing, I decided to simplify my location palette by reducing the number of paints and by using a physically smaller palette (Holbein 1024-1500). In the sketch above, there are 18 paints. They are organized across the top into 4 browns, 3 blues, and 4 paints for mixing greens. The empty well on the top in between the blues is for mixing up the sky colour. Across the bottom are warms, magenta and carbon black. After doing a few painting on location, this setup is definitely optimal because it is easy to hold with one hand, and the mixing strategies are rather straightforward. Grey, green, brown, blue and some orange. Pretty much describes Montreal!

But wait, there is more! A paint buying binge resulted in over 20 earth paints, including 15 in tube format. I love these paints so I set up an 'earth max' palette with 24 slots (Holbein 1024-3000). The earth paints are across the top, ordered roughly by their hue from yellowish to red-black. The 16^th slot is empty since I am missing iron oxide violet, otherwise known as caput mortuum which I will inevitably get in the collection one day. On the bottom row are 8 bright, lightfast synthetics to provide accent colours. This palette should make for some fun abstract paintings.   

If you act now and buy 2, you get a third one for free! I've had this physical palette for years, it was a catch-all for miscellaneous paints. Now its been organized with 28 of the colours clockwise from yellow, red, magenta, black, blue and greens. Tucked away in the bottom left is burnt sienna, just to provide some grit. Every paint has a personality, and it takes time and experience to get to know it. I call it 'the everything palette'.

A matter of perspective

Today was supposed to be very hot but it seemed cool and breezy, maybe due to overcast conditions. When the sun popped out it did indeed get toasty out there. I stopped at Beesborough street, an unremarkable suburban street in NDG, that happens to have a good place to stand and paint just beside the Dormez-Vous which you see as the building on the left. The trees were an interesting variety of yellow-greens and chartreuse. 

Perspective is tricky in landscape painting, the scale of things and the shape of linear objects is all affected by distance. The simplest and most widely taught approach is to use a vanishing point, and make all objects scaled or aligned with lines that emanate from the vanishing point. In the painting you can imagine the lines of the road, sidewalk and building converging on a point somewhere in the middle of the scene. The problem with linear perspective is that it only seems to accounts for objects at a certain distance from the viewer. It never seems to work accurately when objects are very close, or very far from your eyes. 

To test perspective, I set up a ruler at a fixed distance from my eye, and then moved an object away from me 1 meter at a time. Then I measured how big the object appeared to be the farther away it got. You can do a simpler version of this by holding your two hands near your face, and moving one hand away until it is about half the size of the other hand. You have to move your hand about 40cm away to have it appear to be half the size of your other hand. Now, try to move your other hand so it is half the size of the hand you moved. It seems like a real stretch now. In fact, in my object test the object had to be about 2.5 meters away to appear one quarter of its original size. 

However I look at it, perspective is not linear, objects that are close to the viewer will loose a lot more of their apparent size than objects that are situated further away. Depth perception is very complex, and I could not find an adequate equation to explain the phenomenon. Perhaps a deceleration curve or inverse log curve. 

What is this to an artist? Sharp angles such as the one you see in the painting above are very hard to get right. I believe the roof line of the building should have been shown as logarithmic, not linear! I was doing a painting of the Lachine Canal a few years ago, in that painting, as I sat quietly, almost meditating, I saw the curvature of the canal wall that I was sitting on. You see in the link, I tried to emulate it by making the straight lines curved. Your brain's visual system is telling you its straight. Anyways, it will take some trigonometry, calculus, and focal point knowledge to figure this one out.   
 

Av. Beesborough View 5 x 7" cold press, watercolour, May 2021 (No. 2644a)

Silver Dandelions, Trenholme Park

Not far from home, this park used to be called Victoria park I believe, but was renamed Trenholme Park at some point. The dandelions were starting to go to seed, creating a silvery wisp across the field of green grass. The sky was overcast, but still had clouds floating about, which created an interesting silver-on-silver appearance that mirrored the dandelions. I did the trees in a about three layers, working from light to dark, and finishing with some yellow washes, and the bark and branches. After some refinement I have my palette down to a simpler format. Basically I have set up areas for browns, greens, blues, warms (yellow-magenta) and black, using 18 paints. That sounds like a lot of paints, but it is about as low of a number I can go without giving up any convenience, and besides the palette literally holds 18 paints so may as well fill it. For all the other paints I own, I set them up on different palettes for studio paintings, I will make a post about it soon. 

By the way, the heat is starting to come on here, going to be 30℃ tomorrow, time to wake up early. I did a little research into the weather this year and discovered that February 13^th was the coldest day of the winter at more than -20℃ below, I made a blog called deep freeze that day after doing some paintings. If I can do a painting tomorrow that means I will have painted in a 50℃ window (from -20 to +30) in just a little over a 3 months span of time. I will try not to melt, or thaw, or whatever happens in that situation. 

Silver Dandelions NDG, 5 x 7" cold press, watercolour, May 2021 (No. 2642)

Probe meets Probe

Lately various countries have been landing probes on mars for exploration. But what if some other planet sent a probe at the same time? The painting shows just that moment, when probe meets probe. To create the intense red atmosphere of mars I started with an under-painting of graphite grey to establish the shadows, form and some texture. The sky was done with rose-red (PV19, M. Graham), and the surface was burnt sienna deep (PBr7 Da Vinci) and yellow ochre (PY43 Da Vinci). Other colours were dilute organic paints like benzimidazolones and phthalos. Most modern pigments are derived from coal tar (petro-chemical). I found an old document from the mid 19^th century and they were mentioning 'new' coal tar pigments (e.g. aniline) but the authors were commenting on how unstable they were at the time. Since then, azo chemistry was figured out, and that resulted in a whole slew of new 'coal-tar' pigments all around the colour circle. Ironically, the coal tar pigments are extremely light, bright, and colourful in appearance. Actual black pigments are more commonly made from iron oxides or from carbon made by calcinating (burning) petroleum or bones.  I wonder what kind of paint could be made from the surface of mars? It would be pretty expensive I'd imagine.

Probe meets Probe, 9 x 12" cold press, watercolour, May 2021 (No. 2665b)

Lab Book #23: No More Doodles

What was my new year's resolution? No more doodles? Certainly not, there have been plenty of doodles in the recent lab book. The books are numbered consecutively from when I started doing research in 1997, so that makes 23 books worth of science and some art. Aside from the pandemic, 2020 was rife with protests over social issues such as black lives matter. The painting captures some of the protest idea, it depicts protestors holding signs and a banner, and surrounded by a plethora of doodles. This painting is called a study because I might make a larger more planned out version later this year. It was done on the last of the d'Arches paper that had some issues with it, the colours tend to fade out so I really used strong colours to compensate. On a molecular level, watercolour paper is like a sponge, the pigment will travel into it loosing a bit of intensity along the way. A thin fatty substance called 'sizing' prevents the pigment from going to far into the paper, meaning that it sits nearer the surface and looks brighter as a result.
 

Lab Book #23: No More Doodles Study,  9 x 12" cold press, watercolour, May 2021 (No. 2665a)

Colour Puzzles

 

Wouldn't these make great puzzles? They are already like puzzles, with each piece somehow aligned with the next. The two swans represent a unity of colours such as the graphite grey and red, or the magenta and blue. For a more literal example of the style check out Addictive Puzzle.

Hue Relationship, 8 x 10" cold press (Winsor and Newton), watercolour, May 2021 (No. 2660b)

 

Earth colours are rusty, earthy, and much like shades of tea or coffee. They also provide a great backdrop for brighter colour. This scene was meant to represent an underground cavern with water, and various forms of like snaking through the crevasses.  

Between Earth, 8 x 10" cold press (D'Arches), watercolour, May 2021 (No. 2661b)

Finally, this painting started to become the inside of a brain on a microscopic level, with connecting axons and astrocytes. In between the brain tissue are little pops of colourful objects that are dreams. Everything we think and dream exists on the grey and red stuff called brain!

Colour Dreaming, 8 x 10" cold press (D'Arches), watercolour, May 2021 (No. 2662b)