Dream Homes

 

After watching a lot of Grand Designs, a CBC streaming show that tells the story of fussy rich people building customized mansions, I got inspired to design some unique homes. This house comes complete with suspended patio, path to nowhere, and a brick pillar. To capture the night time atmosphere, I adapted the colour scheme according to Handprint.com (MacEvoy) who described the hue and chroma shift that occurs in scoptic (dark) light conditions. There were a few easy to remember conclusions: white becomes a shimmering blue, yellow becomes mustardy-ochre, red and orange turn dark maroon, and blue becomes similar to green.

Dream House 1, 5 x 7" cold press, watercolour, May 2021 (No. 2669b)

 

If manicured lawns and stately architecture is your taste, then we have dream house #2 for you to look at. Complete with manicured lawn, interlocking brick, a guest house, and a duck pond. Paradise in the city!

Dream House 2, 5 x 7" cold press, watercolour, May 2021 (No. 2668)

 

Before you make your final decision, let us look at another option, a water front property that is literally on the water front. Taking cantilever design to an extreme, this bungalow has excellent views of the sunset, and you can catch fish from your living room window. Moving in might be a little difficult, same with entering or leaving, but hey, style over substance.

Dream House 3, 5 x 7" cold press, watercolour, May 2021 (No.2667b)

Somerled Oaks

 

There happens to be a good place to sit near the community garden boxes with a view of a couple of oak trees growing next to an apartment building on Somerled. The trees are shown on the left side of the painting, they are a tall narrow type of oak tree you see throughout Montreal. One of the people who waters the community garden boxes was curious to know if I paint portraits of cats, but I said not in a while. As a commercial artist  one has to paint commissions, and the customer may have some personalized ideas not always to the artist's liking. Even Rembrandt made commissions his whole life. I tried it for awhile, but those types of projects are very technical, it boils down to illustration.

Somerled Oaks v2, 5 x 7" cold press, watercolour, May 2021 (No.2668)

 

This was the first try I did yesterday. Painting windows like this is kind of terrifying, which is why I passed on this scene so many times. When the frames are white against a darker background they have to painted in negative space. Getting it to look architecturally accurate is difficult because any line or angle that is off will be noticeable. In the v2 above, I lightened the brick, fixed some of the window shapes, and featured the oak trees more prominently.

Somerled Oaks v1, 5 x 7" cold press, watercolour, May 2021 (No. 2669b)

 

 

Fire Station Sundown, and palette tweaks

When the sun goes down everything becomes dim and takes on a progressively orange glow. At the beginning of doing this painting the face of the fire station was a pale yellow, about 10 minutes later it was this glowing tangerine. TO get the tangerine glow, isoindolone yellow (PY110) was applied in a thin wash over the yellow ochre base, which was done more as an adjustment to the light conditions. The shadow side was yellow ochre (PY43) and umber (PBr7) with a touch of perylene green PBk7) to get that rich shadow yellow. Other than the sky, there was no blue used in the painting, all yellow, orange green and some rust. The sun light playing off the yellow brick resulted in a toasty, radiant glow.
 

Fire Station Sundown, NDG, 5 x 7" cold press, watercolour, May 2021 (No. 2667a)

 

With each painting I learn more and make adjustments to the palette setup. This version has caput motum (PR101) a very useful dark dusty red earth, and perylene maroon (PR179) a high chroma earthy red located just to the left of indo blue (PB60). My old favorite phthalo blue-green (PG7) is back. The whole top row is meant for 'mixing' between each other to create browns, shadows, greens and darks. The bottom row has 6 high chroma paints for highlight colours, and off to the side, carbon black used for darks like in the tree shadows or window shadows.

The End of Curfew is Near

 

This Friday Montreal is lifting the curfew and a few other changes due to the improving situation with COVID and widespread vaccinations. As you know from the blog, there is an auto shop nearby, which I painted at night once before. Police cruisers are always parked there, maybe because they break down a lot, or just don't have anywhere else to park since they removed the station from our neighborhood. Without breaking the curfew, I made this painting sitting outdoors, it was extremely quiet with not a soul to be seen. Painting at night is a challenge, for one thing there are insects crawling all over, and of course you can't really see what the painting looks like, or your palette. I used the Van Gogh palette, it has heavily pigmented paint that really gets onto the paper easily, and I had memorized the position of the colours since they all look gray or black at night. Inside, I outlined the painting in grey (PBk11 diluted) to make the cop car and other highlights the lightest value of the painting, and I adjusted the contrast settings to make it look dim as when I painted it. One funny thing, the fence just above the car looked to be a perfect grey outside, but it was actually a kind of turquoise, and I could not see the green of the tree, but I could see most of the other colours, just not how much chroma they had. The sky is navy blue (PB60) with pylon orange (PO71), a mix I discovered in an earlier night painting of a Pizza store down the street.

Police Cruiser at Auto Shop, 5 x 7" cold press, watercolour, May 2021 (No. 2666a)

 

Last blog for the day: Four Abstracts

Last blog for the day! I catalogued the last month or so of paintings, that is where I name and number them and update the OpenOffice excel sheet. There are about 230 paintings so far this year which is outpacing even last year's output. The goal is not to make a mountain of paintings, but seriously, I am exploring all the new paints and ideas in every way, and doing a ton of location paintings too. In this one, I used a range of earth colours to produce the glowing gold lights, and in the background, every shade of green I know how to make. It was landscape format (horizontal) but I liked it better vertical format. Would be a good one to make a larger version.

Chromatic Idea, 5 x 7" cold press, watercolour, May 2021 (No. 2635b)

 

Naming paintings is always fun. I rebranded my Instagram today as "Gum Drop Tornado" which is the name of an old abstract. Heart beet seemed original at the time, a beet that sort of looks like a heart, but the phrase is already much used on the internet to describe a cooking method. You slice the beet, shape the slices like a heart, then cook them... heart beets. Now, if someone was living inside of a house that was in the shape of a heart beet, then you would have it "in a heart beat". Got to up the meme game.

Heart Beet, 5 x 7" cold press, watercolour, May 2021 (No. 2638b)

 

An incredible news story came out the other day, America was warning its people not to kiss chickens for fear of picking up salmonella poisoning. The real surprise was that American people actually kiss chickens. This painting shows some red white and blue things sucking water from a pond, with a pair of kissing chickens in the background.

Kissing Chickens, 5 x 7" cold press, watercolour, May 2021 (No. 2644b)

Inspired by the world inspired Bulgaria painting, this shows an underground cavern with iron oxide violet (PR101 caput mortum) structures, and a glowing turquoise cavern lake. I like the light bright effect here, if I were to redo Bulgaria, the cave portion on the bottom would look more like this. Actually, when I started the Bulgaria painting it was an abstract, and then started to look like a cave so I went with it. Maybe this one needs a few cave paintings on it, like in the Botswana painting.

Iron Violet Cave, 5 x 7" cold press, watercolour, May 2021 (No. 2645b)

 

Thoughts on Social Media (with Brazil Study)

Social media is all about sharing thoughts, ideas and images with the outside world. Making art is all about the same things, in some ways art was the original social media along with the printing press. Recently I posted the painting of Brazil, here on the blog and on Facebook. The Brazilians on Facebook seemed to like it, and one commented that the colours really capture the feel of the North. I get comments all the time, but this one was cool because this series is an attempt to capture the look and feel of a landscape using books and the internet. With Instagram now, people see me painting on the street and I can direct them to my account if they want to follow. If you read my blog there is no need to have the social media. After completing a painting or two I scan, crop, adjust contrast (the scanner makes everything a little cyan and low contrast), upload, write, and publish. I figured out now how to post to Instagram and have it auto post to Facebook. 

The painting above is also a form of socializing, you see the local people on the beach, in a paddle boat trying to sell things to the people on the ferry, and the ubiquitous ferry that carries people along the Amazon river to and from cities like Manaus. This is a small study I did before making the big version in the link above. The water was a little too 'orange pekoe', and the scaling of the beach and boats had to be adjusted. In the final version the river has the vastness and glow of the landscape.

World Inspired Landscapes: Brazil with Ferry Study, 4 x 6 1/4" cold press, watercolour, May 2021 (No.  2629b)

Walk down Fielding Avenue

Fielding Avenue runs through the middle of NDG connecting the west to the east, it is mostly apartments, with a stretch of small shops starting at Walkley. This is a pizza shop on the corner, a bright red car was parked there for most of the time but it drove off towards the end. To get the red colour I used pyrrole red (PR254), it is literally the same pigment that was probably used to paint the car, you see how bright it appears. The bricks were mostly yellow ochre (PY43) with some other shades. Today I brought a small ruler with me and used it to get the lines straight, although it worked out okay it was difficult to use a ruler and paintbrush while standing up. I think it worked okay though. 

88 Pizza,  5 x 7" cold press, watercolour, May 2021 (No. 2650)

 

On the north side of fielding were some interesting shops backlit by the sun. A cyclist zoomed by, and a person came out of the shop as I did the painting. If I can catch it early enough in the painting during the outline phase then I can get the moving objects into the design. The ruler helped get all the lines straight and to map out some of the angles. Making the dark brown and greys for the buildings in shadow required indothrene blue (PB60) and various earth paints like burnt sienna (PR101/PBr7).

Fruit Rocky Montana, 5 x 7" cold press, watercolour, May 2021 (No. 2652)

 

As the sun was going down, the shadows got long and the atmosphere took on an orange-yellow tint. I liked the way the window was reflecting the light and the trees, and how the shadows cast across the side of the building. The other reason for trying this painting was to test out the ruler idea, it helped to make true the roof lines, corner of building, and some of the windows. The one window on the side I did not use the ruler ended up looking crooked. My goal is to keep the paintings loose, so I may use the ruler sparingly just to get the key components lined up. I will have to walk down fielding again when the sun is still pointing north, probably before 1 pm.

Marché Oasis 5 x 7" cold press, watercolour, May 2021 (No. 2651)