"A Little Tacky" Place Jacques Cartier, Montreal

Summer is always a fun time to paint, the sun makes the paint dry fast, and illuminates the scenes with light and colour. This scene is down at Place Jacques Cartier in the old port, old Montreal. It is a touristy area to say the least, the main gathering area being this little stretch of cobblestone road depicted in the painting. Restaurants and colourful awnings line the street, artists and musicians set up shop in the middle. I was drawn to the complementary colour scheme made from the minty green copper roof juxtaposed with the fire-engine red awnings. I almost didn't paint this scene because it was a little tacky, but hey, that's old Montreal.

As the tourists looked on, they must have wondered what I had been smoking, because here was this all-blue version of a landscape. I began the shapes with blue... straight french ultramarine in some cases, in other places a paler grey/blue made from a dab of ultramarine mixed with cerulean (a thick sky blue) and a bit of rose madder. If they had come back in 20 minutes they would have seen the magic of watercolour; once the blue layers were dry I overlayed transparent warm washes... thin browns, reds, and yellow-orange. The combination of the blue wash and the warm wash gives that heavy, warm feeling of the sunlit brick and roof. I had never tried this before to make that emerald green on the central roof (the focal point)... Learn something new every day. I adapted this technique from an article by Steve Hanks, he described a method to paint human skin by layering warm washes on top of cold blue/purple.

7.5 x 11" cold press. July 2012