Place Guillaume-Couture, NDG

Now, this is the end of Terrebonne street, if you walk all the way down and get to a small park called Place Guillaume-Couture you know you have arrived. The park has a lot of trees including some rare urban birch trees like the one seen in the painting. On my left, unseen, was a large apartment building casting a shadow across the road and creeping up onto the grass. It was very windy when I did this one late last week, in fact, on my left unseen, was a literal wind tunnel of freezing cold wind. To keep the paper from blowing away I used a wide elastic, which left a blank spot in the painting that I covered up later on at home with the beige tree you see on the far left.

Since I removed alizarin crimson from my palette, a deep crimson red, I have had trouble creating rich shadow tones for brick buildings. I studied complementary colours at Handprint.com, and then inspected my Schmincke brochure, which has a colour mapping of all pigments, and then did some testing. To make a long story short, I could create amazing brick shadows using perylene maroon (PR179), indo blue (PB60), and potter's pink (PR233). That mix was used in this painting on the left building and right building in shadows. The shaded side of the white brick building in the middle was completely different, is was a mix of helio green (PG36) and magenta (PR122), with a touch of vanadium yellow (PY184). Who knew the paint colours could have such cool names?

5 x7" rough press, watercolour, April 2020