The Québec City conference center was a non de-scrip box of glass surrounded by a highway and a sitting area with flower installations. The City really does love its flowers! I made this one on a lunch break, you can see the conference center in the background, and the colourful display of flowers and flowering shrubs in the foreground. Painting a scene without a sky is actually a bit challenging, so I made sure to reflect some blue in the background glass panels and keep the flower display high chroma so you know it was a bright sunny day.
Flowers outside of Conference Center, watercolour 5 x 7" cold press, August 2023 (No. 3526a)
On another lunch break I walked over to the park area surrounding the old fortification wall and got a view of the conference center nestled between the hotels and buildings. Everywhere you looked there were plenty of these landscape installations, but little actual nature to behold. As a landscape painter in the city I look for elements of nature, but in this case the fake nature was decent enough.
Conference Center City View, watercolour 5 x 7" cold press, August 2023
Before I did the larger sized painting of the garden flowers, I made a smaller study. This was from the opposite angle and I put more detail into the statue which is partially shown. I didn't feature the statue, just suggested it, otherwise it would end up looking like a tourist photo. To make the grass appear to be highly illuminated by he sun, I surrounded the lawn with darker elements and made the shadows in the foreground extra dark and purple. You may think the grass is green, but it is chartreuse. In fact, I varied the lawn with two shades of chartreuse, a yellow, and a green tint.
Flower Garden Study, watercolour 5 x 7" cold press, August 2023
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