Montreal built a walking path between the escarpment and the train tracks, its about 1.5 km long beginning in NDG and ending down near the Glen hospital. In winter its blocked off but people still go there to stretch their legs or walk their dogs. This view is looking east, it shows a bit of the walking path and the train on the right side which actually went past as I was painting. In reality the scene was much wider but I compressed it to fit on a 5 x 7 inch format. In my paint bag I carried a 8 x 10" paper but today it was a little too cold to manage that size and with the snow coming down I knew the painting had to be done fast. The sky was added first using thin glazes of blue (PB15) and red-orange (PO73), and a touch of yellow (PY43). Getting the colour and value of the escarpment trees was the main challenge, it had to be blue-grey at a distance, and a beige-grey closer to the foreground. The bottom half of the painting was all done drybrush (the paper was dry, the paint was wet) in order to maintain the details. With 250 grams of salt per liter of water, the paint takes a long time to dry and I carry the painting home in a small drying rack in my attache bag.
Train Winter Blast, watercolour 5 x 7" cold press, January 2024
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