Tuesday, July 8, 2025

Greek Restaurant Nikas

 

The alley from Maisonneuve street popped out onto Sherbrooke street in front of a Greek Restaurant called Nikas. I have been there a few times with friends and family years ago, they make an authentic Greek salad (Tomato and olive oil) with a selection of kebabs served with rice, potato and tzatziki sauce. When paining these lower-level corner stores, I start with the upper edge of the top floor, then sketch out the shape of the sidewalk. In this case the store was on a corner, so there was a two-point perspective on the horizontal lines. The restaurant facade was a complicated jumble of roofs, signs and windows, I could not even tell where the entrance was! The west-facing part of the sign and roof was badly faded which I tried to depict by mixing the blues with raw sienna. I put raw sienna back on my palette after reading my own blog from PEI last summer I remembered about how good it is. 

There are many kinds of raw sienna on the market, the good one will have a warm toffee/caramel colour and lower chroma (slightly greyish), with perhaps a grainy texture to it. Most all of them have the pigment code PBr7, although the names will vary widely. I bought about ten tubes of yellow ochre (PY43/PY42) and raw siennas and tried them all, but only two of them suited me. The raw sienna from Daniel Smith, and the yellow ochre from Da Vinci. Recently I got yellow ochre from Shin Han (PY42) and it was identical to the Da Vinci one. If you want to just test out a lot of paints, some companies like Daniel Smith provide a testing card... it costs a little but has small samples of most all their paints. Jane Blundell's website also has a good resource, she seems to own every paint there is and made test swatches. 

Greek Restaurant Nikas, watercolour 6 x 7.5" cold press, July 2025

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