I have some older monoprints that I kept from printmaking days that are basically unfinished. I believe I was playing around with various media to see what kinds of effects I could get. What with limited time these days, I’ve pulled them out and added some drawing, and/or a bit of watercolour to see what happens. I keep them on my desk and just sit and draw for a few minutes when I can. Below is one of two monoprints that I think were originally oil based. I added some charcoal drawing, plus a water colour wash here and there, and finally – for some reason – I added a little verse in the sky.
“As a river rushes to the sea, as the sun and moon glide across the mountains in the west, as days and nights, hours and moments flee, life flows away, inexorably” Padmasambhava, 8th century
Another great outing with the Vancouver Urban Sketchers – we went to the Via Rail station near Main Street. Built around 1917 on reclaimed land in False Creek, this building, in addition to being a train station, has also been Greyhound’s Vancouver home since the old bus depot on Dunsmuir Street was torn down. I’ve been travelling on Greyhound since I was 15 so I’m a little sad it’s shutting down its Western Canada operations, although I’m not particularly surprised. My first sketch is the ticket counter, soon to be a memory. I’ve also posted these sketches to the Urban Sketchers site – you can see my fellow sketchers’ work at this link.
We’re in another heat wave in the city but I found a nice shady spot to sit for a couple of hours and sketch. A group of Vancouver Urban Sketchers met at City Hall then spread out around the grounds. Regretfully, I didn’t bring a pad of heavier paper and the scan shows ripples on the page from the washes, but OH WELL. Just means a visit to the art store for more art supplies! Such a chore…
Work continues on the children’s book. Like the previous one, I’m using photoshop to “paint” the pages. I’m still having a problem finalizing the main character though. I’ve done many colour iterations of “Starling” and am still not happy. Here’s one of the characters I’m more satisfied with (a woodpecker) although no doubt there will be more tweaks (in fact, I can see something I want to change right now):
Painting-wise, I’ve finished a little landscape. I bought a bunch of small canvases and decided that if I was going to fit painting in along with the daily grind and progress on the book, I was going to have to paint quickly and fast. I allotted myself an hour or so and managed to paint a landscape that was mostly satisfying. I left it on the wall for a week then took another half hour or so to tweak it. I’ve got 4 more 10″ x 20″ canvases to “play” with and took the leftover paint from this one and slapped it on a new canvas. Interestingly, it looks as if another landscape is emerging. This is quick landscape #1:
“Early Morning in the Valley” Acrylic on canvas, 10×20″
When gift-giving season rolls around, I usually make my own Christmas tags – except for last year when I rooted around all the leftovers from previous years and did a Christmas tag “retrospective” – haha. Can’t say I was in much of a mood this Christmas tag-wise but I tried drawing stuff a few weeks ago and ended up with some crummy sketches of shoes. They sat on my desk for a bit until the Big Day was almost upon me at which point I just put them in my scanner and opened them up in Photoshop to see if anything could be salvaged.
Surprisingly, they turned out OK. You can download a pdf of the tags for next year here. Print out on 8 1/2 x 11 cardstock, take a ruler (metal preferably) and an exacto knife, match up the blue cutting lines at the edges and slice away. Here’s a card design using the final illustrations:
