Catching up

I missed the last US Montreal outing. That's what you get for living at the South Shore and not having a car. So today I sent myself downtown to do as many location sketching as possible before the rain starts again.

It was unusually quiet at Place Jaques Cartier.  I guess, season has not really started yet. A very few tourists, but all the people who's feeding on tourists are out and working. Supply is way higher than demand.

Place Des Armes was filled with Tchaikovsky music and smell of manure. A lot of street performers and a lot of horse carriages, and it was pretty chilly in the shade and pretty hot in the sun.

I have something to say

Only the good colors

I was thinking for a while about reducing my watercolor palette. I was carrying a box with 21 paints and I noticed that I was using no more then a half of them. Moreover, I was constantly mixing up purple and brown, dark green and black. Shari's post about painting with limited palette really spoke to me, but I was meandering around, couldn't really decide which colors to choose?

And than I remembered the thing Jack Black was saying Kate Winslet in that cute movie "The Holiday": "I wrote a melody that sounds like you. I used only the good notes." It is a funny kind of turning of phrase, but I suddenly realized that it actually holds a recipe to my problem. If I want to make pretty paintings, I have to use only pretty colors.

And everything became clear to me. I stripped down my paint box, selected the colors I actually like - chose only 6 this time, and set off.

To make this little sketch I had to march alongside a semi-decolated railway track - no path, only rocks and thorny weeds. You can see one of that converted old industrial building at the Canal at the back and little whitish-blue clapboard houses along the track. There is a crossing where the car and a man passing, and past the curve is canal Lachine.

I am pretty pleased with the results. The painting doesn't look dirty at all - although I discovered that my new pen is running in water. It looks little yellowish after scanning, but believe me it looks better in person. So - only good colors for now on!

IF: FUTURE

"...Any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with". Works pretty good for girls as well, I think.

US weekly theme: People on the Job

Trying to find some working people in the middle of the weekday in downtown Montreal I finally came across a postman in uniform with a huge mailbag full of mail. He was having a smoking break.

This is a thing about Montreal and work: on Wednesday, in the middle of the day - very nice sunny day indeed, I found about two hundred people relaxing at the stairs of Place des Arts, snacking, smoking, sunbathing and looking at three guys who were actually working: putting a new billboard up on the wall.

A group of red Cross volunteers was having a meeting in the park. Look at this guy with a huge beehive of dreads on his head! Suddenly a passing crazy man starts yelling at them. He was cursing and swearing, really nasty and loud. In a moment it was clear that all this flood of foul language was addressed to Canadian military. Why he was dealing it onto poor Red Cross guys - that is between him and all that people in his head.

And this is one of many street vendors setting up her jewelry stand.

Illustration Friday: FAREWELL

Wow, it was long since I did something for IF. It occurred to me that school is very soon be out for summer :)

Hand-made sketchbooks

So I finally came to that point in my life: I am making my own sketchbooks. I realised that I am only as good as my tools. I cannot pick up any sketchbook and any pen and draw something nice. I am a slave to certain types of paper and if I don't have it - I am useless. And if I have it, but it's wrong size - it's as good as nothing. Or if it's the right paper, the right size, but a pen stumbles on it - it's like I am missing the best half of my brain. Thus, I am learning a beautiful art of bookbinding.

In the last few days I managed to produce three rugged little books with different paper inside. All paper was cut to smaller size, folded and sewn together into two or three signatures per book. Apparently, it's called "Smyth sewn", people. I am learning. The result is not pretty, a little crooked, but perfectly functional. And cheap. Much, much cheaper, than the real sketchbooks. Which, by the way, solves another problem: sometimes I get so intimidated by a fancy sketchbook, I screw up just because I am that terrified to botch a beautiful off-white page spread. Not with these babies! They are hideous! they do open flat, but some of them don't really close...

I was thinking how to make the covers of my books at least a little bit prettier (they are just a very heavy cardboard), and finally came to a very neat decision if I may say so. There are a few helpful rules or tips for sketching that I'd like to remember while I am drawing and I never do. So what I did: I wrote them right on the front covers of my hand-made sketchbooks. Here! Now I always have my ten or so commandments   at hand.

What are the results of all my efforts? I think they are pretty damn good! I tried working with watercolors on a nice smooth vellum kind of paper and it worked beautifully. Then I tried color pencils on porous soft drawing paper - and it worked pretty well too! Happy, happy!