Tidnish Dock - plein air

Today was a wonderful sunny and clear day, and I joined some other painters from the Tidnish Art Gallery to go plein air painting. Diana, the organizer, decided we should go to the Tidnish Dock Provincial Picnic Park. That was an awesome choice in my mind. I totally love that park and have always felt its views were very paintable.

The sun was pretty hot though, so I wanted to set up somewhere that was in shade. Of course the view I really wanted to paint was only accessible if you sat out in direct sunlight! Two of our group, Melanie and Don, decided to brave the sun so that they could paint that view. But I sat under the shade of a big tree and faced the opposite direction. So the above is what I came up with from that viewpoint. My usual 9x12 Art Spectrum. Funny how you see things when the painting is online that you don't see in real life. The bushes above look too perfectly rounded and curved, as if someone had gone over them with a hedge clipper. Yet I didn't notice that at all onsite! LOL. Well that's easily fixable.

It's always fun to paint with a group, though. So it was nice to be out and about with Diana, Melanie and Don. We may do it again, and Diana is thinking next time we might try the marshes at Baie Verte - another favorite location of mine!

Canadian Life Drawing Two

Tonight I had my second life drawing session over in Tidnish, NS. This week instead of a slender young man our model was a full-figured older woman! Much more fun to draw actually. :-) I enjoyed getting out and seeing other artists - though all of them were far better at drawing the figure than I am! But I still had a good time, and broke out my pastels for one of the 25-minute poses. This is on my usual 9x12 Art Spectrum.

Tomorrow at 10 AM I'll be going back there to join a group for a plein air session, so getting to try lots of different things. Last Thursday I took a pottery class there! I'll have to post those here too once they are all glazed and fired.

High Marsh Road

I went to Sackville yesterday to buy some larger drawing pads, and pencils, for my life drawing class on Monday nights. I went early so I could take a walk through the Sackville Waterfowl Park before the expected rains hit! But I also took the scenic route home - over the dirt roads through the Tantramar Marshes and through the old covered bridge. I drove slowly, enjoying the scenery in the rain, and kept seeing little sparrows flitting in and out through the shrubbery and grasses on either side of the road. They were too small and fast, in the rain, to make out details, so I kept trying to take photos of them!

Alas none of the photos were decent enough to permit an ID, but as I was looking at them I decided one looked like a great shot for a painting! I had not even been trying to take "artistic" shots since it was a gray and rainy day. But I had a quiet morning today, and ended up doing this painting of High Marsh Road.

Canadian Life Drawing - One

Here I am up in New Brunswick, Canada for a month. The other day I was riding over to Amherst, NS for some shopping, by way of the lovely back roads through Baie Verte and Tidnish, NS, and I found the only Tidnish tourist bureau is now an artist's cooperative gallery! I stopped in to take a look, and found they also are offereing classes there - including a Monday night Life Drawing open studio. $10 a session gets you two hours, from 7:15-9:15 PM. So I decided to go! Alas it was not conducive to pastel painting. There was an artist facilitator, and he had the model (a young man) just doing lots of 30-second and 5-minute and 10-minute poses. I was certainly not able to use pastels in that time frame, and didn't want to use my nice Art Spectrum paper either.

So I had to use the small 5x7 sketch pad I had stuffed in my bag, working much smaller than I usually prefer. But it was interesting and a fun experience, and at the end there was a 20-minute pose, so I decided to dare my pastels and Art Spectrum 9x12 paper and the above is the result. Not very great of course. With only 20 minutes I had to be super hasty. To do something like this reasonable justice would require at least 45 minutes for me, and hopefully at least an hour. And I don't think I'm going to get that with these sessions!

But I still enjoyed it, and will plan to go on Monday evenings during the month I'm up here. They are also trying to get a group together to do plein air, and I expressed interest in that as well. We shall see.

Early Oceans - acrylic on tile

This one doesn't really have a title. It's just an acrylic done on a 6x6 tile. It's a summer art project for the Art Guild of Orange Park, and these are all going to be sealed with tile sealer, and then used as appetizer plates at our September meeting. So they are just a way to play around. But I had such fun with this one that I said I'd enjoy doing a second tile.

I didn't have any sort of reference for this one. I just made it up out of my head, but wanted to try something that could incorporate part of the natural color of the tile, which is the sandy foreground.