Seems I've been on hiatus from this blog since ... dear me, since August! And it looks as if it's gonna be that way for a bit longer. So I may as well face facts and make it official. Okay, so I'm officially on hiatus until the winds of change blow me back this way again.

Thanks to everyone who's been following me and my work. I appreciate each and every one of you, and hope to meet you here when I return. Meanwhile, here's a holiday card in watercolor and colored pencil. Plus a little white gouache thrown in for highlights. Have a wonderful holiday, and all the best to you, your kith and kin!

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It was one of those weeks. The kind where life happens and not much art work gets done. Although I did find time to flip through some of my sketch books. And reminisce about the good old days when it was easy to take sketching trips for granted.

For me, sketching on location is just plain fun. And since it's fun, it's a painless way to practice and improve my design and drawing skills. It also happens to slow me down for a deeper look at my surroundings, which widens my appreciation of them. All wonderful reasons for regular sketching trips!

In the whole wide world, one of my favorite places to sketch is the Metropolitan Museum of Art. With so many galleries and amazing treasures, it would take a lifetime to draw them all. Of course, right now getting out and about is pretty much on hold. So my sketches have become precious keepsakes, bringing back memories of the days when indoor expeditions were a lot less complicated. I'm looking forward to their return! And I don't suppose I'll ever take them for granted again.

Here are a few of my Metropolitan Museum sketches. Click through the gallery below to see larger images.

Red is quite a fiery, flashy color, isn't it? It likes to jump up and down and wave for attention. It monopolizes all eyes in the room. Too many flashy colors in your painting and it could escalate into a brawl. Although I adore them I rarely place such flaming colors so prominently in my paintings. Usually I save them for a few bright accents just to liven things up. That didn't happen this time.

It was full harvest mode at my local farmer's market. Amid all the produce was a dazzling assortment of peppers in yellows, oranges, reds and greens. All these gorgeous colors caught my eye, so I brought a box home to paint in a still life. I arranged some orange and green peppers in a bowl with a few red ones scattered about for a bright color pop. Frankly, my first attempt was not a success. (Hey, it happens. All the time, actually, and thereby lies a tale for another post.)

When I finally got around to the second try the peppers had ripened into a full blazing scarlet. Not my original intention, but what can you do. An artist has to adapt. Anyway, that red was such a rich, ravishing color that I went for it. I'm a sucker for a challenge. But how to make it work with all that heat? I thought that by surrounding the reds with some cool grays and blues it might calm the composition down a bit. And allow the reds to shine. And that it might be fun to contrast them with that one lone green pepper that refused to ripen. 

For the next painting I went back to my usual m.o. with a gentler color scheme. And some brilliant color pops. Back at the market I picked up another box of peppers. Orange ones.  This time the red accents were in the leaves of a croton plant sitting by the window. It was a dark, rainy day and I loved the way the soft, cool grays played against the vivid reds and oranges in my peppers and leaves, setting them off nicely. 

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This past August I took a short, lovely trip to Quebec City. It's a place full of hills and vistas, and exquisite old buildings with more turrets than a Disney castle. In other words, a perfect place for sketching.

I was traveling solo and wanted to round up some sketching buddies to share my adventures with. So I did a search on the Urban Sketchers website for the Quebec City chapter. I thought surely there must one, since it's such a charming, sketchable city. But I was wrong. Hmmmm. So I searched for artist meet-ups instead, and this time I struck gold. Turns out that artist Denise Bujold runs a wonderful series of events called "Artistes dans le Parcs". Each month artists meet at the parks in Quebec City for sketching, painting and companionship. And I couldn't wait to meet them!

They did not disappoint. There was a friendly crowd at the Parc Nautique de Cap-Rouge on the day I joined them. Denise and the other artists welcomed me warmly even though my French is horrible. Fortunately their English is a thousand times better than my French!

At the park I painted a watercolor on the bank of the St. Lawrence River. It was a challenge to catch it before the ebbing tide turned the bank back into a flowering marsh. 

Larry Marshall and Yvan Breton were also at the event, and graciously invited me to go out sketching with them the next day. How wonderful it was to be with two inspiring local artists who knew their way around and could point out great places to sketch. It began to rain just as we settled down to draw at the old lower city, or Basse-Ville, but Yvan knew about a covered entrance to a building where we could draw the picturesque Université Laval while we waited it out. 

Eventually it came time to say good bye to my new friends. But being with them and seeing their wonderful sketches renewed my interest in drawing. And so I continued to sketch on my own in their beautiful city. 

If you follow my blog you may already know that during my art school days I studied the figure, still life and landscape using oil paints. But I like to challenge myself and learn new things. So lately I've been reading up on watercolor techniques and trying them out.

Many old school watercolor books I've found are written by purists who use transparent watercolors only, and look down their noses on any use of opaque media. I get why they love the fresh, luminous look of transparent paint. But coming from oil painting makes staying in the transparent zone easier said than done. I'm used to the option of painting light over dark. And you can't do that using transparent paint. Light colors just won't show up over dark.

Nevertheless I persist. I continue practicing transparent techniques to get better. But sometimes, after I've already tried and failed, it's time to save my work ... by any means necessary! And why not. It's kind of liberating, actually. Besides, after a recent trip to the Metropolitan Museum I couldn't help noticing that many of the modern and old masters made drawings and paintings in mixed media. Watercolor with charcoal, watercolor with pastel, watercolor with opaque white, watercolor with ... you get the idea. I'm by no means a watercolor historian so I'm not sure when the cool kids got so pure. But I'll look into it and get back to you. 

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