Incident at Lady Meredith – Workshops on my mind!

The last couple days I’ve been out painting Lady Meredith House,
at the corner of Pins and Peel, in the heart of the Golden Mile. I pass
this house frequently, and have always wanted to paint it. It’s well
situated on a steep corner and has a fantastic roof line, studded with
witches hats, tall slender chimneys and decorative brick work. This is
actually my third sketch at this location.

By that I mean, I just did three days in a row in the same spot. Why? A little bit crazy I guess.

I’m
having some sort of perfectionist fit this week. Normally I’m quite
free about sketching – whatever I get is fine. Some turn out, some
don’t. It’s all part of the process.

But these days I’m feeling I have to up my game, as I’ll be painting live at the Urban Sketchers workshop in Santo Domingo this July, and at my own 3 day sketching event in Portland this August, (in partnership with fellow Montrealer Shari Blaukopf).

Normally
I might have been happy with my first sketch. But this time, I couldn’t
live with it. There are numerous flaws. First among them is dead,
monochromatic color.

I
used a single color (burnt sienna for the brick, and paynes grey for
the roof – and pretty much just layered them darker and darker each
pass. Yes, this is a dark building, so it doesn’t take reflected color
the way a light colored structure will. But, still no excuse for drab
earthy tints. So my take aways are: try to use clean, pure colors and
let them mix on the page. It’s watercolor! Let the water flow. Never
just add grey to make shadows – use a complimentary color to make a
complex dark mix. And whatever you do – don’t be boring! Unified shadow
shapes does not have to mean monochromatic passages.

Second
major problem – the house is just plonked there, like it’s in the
middle of a farmer’s field. I like a strong focus of interest, but
simply leaving out the environment doesn’t work. The house just sits
there like a lump. It’s too big on the page, there’s no sense of space.
It’s such a static, dull, leaden composition. It’s almost not a
composition at all. I’m not too happy with all the fiddly (also
monochromatic) bits of foliage either. It looks like a bed of lettuce
under that turkey.

This
is my second attempt. I addressed the boring composition – climbing up
behind the wall of the Irving Ludmer Research facility (which I painted last year).
This gives me an interesting design element in the foreground. I also
better planned the shapes of the surrounding trees, and included a bit
of environment (the lamp post, the house behind). Unfortunately however,
I was so excited about this foreground I ended up jamming the house up
against the top of the page. As well, the bricks are still too
monochromatic. It’s better, but still just variations of burnt sienna. I
realize now this is the first time I’ve painted bricks – so this might
be a natural learning curve 🙂

I
could have said, okay,okay, I’m getting somewhere, onto the next thing.
But – what can I say. The good weather lasted, so there I was on day
three, doing it again.  In my third version I have the more dynamic
composition, the more lively color – and I addressed two other things
that were bugging me. I paid more attention to the rule “Contrast of
Shape” inside my brushstrokes – so there are some big sweeping marks in
the trees and sky to contrast with the small details in the house –
avoiding a tendency to make a lot of similar shaped strokes, and helping
to focus the eye toward the detail at the center of interest.

I
also realized I want to have a strong design in the drawing. Big
shapes. What I call the rule of 5 and 3 – a few big blocks, fit together
nicely (but it has to be three or five, not four or six – those are
static numbers – just look at dice:) So I have Sky, Roof, House, Trees,
Street. But I don’t want the color to be as simplistic as version two.
There I have Blue Sky, Orange House, Green Trees. Each block is its own
color. This is basically correct, but the execution isn’t exactly
nuanced. I really want each color block relating to the others within a
harmony.

One
more color thing – I wanted to think about each plane of the house as
having a slightly different color temperature. To break up those
damnable bricks, and better describe the complex structure. Every time a
surface changes direction, it should change temperature.

You’ve
probably also guessed – the version I like the best is the least
accurate drawing.  What can I say? I find this an elegant fanciful
building, so when I finally let go and drew it expressively (in this
case, elongated and with pushed perspective) it really started to speak
to me.

Sorry
for the long post, I hope it’s helpful to some. I’ll leave you with a
classic USK  “Trophy Shot” – (the – yes I really painted this on
location shot).