Car Painting

[By Marc Taro Holmes, Montreal, Quebec, Canada]

 We had a record 24cm snowfall yesterday. Getting out of the garage
this morning was a chore. Shoveling the driveway, spinning tires
spitting gravel, the whole nine yards. But! we were rewarded with a
brilliant sunny day as payback. You don’t want to pass up a sunny day
during Montreal winters. I had to get out and take advantage.

Last winter, after I complained about the lack of outdoor sketching,  my friend Shari introduced
me to painting from the car. She has a decent sized vehicle. Our car (a
soft top Mitsubishi that’s sadly out of place in snowy Quebec) isn’t
quite as comfortable for this sort of thing. I actually found the
dashboard and window frames pretty irritating. Until I decided to just
paint them into the scene. Suddenly they were a lot of fun.

This
was about 2 hours, painted on a Macbook Air in CS4 with a Wacom Intuos
5, on location at the Notre Dame des Neiges Cemetery. I have to say,
deciding at the last minute to add-in the car interior would have been
impossible in traditional media. I ended up extending the canvas a
number of times.

Another interesting bonus – the shadows don’t move in
December. The sun is so low, it’s raking shadows all day long. I guess
winter painters might have known that already – but it was neat to find
out first hand.