Now that I’m not on the road, it’s time to catch up on my daily sketches. This scene is just outside my office window — trucks lined up to pave a driveway — and it’s the perfect subject for a quick drawing. I grab what’s close at hand. A fountain pen with blue ink and a sketchbook with smooth paper for drawing. I hope that they will stay there until I am done. A seated figure on the CAT would have been even better but I am not so lucky. Maybe they will be back another day ..read more

I don’t have many opportunities to draw cats, but on the weekend we visited our son who has a roommate with a cat named Indigo. Indigo is a very friendly white cat, but he’s young and he’s curious around new people, so he spent a fair bit of time leaping around us, from sofa to windowsill to tabletop. When he finally tired himself out, I was able to draw him in his favourite spot on the back of the couch. The line through his head is the start of a previous drawing, but guess what? He got up and moved, so I had to start again. I’ve been away a fair bit lately, and Alice has been with the dog ..read more

If you like spring flowers, April is the right time to visit Carmel-by-the-Sea. Calla lilies grow like weeds, the pink flowers of hardy ice plants are blooming all over the coast, and the conical purple spikes of Pride of Madeira cover landscaped beds as well as wild hillsides. I had never seen these shrubs before so I took a photo of one of the plants and posted it on Instagram with the question: does anyone know what these are? Of course many of my California friends responded because, besides being a native of the island of Madeira, the only other place where this plant is abundant is in co ..read more

It’s been a great week of teaching with French Escapade in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California. Everything is so green here — Calla lilies, orange poppies and Pride of Madeira flowering everywhere — and we’ve had lots of sunny days, which is a good thing for this winter-weary Montrealer. My first group of sketchers left this morning and another group arrives tonight, and in the middle I thought I’d share a few of the views we had this week. On a sunny morning we set up along the wall at Lover’s Point in Pacific Grove. There were seals and otter not too far off in the water, pelicans flying above us ..read more

I know I haven’t been posting much on my blog lately. I always miss that. But I have a good excuse. I’ve been painting lots of spring flowers, and after being so inspired by all the tulips at Cheekwood Gardens in Nashville, I decided to turn all that intensive flower painting into a new online course: Sketching Spring Flowers. If you’re a long-time reader of this blog, you know that I love to paint spring flowers in my garden. I once even filled an accordion sketchbook with drawings from my garden after I planted 200 bulbs from Costco. This year, alas, I have no spring flowers in my garden, o ..read more

If I can, I usually arrive at least a day early at a new workshop location. I feel more comfortable teaching in a place that’s at least a little bit familiar to me. That was the case last week in Nashville. I arrived on Monday evening so I had Tuesday to drive around with my host and sketch in the Berry Hill neighbourhood of Nashville where Warehouse 521 is located. It’s a great area, and the art studio is surrounded by recording studios, small cafés and restaurants. I sketched Nashville Jam Co, which I thought was a music venue of some sort but it turns out that it’s a brunch place where they ..read more

Happy first day of spring! This morning I had a snowy view outside my window in Montreal, but it certainly was more springlike last week when I was teaching in Nashville. I’ll post my urban sketches later in the week, but here’s one from my last day in Tennessee. On the recommendation of one of my workshop participants, we visited Cheekwood Estate and Gardens, just outside of Nashville in the suburb of Belle Meade. Besides flowering magnolia and cherry trees, there are over 250,000 bulbs in bloom. Daffodils and tulips as far as the eye can see. I sat on a bench in the sun to sketch these pink ..read more

I can’t stop painting these mini-daffodils. This time I painted them in my portrait format sketchbook. When I looked at them up close with all their delicate details, they reminded me of butterflies, so I added a deep sky blue background with some Prussian Blue. It’s not that easy to paint around all these shapes so I wet the paper first, as best I could, around the flowers. In some places I went back with a second wash of paint which ended up a little too dark in spots. Sketched in my Hahnemuhle 100% cotton sketchbook ..read more

Thanks to all of you who wrote encouraging words the other day when I went through a trashing paintings day. It was so comforting to know that we are all in this together, in different ways and on different days. I didn’t save the paintings to analyze what went wrong, but I will consider that for next time. In the meantime, you might enjoy this podcast I just listened to. It’s Kelly Ann Powers interviewing John MacDonald on the Learn to Paint Podcast. She’s a great interviewer and he’s a very articulate painter, and of course I was intrigued because one of the subjects they covered was what to ..read more

Today I ripped up three paintings. I had a bouquet of tulips in a vase in front of me, and no matter which way I tried to paint them (wet-in-wet, wet on dry or direct watercolour), they were just awful. They all went into the blue bin. Some days are like that. One failure after another. When that happens I try to analyze why it didn’t work out. Bad planning is sometimes the answer. Impatience is another reason. Too much water on the brush. Too little water on the brush. Sometimes I even blame the subject — in this case maybe these tulips were just a little too pretty. But I try not to get disc ..read more