Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Hello from USK Montreal!

Hey hey - Marc Taro Holmes from USK Montreal here. I wanted to stop by and say hello. You probably have heard that Shari Blaukopf and I will be in Portland August 3-5 doing a Watercolor sketching workshop. (oh hey, I see our logo in the side bar:) I guess everyone has heard!

At the time of writing this I was in Alliston Ontario (it's a long story). I had a bit of free time, so I headed into town and stumbled upon this great little house. It's like the baby brother of the Lady Meredith house I was painting the other week.

A great chance to use my new found familiarity with red brick :) Apparently brick is an east coast thing - somehow I've never found myself to painting these houses in the Bay area.




I have to admit - I got lazy with this one and skipped an important step.

The very first thing, before starting any descriptive drawing, it's a great idea to lightly mark the volume (height/width) your subject will fill. You make your first statement about proportion here. How tall is your subject vs. how wide. Get this right, and you'll save a lot of time erasing later. You'll also know you like the placement on the page. (Not jammed near an edge, not glaringly dead center). You don't want to catch bad proportion *after* you've drawn a lot of windows and doors.

Anyway, I was so excited to find this house, I skipped that step, and ended up drawing off the bottom of the page. I was actually peeling off thin strips of the tape stretching my paper, trying to get a little more space. I had to bail out and fade the front porch to white.  Oh well, these sort of things happen when you're in a rush. It was still a fun drawing, and it gives it the sense of a real field sketch :)

I"m looking forward to seeing Portland this summer. Drop me a line if you have any questions about the up coming workshop. And let me know if we'll be seeing you in Santo Domingo in July!
~m


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