St. Lawrence Market

I'm branching out from my coffee shop series and trying to capture a few other places in Toronto. This is the St. Lawrence MArket. A great people watching place and a lot of eye candy to sketch.
I thought I'd show the process of how one of these micron pen and watercolour drawings come to be. I've changed my process a bit and when I want to capture people I try to sketch them in with pencil quickly and then black line it.

sketchbook 07/21/10

Inspired by Dan, I broke out the arcylics that have been sitting in my apartment for a while.

I found a gargoyle on the web and thought it would be an appropriate first subject for my maiden voyage into acrylic paints. This image took a few days for me to get it to this point, and I think it's a bit heavy handed. In fact, the end result looks more like a painting that should have been done in oils because of the dense application of paint to the paper.

The learning curve was massive while I was painting this and I'm sure it's going to keeping on increasing as I continue to paint with acrylics.

I think I also have to invest in some better brushes. The set I used was a beginners set with 4 different types of hog bristles and 3 synthetic ones. The hog ones were falling apart and you could see some of the hairs embedded in the paint. I think I prefer the synthetics. They feel more like the watercolour brushes that I'm used to.

sketchbook 07/18/10

A view from my window and a spread that has a bit of everything.

Voulez-Vous Cafe

As I mentioned in the Good Neighbour post, anytime I invest a bit of time and energy into a drawing I remember certain conditions that surrounded me when I drew that image. For this drawing, it was the the proprietress' French accent and how she pronounced, "Vermeer". Made me slightly weak in the knees.

The Good Neighbour

Here's the Good Neighbour drawing, in part for M.B., but also I wanted to post something since it's been ages since my last one.

This image and the "Voulez-Vous Cafe" drawing were actually black lined quite a few weeks ago but I only finished colouring them yesterday. A slight burn out with the cafe drawings, but here they are. It's funny, but when I look at any drawing that I've invested some time in, I could remember exactly what was going around me when I drew it. With this one, there were two gentlemen sitting beside me talking about the nature of love. Actually it was the younger of the two men who was asking his friend what love was? Was he in love? I believe when they did leave, the younger man did think he was in love with his girlfriend. Isn't that sweet.

sketchbook 07/03/10

a face a day…