Urban Sketchers Winnipeg: Perfect Indian Summer Day in Winnipeg

The sky was a beautiful bright blue and there was no perceivable wind. The fall colored leaves are mostly still on the trees. It was also quite warm today with the projected high being 19 degrees C. Diane and Shirley decided this was going to be a good day to go out and get in some painting before the weather turns cooler and the leaves have all dropped from the trees.

Diane had seen a photo of Truro creek which runs through Bruce Park. We agreed to meet in the Assiniboine Gordon Hotel parking lot on Portage Ave and then go from there. It was a bit tricky finding the right street to go down but on try number two, Diane found it. This is a lovely park and I recognize it from cycling; in fact we did see several cyclists throughout the day.

Having come off a workshop with Liz Haywood-Sullivan, I wanted to take my time scouting around to look for the right scene to paint. We were initially attracted to the creek with rocks crossing it in one location. Moving on, we came out on to a relatively open area which had one really large nicely shaped tree. The tree was masses of various golds and a small amount of green.

We started with a very simple shape and value sketch of the tree. Once we were satisfied with our drawing, we decided to start with an oil value sketch using only white, black, and a grey. This was worth doing as it cemented in our brains where the light and dark masses were in the scene.

Now for color! We were both working on a support that had a pretty intense venetian red color. We squeezed out yellow ochre, cad yellow deep, greenish umber (my new color that Marc Hanson likes), permanent rose, cad yellow, white and each of chose the blue we wanted for the sky. It was tricky to get the right greyed gold and green color that was the undercolor of the leaf masses. After building a base of more greyed and sometimes darker masses, we put the more brightly lit yellow leaves on top.

I think we were both pretty happy with our studies. What worked well was our composition and drawing which was due to the time we took to carefully draw out our design. We both felt we could have done better at mixing colors. A challenge for next time! We both agreed that yellow ochre really dulled the color down and perhaps wasn't a good choice or we used too much in our mixtures.

One thing of note was we had a visit from a fellow artist. John stopped by to ask a question and it was at this point that I recognized him as one of the artists that gave us a workshop last year in drawing.