Travel Sketching - Toronto

5"x7" Annex Neighborhood

Earlier this month I found myself in Toronto, Ontario Canada. Why was I there in March after one of the worst winters in history? It’s a long story but in short we were on the East Coast for my brother’s wedding and decided to do a side trip to Toronto. Toronto has a lot of great Architecture and neighborhoods just asking to be sketched but my hopes of doing a load of outdoor urban sketching and painting were dampened by the 15-30 deg F weather. I did however make the best of it and was able to do a bit of sketching from inside looking out windows and also at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) and Ripley’s Aquarium.  Below are the results from my sketchbooks, these were done in my 8 ½” x 11” Stillman and Birns Alpha sketchbook and the small ones are from a 5”x7” ”Nature Sketch” sketchbook.

5"x7" Flat Iron Building

5"x7" Small House Cabbage Town

5" x7" old barn in Cabbage Town

 

17" x11" "Houses on Marchmount Street"

8 1/2" x 11" "New meets Old"  Outside of the ROM

17"x11" sketch compilation from the ROM

17" x11" sketch compilation Ripley's Aquarium

5" x7" "House on Marchmount Street"

Soon I will be posting sketched from part 2 of the trip Niagara Falls.

Plein Air travel Paint kit - low budget edition

 For sometime now I have been wanting to expand my on location sketching to full on plein air painting.  Currently I do most my sketching on site and later add the watercolor washes at home. In preparation for a trip to New York and Toronto with hopes to do some good urban sketching I decided to put together a plein air travel painting kit. I didn't want to spend too much money on a travel paint kit so after doing a little research I decided to make a palette out of an Altoids container with water bottle caps for the paint wells.

My kit includes:

- Altoids pallet with M. Graham watercolors colors- burnt sienna, ultra marine blue, cerulean blue, raw sienna, alizarin crimson, payne's grey and hookers green. 

- Nature Sketch 5"x7" sketchbook (this is an inexpensive sketchbook that does great with watercolor washes) 

- Stillman and Birns 8 1/2" x 11" alpha sketchbook

- Escoda Perla Z travel brush 

- Pentel Aqua Brush 

- Small plastic water container (from my backpacking stuff)

- Sepia Micron .005 pen 

- staedtler lumocolor pen

I tested out the kit on a nice day at Cathedral Park along the Willamette river in North Portland

here are some of the sketches, it worked really well except the aqua brush is a little small for my style and its very difficult to get the right amount of water. It will take getting used to. 

plein air travel paint kit 

"old boat willamette river "
5"x7" Nature Sketchbook

"docked sailboat "
5"x7" Nature Sketchbook

"NW Industrial on the Willamette"
5"x7" Nature Sketchbook

Soon I will be posting sketches from the East Coast trip.