Art Day in Port Stanley, I started by creating a sketch view looking towards the harbour while standing beside Art Emporium. It was a lovely weather day!!

I re-drew the view larger on watercolour paper and added colour. It takes longer than you'd think. This took me most of the afternoon, but in my defense there were lots of folks around to chat with lol. 

I've painted this view before but never on-site thought thought I'd start with a sketch.. first in pencil then with black pen over top. I'm not really an architecture artist, and this view is mostly buildings. The fish house on the right is one of Port Stanley's oldest buildings. 

I re-drew the view at a slightly dfferent angle. This is a stylized version of the view using a mixture of media (pencil, ink, couple types of paint). I flattened some of the perspective, left out some details that I thought made it too busy, but added clouds.. all in all, it feels like the vibe. Painting plein air always takes longer than i think it will. Some of that is the painting part, again, some are the conversations with folks who pass by lol.

I went for a walk down to the bridge and decided to try my hand at capturing the bridge. I'm not really an artist who paints complex structures with perspective so it was a challenge. The drawing part was key!

Having a drawing process helped capture this view, I feel like I nailed it lol. I started with the large shapes first and then worked on details. I added some watercolor and pencil crayon to give a fuller sense of place.

I spent a delightful morning sitting at the pier drawing and painting. Here is the drawing.

I added watercolour and pencil crayon to give this drawing some life. The place where I was sitting was beside a walkway so lots of folks stopped to chat lol.

This is the creek that runs past our condo. We live beside a marina so there's lot of boats to sketch and paint. This is a preliminary sketch as I figure out what I'm look at.

Here is the colour sketch of the same view from a little different angle, and a few days later. You can see that there's already more colour in the trees.

A few of my recent Port Stanley plein air sketches currently showing at Art & Soul here in Port. These are all framed up and available for purchase there.

This was a wonderfully sunny warm day for October, so I took advantage and sketched at the beach. This is the view I was thinking would be lovely for my in-person plein air on-site sketching workshop. You can find out more by go to the WORKSHOP PAGE