daily-ish notes…

  • on painting sunsets.

    Over the last couple days I’ve left a short note about two different things; sunrises and daily sketching in March.

    As March begins and I pull out my sketchbook for the first of thirty one consecutive days sketching and painting, I return here to note that this first sketch is compounding from those two previous thoughts: a daily sketch, but a sketch of a sunset.

    I don’t think this strictly qualifies as a successful bit of storytelling traversing three days of posts, but if someone else said it I wouldn’t object.

  • about #mARTch.

    As February draws to a close, I look to the changing of the calendar page (as I often do) for inspiration for a month of — something. (In April I’m already planning a fitness blast and looking to run every day of that month, but for March I figured something a little more creative and relaxing.)

    Thus, #mARTch.

    Thirty-one days of art.

    In my case, I’ll be cracking open my various watercolour books, wetting my brushes, and dirtying my palettes, in an attempt to complete an ink-and-paint sketch (of no specified size or subject) for each day of March. Hopefully, I’ll simultaneously think of some way clever to share them on this site, too.

    Wish me luck.

  • of sunrises.

    March, just hours away as I write this, is often a month of sunrises.

    Sure, there are sunrises all year long, but where I live the timing, angle, and moisture levels in the air make March a month of spectacularly beautiful sunrises at a convenient time of day.

    I used to take lots of sunrise (and sunset) photos. Cliché? Maybe.

    Tho, I’m hoping I can transfer that skill of capturing beautiful sunrises in pixels with a camera into an equitable skill with a brush, paint and paper. I’ve been watching videos and reading tutorials about blending colours and layering washes to create the types of hues and patterns that we often think of as a sunset.

    Now, hopefully March delivers me some inspiration.

  • about addendum b.

    Continuing on from yesterday’s note and the addendums to my About Me page, I thought it worth noting that in the last week or so I’ve branched out from purely watercolour painting notes and added a quiet little section where I’ve been trying to evoke my inner Asimov and write fiction on the daily.

    There is a little section called the story as noted hidden down in a menu somewhere and it’s become the place where I try each day — or have done for the last week or so — to write a bit of loosely connected science fiction-type words. I aim for a hundred-plus words per day, roughly drabble-length, but just brick by brick adding to a larger narrative. That narrative fiction may change over time, but at the moment it is a silly story about a dying planet Earth in the somewhat medium future and a guy named Noah aboard a transport spaceship full of barnyard animals.

    Not watercolour, but rather continuing to build my little digital creative studio space here.

  • about addendum a.

    I have a fairly vague and creatively idiosyncratic-bent About Me page on this site. Of course this would do little favour to a website that was actually hoping to lure in long-term repeat visitors and actually cared about things like audience retention or selling a product… which I don’t.

    I’ve thought about rewriting my About Me page, but instead I decided I’d just start leaving addendums here in my daily notes and maybe someday someone will care enough to scroll through these far enough to find out more about what’s going on here on notesforasketch.ca.

    See, I started this site because I was listening to a podcast and the interviewee of some particular episode kept mentioning about his work and how he would often carry around a book and make “notes for a sketch of” blah blah blah so that he could go back later and draw from memory. At the time I was thinking a lot about my various creative pursuits, and the work I was doing in learning watercolour and how some of the stuff I’d written so far was leaning towards the “advice-zone” — and not in a good way, towards advice that as a learner I really had no business handing out. I just wanted to keep track of things for my own business-of-learning needs, so really what I needed was a lot of little notes for that one sketch that I’d made written in a casual sort of manner and being reflective on my process and the sorts of thoughts I was thinking when I painted said image.

    Idea: conceived.

    Of course, in the intervening months this has not only started to swirl into more of a solid vision, but I’ve found I can use this site to leave more than art notes, but blobs of fiction and of course these daily missives, so the whole site is really starting to become something more of a digital creative studio space for me, and I like where it’s going.