Friday, September 26, 2014

Sketching at the Harbourfront, the Sculture Garden and the Roundhouse Park

I've been pretty busy the past couple weeks and didn't get a chance to post about our sketching outings over the past couple weeks. We visited the Harbourfront, the Toronto Sculpture Garden and the Roundhouse Park.

The Harbourfront
There is a lot of interesting things to sketch at the Harbourfront. Despite being a gray day, we had enough time to spend a little time outside to sketch the many view from the  harbor before rain came pouring down on us. Member of the Kitcherner sketching group came to sketch with us as well, which was nice. There was a lot of activity going on that day and free food sample from a festival going on at the time.





Toronto Sculpture Garden 
We had a beautiful day for the sketching event at the Toronto Scuplture Garden. The garden is a great initiative between the city of Toronto and the Louis L. Odette family, giving artist an opportunity to experiment with public space since 1971. The artwork currently exhibited is by Jed Lind and is called Gold, Solver & Lead made with first generation Honda Civics. An archive of previous work is available on the Toronto Scuplture Garden website.





CN Tower
A couple of us met at the Rounhouse park to sketch the CN tower and the Toronto Railway Museum. Unfortunately that day was a little cold so we didn't spend a lot of time outside. Still, we got a moment of sunshine that gave us enough time to complete at least one sketch. Then we headed over to a local coffee shop to continue sketching. This is the time of year where it's hard to predict the weather and we'll probably be mostly sketching inside until next spring, but seeing how beautiful the weather has been this past few days, we might get a couple more opportunities to sketch outdoors before winter.

Tuesday, September 2, 2014

Perfect day at Distillery District

After a relatively long hiatus from urban sketching, I spent a lovely afternoon at the Distillery District listening to live music and did a couple sketches.  The first one was a loose sketch on my watercolor moleskine, trying to capture Melody Fair - the group that was singing live.  The second one was a more detailed sketch of a cute little shop done on the watercolor postcard paper.

While sketching the cute little shop, I had a sudden feeling that I was in Europe - sketching on the streets filled with people, historic architecture, lovely art displays, and live music - It was the perfect day for me.