Anniversary!

We celebrated our twentieth wedding anniversary last week! This is the image on the front of a card I made for John. It's a brush marker painting of our cats, Jasper and Kiki, in very familiar poses. John loved the card and suggested that I post it. So here it is...

Beach Bums...

The weather's hot. Summers in Toronto, Canada are unpredictable, but this year's been pretty fine so far. Seems like a good time to post a few watercolours of beach scenes. The thing is, we haven't actually been down to our beach to paint this year, so we'll have to make do with older views.

Here are three sketches of our neighbourhood Toronto Kew Beach area by John:



And three sketches of Pacific coast beaches in Costa Rica by Arna:

Rom Sketch Date Part 3...

Here are the last of the sketches from our July 7th visit to the Royal Ontario Museum. The first two are by Arna:

These next two are by John:

This fellow looks like he's giving us the finger. Such un-monk-like behavior! ;)

And this one is Arna's sketch of John sketching:

ROM Sketch Date Part 2...

Posted by Arna:

Thought I'd try some fooling around with brush markers and a waterbrush. To avoid muddying the washes I used no more than two colours on each sketch.

This one's the first of the day... a good warm up. John noticed that this fellow had dragons for sleeves and his arms came right out of the dragons' mouths, but when I did this one I hadn't figured that out yet, so the sleeve shapes are kind of abstract. The little character at his feet reminds me of Bart Simpson:

You can see those dragons' mouths clearly in the photo I took afterwards. Funny how you can look at a thing and not really 'see' it:

Here's an earthenware horse about a foot and a half tall:

Here's the actual horse:

Here's an army! I found myself simplifying and juggling shapes, to define these horses and riders:

Horses and riders in earthenware. They're each about a foot tall:

ROM sketch date...

Posted by John:

Here are some new sketches from today's visit to the Royal Ontario Museum. We spent a productive Friday sketching in the same area of the museum we visited several weeks ago with Mike Smukavic. This time he couldn't make it. We missed you Mike!

We'll post more of today's work over the next week, including some colour brush work from Arna.