04 Jul 2017

Preparation

On the 21st of May, it was just a few days before I left Paris to spend a month in New York City with my colleagues from Deep Algo. I knew that I was going to take my watercolors with me, and I wanted to be ready to capture scenes of NYC just like those guys who paint on location around Grand Central Terminal. So cool!

Yet I had never left the comfort of my home for any of the previous Youtube tutorials, so I felt that I had to do it at least once before leaving. So I brought my stuff to this week-end’s hike with friends, where I made the most of the picnic break to paint a view of the Port-Royal-des-Champs Abbey.

I still have a lot of work to do on trees and shadows. Overall though, the test run was a success, and it was a real pleasure to work outside.

The nice thing with watercolors is the reduced number of items you have to carry:

a paper block

pencils and an eraser

a small bottle of water and a glass

your color palette (24 half-pans are more than enough for me)

your brushes

some paper towels, to dry the brushes and to retrieve colors from the paper when you make a mistake, or when you want to achieve special effects (I don’t know which ones yet, I only use it to correct mistakes)

After that, I also felt that I needed to get a hang of NYC’s color palette. Everyone knows the iconic yellow cabs (I found that a mix of Cadmium Yellow and Cadmium Orange could do the trick). I looked for nice pictures of New York online, which I usually go about by browsing quality pictures on Wikimedia Commons. Although I can’t remember why, I chose to work on this subway photo.

New York City

On our first day in New York, we were treated to a burger and beers at a bar near Ground Zero, with a view on the Hudson river and New Jersey. That’s why the first painting from my trip is actually not depicting New York. I didn’t even know what I was doing, but now that I’ve looked at a map to understand what it is that I’ve painted, I feel I’m owed a refund. Anyway.

Here is a view from Manhattan (although I don’t remember the street in which the photo was taken). I enjoy the contrast that there is between the high geometric towers against the mineral sky and the greasy organic mess of traffic, pedestrians and shop signs in the streets.

None of the previous two paintings was done on location. In fact, the only watercolor I did en plein air was at Long Beach. Even though it doesn’t show, I waited for a actual plane to cross the sky before committing that smudge.

Finally, another painting that I did at home from a photo: the defiant little girl that now stands in front of Wall Street’s charging bull. At first I aimed for a very quick watercolor, that’s why the pencil strokes are so apparent: I wanted to get primarily a drawing with just a bit of color on top. However I turned out to spend a considerable amount of time trying to give a human figure to the girl.

I need to work on drawing and painting the human body.

Almost on the very last day of the trip, I finally resolved to send postcards. However, with the four postcards that I had bought, I was one short to reach the bare minimum of recipients that would grant me continued contact with my family upon my return to France. That’s when I thought that I could make a postcard myself!

It’s a view of Hudson Square. Not special, but typical of NYC with a yellow cab and American flags (here on the Fire Museum).

In the end, I did not have so much time to dedicate to painting during the trip, so that’s all for my first carnet de voyage. I hope you enjoyed it!

Epilogue

Near the end of the trip, I felt like destroying stuff, probably because the heavy weather was getting the best of me (or was it that somewhat unpleasant work meeting that left me in a murderous mood? I can’t remember). Anyway, I had some bad energy to release, which materialized in the form of a building on fire. I first drew with a pencil, then used Faber Castel PITT Artist pens for the gray coloring, and finally used my watercolors only for the fire. I’m quite proud of that one, I think the different techniques make the fire stand out. Also I went crazy with the paint brush and made some small projections to suggest small particles and a truly raging fire.

This burning building idea comes from a puzzling chain of circumstances that led me to view Arthur Tiar’s artwork at the Felicità 17 exposition at the Beaux Arts in Paris, and then similarly fiery images by Celeste Sousa at the Cooper Union’s Annual student exhibition in New York.

After that, I was back to my normal mood and up for bucolic scenery.

See you again soon for a collection of tips that I gathered during my first months of watercolors.