Work in Progress

I've been working on this one for a long time.  I think I started sometime back in the spring... or maybe even earlier.  Mostly my art supplies have been lying around at the cottage, waiting for me to get back to them.  It has been such a busy year, with so many projects on the go, that I just never found time to get back to this.  I also never found time to go fly-fishing... for the past two years now.

Finally I got back after this one on the Thanksgiving weekend when Helena and I were out at Nordegg.  The day of heavy snow that we got at that time, kept me mostly indoors, and I finished up the layout.

During our most recent visit to Nordegg in early November, Margarit and I were out at the cottage for ten days, and it was over this stretch that I managed to finish it up.  I worked on it over several days, and finished it on the day that we left for the city.  I have to let the watercolor paint dry at various stages between applying it.  And, I find that as I work on the detailing, I need to step away from it for periods of time, think about it, and then return to work some more.

I'm not very good at painting, so I wouldn't really call this a watercolor.  I work with one of my photographs as a guide.  Then I sketch that out on a piece of watercolor paper.  The next step is to lay in some rather rudimentary and crude blocks of color.  The photograph that I work from is Black and White, so I take some artistic license with the colors.  Then once I have the colors done, I work with pencils and ink to detail in the image.  I use two hardnesses of graphite for shading and light details, and ink pens with various size nibs to outline and provide stronger detail.  I'm generally happy with the way that this one turned out and will soon move on to my next in this series of old hotels.  This one is the Peers Hotel from our Beer Parlour Project outing BP20.0 last October.  Sadly the hotel closed after our second visit, a couple weeks later, and has never re-opened.