Winter Scene and Aurora Borealis

If you had asked me a few years ago if I would ever fret at the idea of a little bit of snow, I would have said no without hesitation but having lived in Vancouver for a while it is a bit less usual for me now. Public transportation has been slow at best in the past few days and people are impressed every time I come to work with my bike. Although some of my jobs were cancelled which allowed for a late start, I braved the storm in order to get to my Painting and Drawing class. My new phone takes excellent night shots and I wanted to test it on my way there.

This is Sun Yat Sen Garden, this shot was actually taken on the way back.

Coal Harbour as the storm was in full swing. I wanted to capture the atmospheric effect with Stanley Park off in the distance.

It’s just a whole different feel. The beauty justifies the hardship. I can understand why drivers feel less confident, it is prudent to drive slowly in the snow with summer tires but the streets didn’t freeze. I wonder if we’ll be so lucky tomorrow Morning.

It’s nice to have less cars out on the streets too!

For the art lesson, I used a watercolor tutorial from Untamed Little Wolf on YouTube. It’s funny because the video for this project has under 800 views and others have over a million. This first one is mine I ran across some issues but it was a lot of fun!

I brought a tooth brush and some acrylics for the star effect. We sprayed it on the sky once we were happy with it. I encouraged my students to make the sky pretty dark so that the stars would stand out more.

I had brought iridescent paint to mix with a more liquid one but the effects were a no show, the liquid paint was too opaque. The highlights in the sky are from that interference paint. When you move it around, the highlights shine. You can put acrylic on watercolour no problem but as you can see, there are some stars visible through the trees hence watercolour cannot cover acrylics very well.

The design for the trees is exceptional here with some quick and decisive brush strokes. They have movement and refinement.

I am obviously very proud of the work of my students, they all made tree studies to perfect their style before going on the final painting.

This is one of those studies, much stronger than the starry sky ones actually. This is one of the ways practice makes perfect; bringing the effortless look of the study on the more involved composition.

This guy I helped by re-wetting the whole sky without disturbing the layer by insisting with the brush in any way and then we added the black to contrast a lot more. I showed him a video of Lotte Reineger because his style reminds me of her.

I was teasing a student pretending to coin how the star splattering brings the sky together when in fact she said it first. We had lots of fun with some great Brazilian music.

Thanks for watching everyone, I will see you soon!