Shari Blaukopf

This is always the first view I sketch in Rockport To the right of this scene is Roy Moore Lobster Co, and today, on a sunny Saturday in June, the picnic tables on the back deck are packed. Standing room only for lobster rolls and clam chowder. Instead of waiting for a table they took their lunch out to the wharf and found a spot to eat.

It’s a real treat for me to be announcing a new workshop in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, in January 2020. San Miguel is a stunning colonial-era city in central Mexico, and it’s going to be so much fun to capture the architecture and street life of this colourful Unesco World Heritage site in our sketchbooks. I’m super excited to be working with Meagan Burns, our organizer from Art Leap Adventures, because she’s been living in San Miguel since 2015, and she’s a sketcher, so she knows all the best spots for us to see and draw. We’ll be sketching in markets, gardens and art studios, not to mention through the city’s historic cobblestoned streets.

There have been a lot of celebrations around here lately — birthdays, graduations and retirements. In the middle of it all sits a massive bouquet, so lush and bursting with scent and colour that it has stumped me all week. What could I do with brush and pigment that could possibly match its richness? But I couldn’t let it fade without attempting it at least once, on a small page in my sketchbook.

For the second attempt, I stowed away my pencil and aimed to capture the same scene in a more concise and simplified way using direct watercolour. I haven’t had a chance to participate in the #30x30DirectWatercolour2019 challenge that’s going on right now, but I’ve been avidly following the work of organizers Suhita, Uma and Marc on various social media platforms. I brought that big blue sky right down to the tops of the boats, and then I painted another big blue shape for the water below the boats. The sailboat that I painted so boldly sailed away just minutes after I painted it, and no doubt the whole design of this might have been more interesting if the white of the sail was reflected in the water, but hey, that’s direct painting.