Skip to main content

33 on 33: Day Eighteen

Dark and metric is my town
North, east, west, and south
Just because you're smiling
Doesn't mean you haven't drowned

–TMBG, "Dark and Metric"

My second day in Wellington proper for 33 on 33 began with fog and mist which expectedly turned to rain soon after I set up. Knowing it'd be raining again I parked my van across the street with a great view of my subject whether the side door was open or closed. Here's my Map of Progress.

Main St. looking east.

Of course, before I could start painting, I had to choose my subject, keeping in mind the imminent rain and the need for cover. There were a number of excellent choices, but I would have gotten soaked if I set up my easel outside, and most of the angles I liked were unavailable to me from inside the van. Painting the fog would have been a good challenge, but the best, yet most inconvenient and dangerous, angle was right in the middle of the street (another advantage of painting from photos).

Main St. looking west.

Another great view of the town in the fog from the middle of the street.

Library and archives.

When you're just driving through Wellington, it's easy to miss this gorgeous library  because of the huge trees out front, but it's certainly worth investigating, not only outside for its architectural splendour, but inside as well because it's the home of the Prince Edward County Archives.

Majestic.

This impressive entrance may one day become my subject for a painting. They just don't make libraries this interesting anymore.

Wellington United.

Most of this church is obscured by that tree in the first pic up top, but you can see its sign board, burning away in the fog, telling us of Wellington's 150th anniversary. My final parking spot was in the church parking lot (not visible here, but just to the left of the front entrance).

Centre of town.

Boasting some great shops (restaurants, cafés, grocery, hardware), Wellington pretty much has it all in a great centralized location (except for the liquor store, which is just a few kilometres to the east).

Wellington Park gates.

This park goes all the way down to the lake –barely visible here through the fog. This is directly across the street from the Town Hall (below).

Wellington Town Hall Community Centre.

Built in 1882 as a school (see below) it became the Town Hall in the early 1900s and is now a community centre.

Wellington Public School Town Hall.

St. Andrew's.

And here we have it: after about 20 minutes of hemming and hawing, photographing and dawdling, I finally decided that this cute little church was to be my painting subject for the day, but seen from the other side and across the street. St. Andrew's is just to the right of the Town Hall.

Wellington Public School.

I have no idea why this building is set so far back, but, like the library across the street, it's really easy to miss if you're just driving through town. Of course, the immense setback makes it look very grand –even through the fog. This school is just to the right of St. Andrews.


And here's the painting.




Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Axel Foley's Chevy Nova (1/25 scale model)

Multiple tributes, here. I remember first seeing  Beverly Hills Cop  on video at my friend Chris K's house, 'cause his family had a VCR and we'd watch tons of movies (and record music videos) together. The summer of 1984 was a special time for us (having created a strong bond in school since Grade 6 a few years before), going on biking adventures around the 'burbs and into the city, etc., and home video played an important role from then until I moved to the opposite end of Scarborough just before we started high school. We liked the movie a lot, both of us fans of Eddie Murphy from his  Saturday Night Live  days. I don't think I'd seen the movie since then (it would have been 1985, probably summer, since the movie came out in late 1984) and I became curious to see if it still held up. It did. It does. I found Murphy as charming as ever and the comedy (and even the action) holds up very well and its very re-watchable and very entertaining.  Beverly Hi

City of Angels

17" x 11", watercolour and digital, 1999 Ah, City of Angels . I thought I was getting cool film noir but got a cheesy musical instead (Google it if you must). Still, it was fun to make the poster and associated images, mostly because the research consisted of watching real films noir and buying a great book on movie posters of the genre. I made tons of sketches and a few digital mock-ups. For the final poster above, I made three separate watercolour paintings (one of the couple and one each of the two black and white heads) and composited them in Photoshop, where I also added the text. In true movie poster fashion, I wanted the actors names to be the top two names, but I lost that battle and had to use the characters' names instead. It looks fine, but it implies that "Kingsley and Stone" are the lead actors in the show. Oh, well...it's only community theatre... By making the "angel" above half black and white and half colour, th

Small Pond Arts Puppet Wagon (1/24 scale model)

I dreamed up the Small Pond Shipyard for my fanciful scratch-built sci-fi airship creations (which still only exist in sketch/Photoshop mock-up form (and boxes in my closet) for now), but more and more ideas kept coming ( this wind turbine , for example, will be part of a rather elaborate diorama I'll be working on this winter). But the Puppet Wagon was a sleeper surprise, to be sure. [Really, though, I don't know why I was so eager to build this right away since I was planning to slowly develop my modelling skills with simpler builds first and the work my way up to more complicated projects.] Not all parts were used/needed. Most of these ideas have come from watching modelling videos online, and when I saw a review of this sweet little Japanese "Ramen Shop" food truck by Aoshima (right-side drive!), my brain started making jokes about customizing it to the weird food truck ideas I'd been posting on Facebook. But the more I thought about what the co