Illustration: Street Acrobat on Saint Catherine MTL

I didn't get many reference photos this year from Montreal Complement Cirque, there wasn't a free show at the park near me and I didn't see many of the acts on St Denis. I did catch this guy near my house, the business group here in the village has been doing small shows up and down Saint Catherine most days and I happened to walk by while I had my camera with me. 

I decided to use Affinity Photo and do my old paint in greyscale then colourize technique. I like the look of it. I might do one more of him, maybe pen and ink maybe digital water colour which I have been playing with but not getting anywhere. 

photography: Village Gai mai 2024

 A break from Blender for the moment this morning. The street has a rainbow path on it this year. Still not competition for the canopy of coloured balls we had for years and brought in tons of tourists. It's something at least. 

Illustration: Bay Window, rue Wolfe

 

This was originally going to be a Krita project, showing how decrepit the bay window is on this building. The brick was all redone but the window is rotting away. I even started painting it but then decided on another direction and did the drawing in Affinity Designer. Designer is a vector drawing program, not bit map, like Affinity Photo of Photoshop. With them you paint with pixels but vector is more like building an image with shapes - almost like using cut outs for each part. Every piece is its own layer and the image can be made as large or small are you like with no loss in quality. 

So this way of doing it didn't make it impossible to get that rotting look but it doesn't really lend itself to that so I kept some odd angles to the bay but for the most part made it look much more attractive than it is. There is a small tree in front I drew, then deleted because it took away from the facade. I really liked adding the shadows and I think they give it a very natural look I wasn't expecting in a vector drawing.