Travel sketches

The Channel crossing from Dover (England) to Calais (France) gave me an opportunity to sketch. I was able to set-up on one of the coffee table in the lounge and make a couple of quick sketches. Drawing is also relaxing after you drove for a few hours on snowy roads.

The advantage of sketching figures on a ferry is that people tend to stay longer in the same place: they sleep, rest, read a book, or check messages on their mobile phones.



This sketch was done with a black Faber Castell PITT artist pen on a Moleskine sketchbook. I tried to add a wash of watercolour, but the paper of the skekchbook is coated and does not take the water. I had to switch to my selection of Faber Castell PITT artist pens to add some colours.

The sketches above and below were done on a different sketchbook (made by Hahnemühle FineArt). It is in a landscape format and the paper, of excellent quality, takes watercolour well. Like Moleskine notebooks, it has an elastic band to close it, a pocket on the inside of the back cover and a bookmark ribbon. I had with me a Sennelier travel box with 12 half-pans of watercolour.

Visual art, not literature

Paul Signac: Portrait of Félix Fénéon , 1890 [Source: Wikimedia]

“En art plastique, la pensée ne vaut rien si la matière est mauvaise et la forme médiocre. C’est l’œil que la peinture doit émouvoir, et non par la littérature des sujets et des titres.”

That can be translated as:

“In visual art, the thought is worth nothing if the texture is bad and the form poor. It is the eye that paintings must move, not the literature of subjects and titles.”

Paul Signac in “The subject in painting”

Autumn walk in Clouts Wood

I have reworked Autumn in Clouts Wood, a painting done on site (see my previous post). I wanted to give it more texture and achieve more definition for some of the threes.

Autumn in Clouts Wood - Oil on canvas panel (6" x 8") by Benoit Philippe

Another try at art exhibitions labels

For my last exhibition, I tried a different way to print my exhibition labels. Instead of using a heavy card, I printed them on paper and then mounted the paper on foam board. The idea is to come closer to the type of labels you see in galleries and museums.

I proceeded this way:

• Printed all labels using PowerPoint, each label being in a black frame (to make sure they are the same size)
• Cut the labels leaving a seam
• Glued the paper on a 2 mm foam board and
• Cut each label on the foam board with a sharp craft knife, using the black frame as a guide.

The overall result looked good. The labels were light and sturdy and easy to affix to the wall with whitetack . The foam being quite fragile, I had to transport the labels in a plastic sandwich box.


There is still room for improvement:

• I had to redo some of the labels because the paper was torn away while cutting the label. I found out that the different density of the material caused the issue. The trick was to have a first pass with the blade to cut the paper and then a second pass to cut through the foam.

• Some labels had a thin black line on some of their sides. I will have to be more careful to cut “inside the line”. Getting rid of the frame would solve the problem, but it would also make more difficult to cut all labels to the same measurement. I should try to print the frames in a very light grey. This way, even if the line appears, it should be almost invisible from afar.

Related articles

• What your labels tell about you?
• Storing your exhibition labels
• What’s your title?

Labels Exhibition label Art exhibition Studio tip Studio hack

Watching The Blind Girl

This is another painting of visitors watching the art in the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery.

Watching The Blind Girl – Oil on canvas panel (6” x 8”) by Benoit Philippe

The Blind Girl is a painting by John Everett Millais.

Oil painting Pochade Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery