This year I decided to do Plein Airpril again, but from photos, since Toronto’s April weather is rarely good, and I have been so busy photographing things this past year that I’m drowning in my own reference!
And I did it! I did 30 paintings this April, on wood panels ranging from slightly smaller than 5″ square up to 7.5 x 9″!
Here are the paintings:
I have done plein airpril in the past – and finished! – but I wanted to really feel motivated this year, and so I decided to challenge myself to paint them all on wooden panels, and hang them up as I went. So I cleared out a corner of my studio, hung 30 3M hooks, primed 30 panels, added hanging hardware to the backs of all 30 of them, and hoped that would motivate me to make it all the way through. Here is how it started:
And here’s the big finish:
It was super motivating to have them go up one by one and start filling in that wall, and I will absolutely do this again for other series of work I produce in future! Honestly, I loved it, I really recommend it.
For my set-up, I fiddled around a little before settling on using a cork board and pinning the panels to it with pushpins each day, as that was modular, sat in my desk easel well, and let me move things out of the way for freelance work easily enough. You can see some of that setup here:
I used a sealing airtight palette for my gouache, so it stayed pretty wet between days. This works when I know I’ll be using it again – if I do this and then leave it for weeks or months, I do end up getting some mold sometimes. But with daily use? No chance of problems! Only fresh, enticing paint!
Doing 30 finished gouache paintings in a month is a huge learning experience, and I played with a few different variables, including what colours I used (so many different ones), how I did my underpainting (ended up liking using inktense pencils for the drawing, then throwing an underpainting over them with a fun colour), and which brushes I used (I always default to flats with gouache, but I decided to really explore all my rounds, and learned a lot about how to make fun marks with those too!) – and of course, what I painted.
Thematically, I decided to stick to photos I have of Toronto – our local architecture, infrastructure, flora, fauna, etc. Getting out there with the camera so much this past year has taught me a lot about what kind of lighting and framing I enjoy, and digging through all those photos to pick out ones to paint was incredibly fun! I also went back through my archives – there’s some very old photos in there, but I’m glad I got to go back down memory lane and explore!
Doing something this focused for 30 days was extremely educational, of course, but it also is a stamina game, and not just physically. My mind loves to switch gears as soon as it feels like it’s learned something new, so after only a few paintings I could feel that siren call to switch mediums or formats or projects starting. I think having the wall of blank primed panels looming over me was a huge help in staying focused and feeling good about it! And of course, switching out the subject matter, brushes, colours – these all helped keep me in the game as well.
In the end, gouache has become my comfort zone. I know what it does and how it works at a baseline level now, and it’s finally time to start asking myself questions about the more meta layers of the painting process – what kind of stylization do I want to aim for? What kind of marks, values, colour language feel appropriate for the image I’m making? What does it mean to make a painting out of one scene versus another?
In contrast to plein air, this series could only have been painted from photos – most of these compositions are inherently fleeting, whether because of their contents (flying birds) or the position of the viewer (in a car on the highway). The challenge of making a painting on site is different, and one I do want to tackle more this summer! But getting into these pieces has opened a lot of new possible paths of investigation to me with gouache, and I think my next studio challenge (which I will save for later in the year) will be doing tiny thumbnails as warmups more often – studying from cinema or fine art or photography, I think. We’ll see.
In the interim, I’ve had some folks reach out and ask about buying the original of one of these, and I do want to figure out how to make that possible for folks outside of Toronto, but I haven’t got that solved just yet. But, if you are in Toronto, I’ll be bringing these with me to a group show I’m in on the last weekend of May – I’ll share more details when we officially announce! And whatever is left after that will go to the Danforth Arts Market, I think. Again, I’ll keep you updated!
I did figure out how to make prints available, though! I have got all of these scanned nicely and uploaded to my INPRNT shop in a collection called Toronto Views – Plein Airpril 2026 – click through to see them all and see what formats are available (art prints, cards, and more) and also see what sales INPRNT is running, because friends? They are very often running sales.
If you do pick one of these up, I’d love to know how it looks in its new home!
In the end, this was very satisfying, really fun, and a wonderful evening routine for me in a month full of work and life and really wild weather, actually, I am very glad I chose to stay inside this year.
Thanks for reading along! I think, after everything, my favourite is Rooftop Company. Question before you go: which one is your favourite?
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