"Canadian Mason"
©2017, 11" by 14", Watercolour

This painting was a long time coming!

For years, I'd wanted to paint a mason jar partly filled with water - it seems to be a popular subject for watercolour painters. When I first thought of it though, I knew that I needed to put a twist on the concept.

Since I loved all things paddling, and was a huge fan of the late Canadian paddling superstar, Bill Mason, I thought it would be neat to put Bill inside the vessel so that it would truly be a Mason jar.

I put the project on the back burner for a number of years, and only recently decided to revisit it (due mostly to the positive reception that my paddling portrait of Bill had been receiving at shows of late). To do it convincingly though, I had to be able to work from a source image with an actual tiny figurine of a paddling Bill suspended in a mason jar so that I could see how the contours of the glass (specifically the embossed letters) refracted the colours and the shape of a little man in a canoe.

I created a tiny figurine out of home-made modelling clay and, once it was cooked (even though it looked a lot like a cookie), I painted it appropriately. Then, I suspended it in a mason jar with a couple of rocks below it, and took plenty of pictures of it from different angles and with different backgrounds until I found an image that I was happy with.

When it came to the model, I obviously used it just as a reference, and filled in the details by looking at the aforementioned portrait I'd already painted. To make it even easier, I still had the paints that I'd used to paint the first one a decade ago! Another one of the reasons that I love watercolours!

Bill always wore the same outfit in all of his movies (red checkered shirt, red bandanna, and a beat-up old hat), and always paddled the same iconic red canoe, so I'm confident that, even though you can't see all of the details of the figure perfectly, it's still pretty obvious as to who it is in the mason jar.