“I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers. It would be terrible if we just skipped from September to November, wouldn’t it?”
—L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
And I’m so glad my first visit to Prince Edward Island was an October one.
Even without the peak fall color everywhere, the island was easily one of the most beautiful, picturesque places I’ve ever seen. In fact, the gratuitous beauty got to be a running gag between my travel companion and me—with each new jaw-dropping vista, one of us would roll our eyes and sigh, “Jeez, I guess I’ll just look at another pretty scene…” and then laugh.
Actually, laughing about it was about the only way we could keep our sanity. It was all I could do not to abandon any attempt at sketching (because what puny drawing could ever hold a candle to the real thing?) and just burst into dumbfounded tears over the enormity of it all. Because all those October trees, and October fields, and October skies made for two days so perfect that no amount of careful painting could ever do them justice.
I just got back from two glorious weeks in the Maritimes. I still have a lot of color finishing to do on my trip sketches, and somehow it’s still four hours later in my brain—so for now, here are just a couple of drawings to give you a taste.
The tiny fishing village of Peggys Cove (oddly, there’s no apostrophe in the “official” spelling) is a place I’d been wanting to see for many years—and thanks to the perfect weather on the day I spent there, it became one of the highlights of my trip. I’m told the place is one of the most-photographed places in Canada—and it’s not hard to see why. As I heard a tourist from Texas exclaim behind me, “Everywhere you look there’s a picture!”
Boy, howdy, is there ever. I sketched, and sketched, and sketched for hours—even in a steady, icy, screaming wind (the reason I couldn’t do any actual painting on site). Every time I finished a scene and started to walk on, I’d get about three steps before finding another vantage point I just had to sketch. I ended up filling fifteen page spreads that day with my pen scratches—so you can bet you’ll be seeing a lot more of Peggys Cove before too long.
