It really is no secret that I love art supplies and stationery. I suspect anyone with more than a vague interest in art is much the same! I could spend endless hours and dollars if left alone in an art supply store…and I can guarantee you that it takes real self control to resist the urge to buy every coloured tube of water colour I see when I am browsing online. But since I have to restrain myself and behave like an adult, I content myself with playing with my existing supplies, and there are few things I enjoy more than setting up a new watercolour palette. This past weekend was rainy and wet and not at all conducive to spending time anywhere other than at home, so I decided it was time for a change.
I set up the old one just before I went to London in May, and it served me well through that trip and various urban sketching adventures and general sketchbook play since. But it was looking grubby and worn, and I wasn’t really enjoying the colours so much any more.
This is the setup I used for most of 2017
I have been itching to use some of my new tube watercolours in my sketching kit, and had seen another artist’s setup in the same box that allowed for more pans and was super excited to put together something a little different. Now was the time to get watercolour smeared all over my fingers and fret about how many cents worth of pigment I just wasted!
The new palette filled and sat out to dry
The colours are a mix of Daniel Smith and Winsor and Newton tube paints. The new palette looks so juicy! I wanted more “neutrals” in the mix, and so I have a selection of “coloured neutrals” like Prussian Blue and Vandyke Brown and Perylene Maroon alongside the properly named Neutral Tint. There are a few convenience greens to test out since I always struggle with foliage in my urban sketches. And then some lovely yellows and reds. It looks like a jewel box doesn’t it?
This is the setup I used for most of 2017
My current sketchbook was also at an end, so I figured a fitting way to round it up was to swatch the two palette’s side by side. The names of the paints are all there if you can decipher my hurried scrawl. I am psyching myself up to do a mixing chart with a 24×24 grid ….yikes! Perhaps if next weekend is rainy! Meantime looking at the swatches makes me so happy!
Sketchbook pile on a temporarily clean desk
Speaking of piles of supplies… I didn’t think I had *that* many sketchbooks on the go at the moment…but then I cleaned up my desk and sketching bag. I have six books on the go. What you can see peeking out of the left-hand side of the photo there is a pile of fresh notebooks and sketchbooks ready to be sent into battle. I am well and truly addicted!
How many sketchbooks do you have on the go right now?
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Wooo! First properly hot day of the season and the Canberra Urban sketchers were out sketching! I found a lovely shady spot to set up in and got completely lost in my sketchbook. The location this time was the Shine Dome which is part of the Academy of Science. Affectionately known around town as the Martian Embassy. I had fun with this drawing, but I’m not entirely happy with the sketch as a whole. I think it lacks interest due to insufficient contrast – it’s all very same same. The dome should have been much lighter and with enough variation to show the curve of the dome with more than the outline against the sky. I did have fun, however, imagining that the agapanthus plant in the bed right in front of me was some manner of alien life form out on an exploratory mission. 🙂
This painting is one that I did as an experiment in exploring composition creation using a number of photos as well as having a go at portraiture in watercolour. Needs more practice, but I am happy for a first attempt 🙂 I used Daniel Smith and Winsor & Newton tube colours on Arches 330gsm hot press paper.
Yeesh! Where does the time go? It’s half way through November and the last time I wrote was mid-September. It seems I have done more apologising for not writing than writing anything substantial this year.
The fact of the matter is that I have needed to manage my overall energy levels far more closely this year than I had anticipated when I made my plans to post an article every week. Work has been busy and intense and earning a living takes far too much of my energy to allow for much else. So…writing content for my blog has drifted to the bottom of the to do list for a little while. Though I hasten to add that I know this is a first world problem, being able to pursue one’s passions in any small way is a privilege. I have a fortunate life.
The good news is that even though I have not been writing for publication, I have still been drawing and painting, but that too has seen ebbs and flows in the type of art I have wanted to create. I have found that I have less patience for sketchbook tomfoolery, but more of an appetite for having a more involved “proper” painting on my worktable. I can do small concentrated bursts of work a polished piece over the course of a couple of weeks and not feel overwhelmed or upset that I am not producing a finished piece every time I sit down. Which seems strange to me now that I think about it, but I will not question the muse lest she run away and leave me with no inspiration whatsoever! Here’s what I have been working on; I finally completed the Love Bug painting that had been sitting on the drawing board, untouched, for months (the original is for sale HERE and prints/cards etc available HERE).
I was also fortunate enough to be asked to do a super fun commission of a pinup cycle girl birthday card for a local customer. I was buzzing through the entire process of developing the concept and sketching up my ideas before committing to the final piece. I am pleased to say that my customer was very happy with her, as was his lovely wife who received the gift (printed products available in my Redbubble store).
Somewhat unexpectedly, I have been having a little fun with some comic relief lately too … she pops out onto the page from time to time to comment on my sometimes amusing life. Here are a couple of my favourites … my hair tends to feature quite a lot :) (you can see all of the webcomics so far HERE)
I could promise to write more regularly, but I am pretty sure that the last month and a half of the year will be much the same as the last couple have been. Perhaps the new year will be kinder to my aspirations.
Be sure to subscribe via the link on the right there so you don’t miss out on my (irregular) posts! And please bear with me while I figure out how to make the emails look interesting and worth reading! 🙂
This time three weeks ago I was sitting in the Barrowboy and Banker Pub at London Bridge …. today it is the location of a terror attack. It is a sobering thought. The thing I love about the Londoners is their ability to deal with this stuff without turning it into a major drama. They are not pushovers, but they respond rather than react. They have been dealing with terrorist attacks since WWII… from the Nazis through to the IRA and now wahhabists. It shows. They will carry on, and they will continue to live and thrive in their gorgeous city that I was lucky enough to explore for a short while. London, I love you.
I finished my first sketchbook of the year last weekend. Three months it took! Outside of travel journals, that’s the fastest I have ever filled a sketchbook. I’m pretty pleased with that effort, even if I do say so myself! (I’ll record a flip through at some stage. It is fun looking at the whole thing as a complete entity and not just disjointed snaps!)
Three months….the first quarter of the year has disappeared already and I find myself getting caught up in the hustle and bustle of work and life and not taking the time to draw as much as I feel I need to (ironic, I know, given I was just rabbiting on about how quickly I filled the book). It has been bothering me. I knew my energies were being expended elsewhere, but I didn’t make the connection, and then I found this quote in Austin Kleon’s fabulous book, Steal like an Artist:
Establishing and keeping a routine can be even more important than having a lot of time. Inertia is the death of creativity. You have to stay in the groove. When you get out of the groove, you start to dread the work, because you know it’s going to suck for a while – it’s going to suck until you get back into the flow….The trick is to find a day job that pays decently, doesn’t make you want to vomit, and leaves you with enough energy to make things in your spare time.
I let myself get out of the groove a bit in the last couple of weeks as my day job has become busier, and I can feel it in my diminished general satisfaction-with-life levels. So tired when I get home from work at the end of the day, thinking about what to draw takes too much effort! Funny how not creating things can lead to me feeling a bit rubbish. Suffice it to say I am working at putting pen to paper each day again…even if the output is not stellar.
The purple hand above is my favourite out of this week’s pages. Hands are such hard workers – from intricate little nuanced movements to grand gestures and manual labour. They are fun to draw … lots of wrinkles and folds – an ever changing landscape of hills and valleys as you wiggle them about.
If you want to take a look at what else I’ve drawn this week you can take a look HERE or HERE.
How do you manage your energy across your day/week? I know it’s swings and roundabouts, but I wonder if I can get more control over it all? If I figure it out I will let you know.
For the past six weeks or so I have been joining with a couple of hundred other students from around the world to work through Liz Steel’sSketchingNow Buildings course.
This sketch of the St John the Baptist Cathedral (Canberra)was drawn about six weeks ago during the first week of the course. We had looked at various types of sketches from painting the negative shapes, painting the abstract shapes and then finding the edges of the building and attempting to see the volumes that made up the complex buildings we selected. It is easy to see that this sketch has perspective issues and lacks any depth to the edges of the roof lines and the windows. It is a very flat representation of the cathedral.
The sketch below drawn today (from a slightly different angle) and I am very pleased with the change in detail and approach, and I can feel that this building has some solidity to it, and the overall proportions are far better (though the onion dome thing is still a little big). I spent about 45 minutes on this one… I think I could probably have slowed down and paid a bit more attention to the lifework, but it was blowing a gale and a little unpleasant. I am also slowly refining my urban sketching kit so that it is less juggling and more art-ing :). I am most pleased with the reduced stress levels that Liz’s method has allowed. Over all I found this drawing far more relaxing and meditative than it’s predecessor.
For the sake of comparison I had a bit of a dig back though my old sketchbooks and found this one… I think this is the very first building that i attempted to capture back in 2010…it really has no body to it at all and looks like cardboard cutout of a house.
This vignette was drawn in 2012 on location in Sydney. The elements of the building seem pasted on and I did have a go at adding at light and shade.
By comparison, this building at the ANU was captured last week on location, and whilst a little wonky in the verticals, I can feel it as a solid object occupying space, and it presents me with a recognisable facsimile of the building.
This one was done the weekend before, but this time from a photo I took in France a few years ago. I am especially pleased with the details in this one. My goal is to try to bring the relative precision of studio work to my onsite sketches. I have tendency to rush and it shows in the lifework in particular of my urban sketches.
i have loved every moment of the SketchingNow Buildings course and look forward to practising and capturing my local area and the places that I travel to.
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Last weekend we were treated to a very rare sunny Spring day here in Canberra. I say rare because we have been subjected to a particularly wet winter this year. The fabulous thing was that this miracle blue-sky day landed on the day of our monthly sketchcrawl, at the local flower show, Floriade.
I have been thinking a bit lately about how I have progressed (or not) in particular areas and had a bit of a trawl back through my Flickr albums to see what I had done in the past. I am pleased that over all I have improved and have kept up the habit of recording life in a sketchbook. I found in one of my earliest books, a capture of a Floriade scene.
This was how I captured the show six years ago when I was just starting out on the sketchbook journey.
The following three images are what I managed to complete this past weekend. I am pleased with the general progression and that I am choosing to tackle more difficult scenes. I am still struggling with drawing on location in terms of getting accurate representations of the things I see (as opposed to controlled indoor sketches). I think the ‘rush’ factor also plays a part in the quality of the sketches, so slowing down is something to tackle. The only thing for it, really, is practice…lots of it! 🙂 Not an onerous task at all.
Stage 88 – where there were school children and local bands entertaining the crowd that grew as it got closer to lunchtime. The HUGE crowds precluded taking up a seat close to the garden beds to draw blooms unfortunately, so I settled for this structure. I chatted to a couple of little girls who came up to check out what I was doing. I love that kids are so curious!
I arrived early in order to get parking and sat and sketched the entry point while I waited for my fellow sketchers.  My aim with this one was to have a go at capturing the movement through the gates….but they moved too fast! 🙂
My next big practice push and learning point is adding people into my scenes….these ones I caught as they stood waiting to meet friends and family at the entrance. Most moved on too quickly, and I need to work on making them actually look like people 🙂  I am currently doing a course about drawing buildings….next people!
Stay tuned for my wrap up of the drawing buildings course and some more before and after fun 🙂
Top drawing: Moleskine sketchbook, W&N waterfolours, Uniball eye pen. Remaining drawings: Stillman & Birn Alpha series  sketchbook, Uniball eye pen, W&N and Daniel Smith watercoolours
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For some unknown reason I decided to sign up for the Everyday in May drawing challenge … I didn’t think I’d keep up, but I’m doing ok so far 🙂 I am enjoying seeing a diverse range of artists share their interpretation of the prompts supplied for each day and having fun coming up with creative interpretations of the prompts for my own drawings. The ebbs and flows of quick drawings and more involved ones as I work around what life throws at me shows me that there is always time to fit in a quick drawing here and there 🙂 I really hope this challenge keeps me drawing more regularly into he future….in the meantime I am looking forward to the final two weeks of this challenge!
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This is Fergus. He’s 12 years old and has had a distinctly unpleasant life as a racing dog and then (we think) as a stud dog in the greyhound industry. He’s a bit beaten up and rough around the edges these days. He’s a bit unsteady on his legs and he can’t see very well and his flatulence would clear an aircraft hangar. But he is a sweet boy in need of my loving care in his twilight years, and is always happy to see me. Glad to have you in my life Ferg!
This painting was created so that I could play with masking techniques. It was a lot of fun to be able to slop the background colour around with abandon, but I did learn to be somewhat careful with the masking fluid, which is a similar colour to the paper, and makes it difficult to see and little holes in the latex. You likely cannot see them in the photo, but there are a couple of little green spots on the Furry One 🙂 He’s not mouldy… that’s just me learning to be more thorough and not rush to the fun part 🙂
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This month’s Canberra Urban Sketcher’s meet up was at the local airport, starting at the new Vibe hotel. The airport precinct has a lot of brilliant things to sketch  – anything from sculptures to people to buildings and funky new hotels. My challenge to day was to attempt to capture the movement in the water features up on the departures drop off area. They are hypnotising to watch…I have no idea how they work. It looks as through a tornado of water is swirling up through the middle of the glass tube and letting water shimmer down the outside. I had fun attempting to capture the reflected colours from the sky and plants and surrounding buildings, though i couldn’t quite get the shimmy of the water down the outside.
Looking at this photo now I can see that i was so fixated on the feature itself that I completely missed the reflection in the surrounding support. :S
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