Way back in September I took myself out for a sketching date out to Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve. The drive out there is a lot of fun, with lots of twists and turns that my sporty little mini leaned into like a champion! It was a wonderfully sunny day and still a little warm even in the late afternoon. My goal was to walk the wetlands Sanctuary track, and try to sketch wildlife if I managed to see any. I took my A6 book and tiny art toolkit palette, a pen, pencil and waterbrush. I travelled very light!
Before the entry to the wetlands there is an abandoned cottage from the late 1800s called Rock Valley Homestead. I stopped in for a wander around and had a sit in a lovely sunny spot to enjoy the garden.
This is a little of what remains of the kitchen. The inside rooms are pretty bare, it is really just a shell of the building. Some of it had been burned in the big bushfires that came through in January 2003. But what is left is well preserved and tended.
my walking poles
The path around the Sanctuary is dotted with wonderful places to sit and watch the comings and goings of the birds, or to have a picnic, or just to listen to the froglets go off.
Wetlands
I was there a little late in the day to catch much of the wildlife, and too early for the platypii but I did manage to see a female black swan on her nest!
She had just taken over nest duty from her partner and was settling in for the evening on her clutch of seven eggs. I was able to stand a couple of metres away and enjoy watching her snuggle and shift to get into the perfect position.
This was a quick watercolour sketch of one of the lagoons along the way … I really need to work on my landscapes! Can you recommend a good online course by any chance?
This creek was so lovely! The bubbling of the water over rocks and around branches was so relaxing. It was getting late by the time I got to this point, otherwise I would have loved to sit and sketch the branches and rocks and grass. I shall have to return!
Snake sculpture
At various points around the loop there were iron sculptures made from scrap metal.
Platypus sculpture
They made me smile!
Kangaroo sculpture
I haven’t made the time to get out of the house much in the last couple of years, and it was so good to get out. I will do it againe!~
I have been putting off filming this sketchbook tour for months now. I wanted to do one with commentary so that I could explain to you what I was thinking when I was creating particular spreads. This week I bit the bullet and did it anyway. It’s not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but we all have to start somewhere, right?
I hope you enjoy taking a stroll through my sketchbook and listening to me prattle on about it! Let me know what you think on the post here or on YouTube!
What a difference two and a half years makes! The top sketch was done this morning in about 45 minutes flat. Mostly because I misread my watch and thought that I had been sitting there for an hour longer than I had been. This was not a big leap for my poor brain to make since it was 9 degrees C with an apparent temperature of about 2 degrees with the wind taken into account. The next sketch was done in the opposite conditions – a midsummer scorcher. I remember sitting there for almost the full two hours labouring over the proportions and perspective. It was, I think, my second ever Urban Sketchers meet up.
The two sketches are wildly different. I tried something different with today’s one, in that I focussed on a single part of the facade rather than trying to capture all of the rather long, low building. It is far looser and was completed quicker but the lines feel steadier even if the sketch is pretty wonky. I also left a lot of the page untouched with pigment.
The older sketch has far more tentative line work and I appear to have worked hard to cover the entire page with paint. It feels scratchy and wonky even though I was trying to be careful. The shadows are clumsy and I think I may have turned King George V into a little person. It is fascinating to be able to compare my growth as an urban sketcher using samples of my own work rather than looking at the giants in the field and winding up feeling defeated. I can see improvement in what I am producing, and that is encouraging.
At the end of the day I like both sketches, not just for the fact that I exited my hermitage to interact with other urban sketchers for a couple of hours, but for the life memories attached to them. Oddly I can remember what was happening in my life when I was trying to figure out how to render a bronze statue on a flat piece of paper. There’s something about drawing that sucks everything in and locks it into the image. I love it!
We just spent a week mountain biking and adventuring in New Zealand. It definitely wasn’t long enough and I definitely want to go back again…..but in the meantime I had a blast riding, adventuring and recording our adventures in my sketchbook. Take a peek…:)
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Figuring out how my paints behave on the Moleskine watercolour paper is fun!!
learning how to do maps and freehand lettering…
Crap photo…but practising buildings…
Sketches during worship this morning…
Loving that I am making time to draw so much. 🙂
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I am LOVING sketching with ink and watercolour! The results are so immediate and fun!  I think I could sit and do this all day long 🙂 Here are two that I did this week:
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One of my architectural practice pieces for the trip…
I’m too excited to keep this a secret any longer!
I have been inspired by the beautiful Blurb books created by Liz Steel showcasing her urban sketches and adventures with Borrmini, that I am thinking that I will create a Blurb book of my own from my adventures in France later this year. I am more than a little excited 🙂
What is a Blurb book? It’s a book that is available for order and printed on demand just for you and then posted directly to you. Nifty system huh?
My French holiday sketchbook will contain all of the sketches I manage to capture while I’m travelling, and be combined with the odd photo here and there as well as excerpts from my written journals. I am so wound up about it that the anticipation is just about killing me 🙂 I may even include some of the lead up and preparation sketches and back story …. we’ll see.
Anyway…I’m telling you all now so that I can’t chicken out later 🙂 I would love to have it out in time for Christmas, but having a realistic look at my work schedule and art commissions on the list…it will probably be early next year.
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I am thinking I’ll take a watercolour Moley to France later in the year as my travel journal, so I decided to do some experimenting today…here are the somewhat less than stellar results! Adapting to the new page shape is an undexpected challenge too!
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I love spending lazy Sunday evenings with friends 🙂 What better way to celebrate than with a drawing 🙂
The colour behind the food was supposed to be “redder” I don’t like the way the sketchpaper in the Molekskines takes colour. Will almost definitely be taking a watercolour Moley to France later in the year.
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