Wollongong

On the weekend it was the NSW Scale Modellers Show 2024 down at Wollongong so my husband and I went for a day trip on Saturday - him to see the little models of things and try not to buy more books, kits and tools - and me to go to the art gallery and do a little light shopping. It's about a three-hour highway drive each way, so a long day but not ridiculous.

It was very cold and foggy when we left Canberra but Wollongong was lovely and sunny. The art gallery is in a cool art deco building and the art was good - not a huge display but with several excellent exhibitions that I really enjoyed, including one of landscapes of the Illawarra (local region) that mixed up new art with various older bits they'd dragged out of the basement, including a few nineteenth century watercolours that I peered at closely. There weren't that many people there, so I got to do some slow peering and pitiless judging. 

This is probably my favourite of all the 'local landscape' works. There were quite a few by this artist and the wonderful confidence of leaving out half of the substance of a person and what that does to the landscape ... I was in awe. The artist's name is Euan Macleod and he is originally from NZ, like all good things.

Someone had done eggs! They are a fit subject for art after all. She had put them in with a heap of grocery-related works. Nice.

I had a cafe lunch, bought some cardies and some new sheets, went back to the model show for a look around, and then we drove home. Nice day out for the 50-something crowd... On Sunday I went for my long walk and the fog was just starting to lift. It was freezing.

Sydney again

I had another couple of days in Sydney last week for work - always good to see something different! I do enjoy so many parts of my job; especially when it involves visiting two distilleries, a paper recycling plant and a factory that makes lab-grown meat! Absolutely fascinating, of course we had tastings, although we had to sign a waiver because it's not approved for sale in Australia yet :)

We finished up our visiting day in the Rocks, just about right under the Harbour Bridge. It was a perfect Sydney winter's day - cool but sunny, people settling in for drinks. It can be a lovely place if you ignore the people and traffic and noise. 

I'm not allowed to put alcohol on my work credit card so I take the opportunity to order whatever mocktails are on offer ... this is a 'vietnamese flag' and it was delicious. And probably better for me than a glass of wine. 

Work does also like to go a bit budget with the hotel - but there is absolutely no excuse for this! Why would you? Who wants this? It took me about ten minutes to figure out how to turn it off but then the cleaners re-enabled it the next day! Why?????

Random paintings

Here is a collection of random paintings that I do when I see YouTube tutorials or TikToks that catch my eye. I do not think it is a good way to learn, but sometimes, after a day at work, you just want to paint a page of eggs.

Or chickens - although to be honest I did this on Norfolk Island where there are random chickens EVERYWHERE. I wanted to try and capture them but only got this far. Definitely less is more with chickens.

I am pleased with the face of this bird but the body shows that I manifestly do not understand a bird's anatomy. At all. There are different types of feathers apparently, and you should paint them differently. Thank you Denise Soden, I enjoyed the tutorial but cannot see the attraction of wildlife painting.

Here are some 'proper' watercolour efforts that are a bit more painterly. Not so great.

New handbag

After carefully researching for months, and lifting about every bag in the Sydney CBD, I bought a bag online one Friday night after a couple of glasses of wine based on a random TikTok. I don't know why it came up on my For You page, but it did, and so I went to the website and ordered myself a yellow bag with wooden handles and a long strap from a small Melbourne maker.

It is very pretty and I am very happy with it - it is a good size, can fit a heap in it, and it's a lovely colour. 

The owner did a follow up TikTok where she packed it on her kitchen bench to send to me (very small company) and I can confirm that it was beautifully packaged in a dust bag, in tissue paper, with little stickers, and a very lovely box. 

I enjoyed unpacking it and I have enjoyed carrying it around ... although the long leather strap is the wrong shade of brown to my eyes, so I've ordered a couple of plain black ones from Amazon and we'll see if I like those better. 

I do like mustard,  although the bag is officially 'turmeric', which is probably more accurate. Here is the cat 'helping' us change the mustard/turmeric sheets. 

More Norfolk Island pictures

Here's some more of these, probably the last to be honest, so I didn't quite fill my sketchbook. But it was good fun, both to do there and then to do at home from photos, like a lovely reminder of the holiday. Here's something historic, with a disintegrating boat. The colours are quite muted, which is fine, but when you paint it it looks a bit dull.

Here is when we went to lunch on Anzac Day at the RSL. I think at this point I'd decided to brighten the colours up to what I thought they should be.

This is one of the historic houses that we went into - fascinating - and quite lovely. It looks back over the ocean, so would have been very pleasant, in the intervals between violent penal colony / isolated hell-hole / involuntary re-location etc. 

And this is the privy out the back - perhaps not so pleasant. I was trying to paint the stones / bricks / concrete, which are really cool colours and shapes. I did not succeed, but it was fun trying.

This is a different technique, where you use a non-waterproof pen to do the sketch, then a wet brush to create shadows and darkness from the lines, where you want them. Clearly I have not yet mastered this technique - some bad smudges! - but it gives a whole different edge to both the lines and the shadows. I might play more.

Retro fashion

I must have been inspired by the colours of the autumn leaves, because I wore a shirt to lunch with friends that I think I wore every day in the early 1990s. I loved it so much that it still hangs in my wardrobe, despite not having had an outing for at least 30 years. 

Flowers! What is not to like. Despite having worn it so much there is little photo evidence - never a party shirt as such - but here is one with my oldest niece, so that dates it probably mid-1992.

And here is my other retro purchase - new shoes, but based very much on the white Reeboks that I desperately wanted in the mid 1980s but could never have afforded. They were about $200 back then I think - out of the question. 

These ones were only $70, and clearly not the same quality, and also targeted at old people like me :) But I like them and I like wearing them ... giving my inner 14 year old a present she probably didn't deserve (she was a bit of a pain, on reflection :)

Such rain

I went down to the beach on Thursday night - to work from home on Friday and maybe get a beach walk in - and it rained from the second I arrived until Sunday afternoon. And not just the occasional shower or a bit of drizzle - it was solid rain with occasional really heavy rain. Which is good for my work productivity but not good for exercise or even possibly getting a swim in. 

This is from Sunday afternoon before I left. The ocean was very brown with a big swell which meant lots of wave foam. I quite like it - it's not pollution, just organic things that have come down the rivers then make a soup that can be stirred up into foam.  So one little walk, but lots of sewing, and several items that I might actually wear! I'll take a photo when I do.

This little fellow gave me a hell of a scare when I opened up the extractor fan - I think he must have come down the vent from the outside. I don't mind lizards really but it was quite large and very speedy. I tried to shoo him into a tub but he dropped to the floor and took off behind the kitchen cabinets ... where he probably still is.

Autumn leaves

Every year I do this because every year I am amazed by how lovely the trees are. When we were away it went from early autumn to late autumn in a week, so I took some photos while it was still lasting. This is from my walk around the lake on the weekend. It was grey and cold but still good to stretch the legs.

Here you have two police cars stopping a busy road - you can't see in this picture but the queue of Sunday traffic on the left went for a very long way. And in the other direction, a forlorn truck slowly and unsuccessfully backing up. And then unsuccessfully trying to turn over the median strip (too steep). 

I think at some point after the off-ramp the truck realised it couldn't fit under the bridge at the far right, and called the police. Which is better than taking out the bridge I guess, but chaos ensued. When I came back over the bridge two hours later it had all cleared, but it was probably the most exciting thing that happened on a Canberra road that morning :)

The lake, uninviting but pretty. I would like to try and paint that but I'm not doing very well with landscapes. I still need the straight lines of buildings and things.

This is the sports oval by the primary school that they turned into a hospital at the start of 2020 and are slowly returning to being a sports oval. The buildings and carparks have gone and they are re-turfing and re-seeding now. A slow process but it will be nice when it's done (it was a bit scrappy before anyway). At least they kept all the perimeter trees, which are the most wonderful yellow.

More Norfolk Island

Here are some more photos of Norfolk Island and - worryingly - my interpretation of the scenery. I bought a new sketchbook to take over with high ambitions (too high, 24 pages is too many for one week) but it is a lovely little book with very nice paper, so that's good. The actual sketches? Marginal.

This is where we stayed - I painted it once from the front and once from the back - once kind of realistic and once all Ian Fennelly splashy. I like the splashy.

This is the view from the back of the Sirius museum, which I actually started while I was sitting there, which is something I want to get more comfortable doing. It feels awkward to draw in the open air, and I have to get over myself. But the perspective is better than if I had tried to draw it just from the photograph. The buildings look closer in real life than they do in the photo.

And this is the same buildings looking back the other way. My cows are terrible. I wanted to give them a go because there are so many cows about and they are quite pretty in their own way ... but mine are not good. The one on the left looks like a person in a cow suit.

And another historic-type building.