A watercolour workshop

The watercolour tutor - Jenny - also does pre-recorded workshops where she slowly paints something, explaining what she's doing, and you paint along. Not the full learning experience of the classes but still good, and in the interests of getting my brush miles up I did the easy beginner workshop of four strange little paintings. Strange because of my painting, not because of her design, hers are quite lovely. We did a starfish, which is when I discovered that my masking fluid was a bit old and lumpy.

We did a field of flowers, perhaps poppies? Perhaps not.

A city scene, which I quite like, although that very blurry foreground is not exactly what was expected. But I'm going to roll with it, because it might be fog, or atmospheric mist.

And some little cacti in pots. They were fun. I struggle most with anything where the paints have to blend, mine are completely out of control and do whatever the hell they want. Which is the point, but is also very frustrating.

Other than that, it has been a busy week with parliament sitting, uni assignments due, final school exams next week and gradual back to the office for my husband. Which he is very happy about, although work clothes and traffic are a bit of a shock. Number one had the second dose of vaccine on Monday, so was knocked about for a couple of days (didn't help with the assignments!) but it is good that the household is finally fully vaxxed. Number two has a job in a shop lined up for December (no idea about shifts or anything, but retail is always a bit of a lottery) which he is looking forward to. I personally am looking forward to more beach time! Bring on January.

Escape, at last

After what seemed like much longer than nine weeks, I finally busted out of landlocked Canberra and made it to the beach!!! Such happiness. The weather forecast for Saturday and Sunday was appalling (storms and rain) so I took the day off work on Friday to make sure I had at least one sunny day, and went down Friday morning. In the end the whole weekend was glorious, and the extra day was just a completely undeserved treat.

It was very busy for a weekend in October, with lots of Canberra number-plates and lots of long shaggy lawns getting mown. I didn't go anywhere or do anything other than two wonderful swims (cold! but decent waves), a bit of sewing, a lot of reading, and just plain old sitting. I did fix the dishwasher, it gets cranky if it's left alone for too long.  It was such a treat not to be woken at 7 am by construction, and to walk by the sea, and be entirely alone, and have toast for dinner. I am already planning the next escape.... 

Another slightly bonkers Domestika course

So I invested another $13.90 in a Domestika painting course 'Contemporary Still Life with Watercolor' by Elisa Alcalde Castro who is a Chilean artist. I now know that the Spanish for watercolour is acuarela - which is a very pretty word that I like to drop into conversation. The subtitles were mostly fine although the genders were all wrong. Luckily number two son is doing Spanish for his international baccalaureate so he was able to explain the very particular issues with Spanish second person pronouns, or something. I said that after six hours of Elisa I felt basically fluent in Spanish and he said that the Chilean accent is considered mostly laughable by the rest of the Spanish-speaking world, and I should forget it all immediately. So I have.

I enjoyed the course. She uses watercolour very differently to the traditional way - lots of paint thickly from the tube like an acrylic. Forming the still life was interesting though, then drawing it up and painting. Mine is a complete disaster from a number of perspectives but I did it and learned something, and it was fun. I thought about never showing it to the world (because it is very bad) but here it is. I might try another one in the future (perhaps not gin, a tin of cocoa and toothpaste this time, why did I do that?)

I amused myself further by more blatant copying of Anna Lau's floral designs. I've probably taken this as far as I can but the results are pretty, and it is a soothing thing to do while watching Netflix. 

Walking (slightly cheating)

My normal Sunday 15km walk has a bakery about two-thirds of the way around (if you go clockwise, which I did) and we needed bread, so I stopped and got bread, then had to carry a slippery plastic bag, which was a pain ... so I hired one of those wee orange electric scooters that infest the cities of the world at the moment (not my photo, that is Brisbane...)

It was SO MUCH FUN. Took a while to get it started (instructions are NOT designed for middle-aged women without their reading glasses) but once I got it up and running the actual scootering was very straightforward. And FUN did I say how much FUN? Zipping along the pavement - luckily mostly empty - up the long slow slope to the back of the bush track. I couldn't take it through the reserve so had to walk the last bit over the hill, but totally worth it. And no injuries, except to the bread, which I dropped at one point and had to go back for, but didn't run over it, so all good. Best $5.95 I've spent all week.

This was earlier on in the walk, a perfect spring day. Our lockdown has ended, and a whole raft of other restrictions lifted much sooner than planned too, despite the ACT's government deep commitment to Fortress Canberra. As anyone could have predicted, once the surrounding NSW restrictions ended, there was no point in trying to hold the line - tens of thousands of people go from NSW to the ACT each day for work or school or shopping or doctor and there have been standing exemptions for people who live in the ' border bubble'. When NSW had restrictions on travel that was fine, they couldn't go outside their region either, but when that was lifted it was crazy that the border people could travel anywhere in NSW and then into the ACT, where ACT residents couldn't leave. So at midday on Saturday they unexpectedly lifted the restriction for regional NSW and three hours later my husband had packed a bag and left to go and check on our little beach house. Which is fine, thank goodness! And he had a lovely day and a half and I will take a longer break after this parliamentary sitting, which will be AMAZING.

Here is the last struggle up the hill, it was starting to cloud over, just as well, I was getting a bit warm. And I've just seen that they're going to open up the shops again in the ACT - another ludicrous consequence - I can drive 15 minutes to the Kmart in NSW and shop, but the one 15 minutes in the other direction in the ACT is still closed. Which has been pissing off the ACT retailers no end so I'm not surprised they're changing that one! And bars and restaurants too, people have been going over for a beer, and I don't blame them. Good try ACT government, but geography wins every time. 

Wet into wet

We are working on our wet-into-wet technique at the moment, and also making good dark darks. I struggle with dark darks because of my Natural Frugality. Paint is expensive! But you need dark in order for the light to glow. That was profound. Life lessons through the medium of watercolour paint. 

Lots of flaws in these, but I quite liked doing them because it is linear. I struggle more with the landscapes and anything where you do a squiggle that 'hints' at a tree. Or a lake. Or an alien abduction because my squiggles don't usually look like anything at all. The lessons continue to be great - really detailed step by step exercises and using it in a painting. Very well thought-through for beginners and for the generally hopeless.

We did a variety of feathers to show the wet on wet effect. Not feathers that you would see on any bird, but entertaining to do.

Speaking of wet on wet, it has been raining most of the week. The garden is looking lovely, and it should be a mild summer which is wonderful news. Probably catastrophic flooding but around here you either get that or catastrophic bushfires, nothing in between, and I think I'd rather take the floods. I live on a hill, it will be fine. 

We are loosening up the lockdown tomorrow which will be good, although not much will change. The shops will stay shut despite being on track to being the most vaccinated city in the world. At the moment 98.8 % of Canberrans over the age of 11 have had a first dose, which means we are pretty close to putting lists of the unvaccinated on the front page of the Canberra Times and silently gathering outside their houses. No, just joking. Kind of. 

A bushwalk

We went back down into the national park on the weekend - fully prepared this time - and did a lovely four hour walk. The first bit was up to the lookout and was reasonably busy; but then we went on the longer loop with not a soul to be seen. It was fabulous ... a few hills but not too bad, and a decent trail. 

The weather was lovely, sunny but still cool and there were even some streams running thanks to the recent rain. Water on the landscape is rare and unusual around here. Yes, my husband does walks in jeans. He is much tougher than me (I would chafe).

He also saw a mountain dragon which he was very excited about. It was about four cm long and I couldn't see it for AGES because the camouflage is so good. 

Last week I also did the double-basin lake walk which is about 15 km - I'd done the basins separately hundreds of times but never together, it's a nice flat stroll.

Floriade is cancelled again but they have troughs of tulips sprinkled around to make us feel better. I am still cranky because I can't go to the coast yet. Apparently 98% of Canberrans over 12 have had at least one dose of vaccine, at this stage we are more likely to die by meteor strike. Or lack of beach time, I feel that could kill you. Parliament's back next week so I couldn't take any time off anyway, but I feel like I should be able to...

This is the path back of dairy flat road. It is  so very unusually green! Long may it last.

Domestika courses

I'm trying not to rush through my watercolour classes - it's very tempting just to race onto the next one but it will probably be better if I do some practice between classes. There is homework to do, and I do it, but honestly with whatever crazed hyper-focus is going on in my lockdown lunacy at the moment I need more. More painting. At all times. So my solution is to do some Domestika watercolour courses - which are cheap, entertaining and give you a bit of practice at stuff.

So I did 'Vibrant Floral Patterns with Watercolors' by Anna Lau - which is exactly what it says on the tin! The courses are nicely produced, and it's interesting to see how artists work. I'm not sure if it's exactly how you learn anything - it's a bit once over lightly and it's very much "this is how I do it and you'll get the result that I get" - but I potter along, do the exercises and projects, and work up my brush control. 

Anna Lau uses her patterns for mugs, and prints, and washi tape and all sorts of things. They are very cute, although half her course is about using Photoshop to tidy it up and brighten the colours, which is interesting but not the kind of thing I'm going to do. These are my direct copies of her work :) The one below is not upside down it's meant to be 'hanging'. Hmmm.

Hours of fun for $15. Excellent.  

The great outdoors

Lockdown seems to have me constantly roaming. There are always things to click and collect somewhere, or work, or groceries, or if all else fails actual exercise. My normal 14 km walk used to exhaust me, now it barely touches the sides. I am not getting fitter, just trying to keep down the crazy. Soooo craaaaazy. Here are photos of Canberra not being at all crowded. It was a public holiday yesterday, so a long weekend, not that anyone went anywhere. 

I walked past my work on Saturday (I like to avoid actual roads, and the pathways round Parliament House are lovely). It was a blustery day and the flag was at full stretch. 

On the weekend the ACT national parks re-opened so my husband and I and about two hundred thousand other people headed there to see something different for a change (yes, the government has no problem with us driving an hour and a half to walk amongst the trees, but we can't drive twenty minutes to Spotlight because it's in NSW, federal systems are stupid). 

We went to Honeysuckle Creek which is actually really cool because it's the site of the tracking station that relayed the footage of the first moon walk for all the world to see! Decommissioned and moved in the 1980s, so only concrete there now, but still kind of neat. 

The 2020 bushfires absolutely tore through here. Some parts are regenerating nicely, but others aren't and it's quite shocking. Even the re-growing parts won't have the same habitat for decades, if ever. 

Our asshole neighbours are ignoring all the construction bylaws and doing building work on Sundays and public holidays now, so we very much enjoyed the peace and quiet of the trees. We weren't prepared for a long walk so didn't go very far, but maybe next weekend. And when we got back friends invited us over for a drink or three (you are allowed to have two people over to your house now, it's very exciting) and that was the weekend.

Stormy days

Storm season has started early in Australia, and a cracker blew through at 11.30 last night - waking me up and making us all a bit tired and snoozy this morning. I swear one lightning and thunder was directly over the house, lighting up the neighbourhood and making the windows rattle in their frames. Although we do have very crappy windows, when lockdown is over I am going to investigate double glazing, at least for the bedroom.

In the pouring rain on Wednesday afternoon I took number two for his second jab. There were literally thousands of people and a massive queue but they are very efficient and pushed him through in about 45 minutes, which is fine. You're not supposed to take pictures of other people so I have blobbed on their faces. Yesterday he felt a bit off but hopefully will be OK today, and it's good to have him all vaxxed! Especially seeing it's back to school next week, just for the final year students.

He also got accepted into his university accommodation which is very exciting and very real. Not his first pick - which was the massive building, super cheap tiny room, shared bathroom number - but the second pick two bedroom, one bathroom, little kitchenette version in a smaller building (but still 300-odd students! good god). The pictures online look great, and we all read the student handbook with great interest. No bongs, pets, abrasive cleaners or going out on to the balcony EVER. He has to accept by Tuesday, which is months before he finds out if he actually gets into the uni course .... will we get the $1400 deposit back? Who would know.