These ones are better

I am marginally happier with this set of paintings. First up, excellently multi-coloured dog shaking off water droplets. I did not think this one would come together until right at the end - it was lots of different colours of swirly bits - but a dog emerged.

And a mossy statue lady with flowers. The flowers aren't at all what they should be, but you can tell they are flowers, which is enough. She looks mostly made of stone, and a lot less frightening than the hat lady.

And some koi underwater with a water lily. I don't think the rocks are quite right but I like the little fish eyes. These were painted on the new fancier canvas that I got from an art store in Melbourne and you can tell it has more tooth. That is what they call the surface I believe, and this one has plenty of it. It's also more of a cream colour than a white, which doesn't make any difference once you've done an underpainting, but you can see it round the edges. I think it's nicer but it's literally four times the price of the other stuff and I don't think it's four times nicer.

Adelaide

Another week another city - Adelaide this time for work. Or rather Port Adelaide, which is a few miles out of the CBD on the water, unsurprisingly. I had heard that it was all very gentrified out there now after a reputation for being quite rough ... to which I can only say it must have been rough as GUTS before, because I wouldn't have chosen gentrified as one of my top adjectives. 

There were some lovely older stone buildings, although many of them had people sleeping in the doorways. Sleeping or shouting. Or (oddly) playing Frankie Goes to Hollywood at volume. I went for a bit of a walk to see what was what, avoided the dodgiest looking pubs and ended up having a very very delicious Vietnamese dinner. The water was pretty.

But work went well, and my flights were on time. The hostie on the flight back gave me a large glass tumbler full of wine (I think we were both at the ends of long days) and that helped.

Not happy with these paintings

Still going with acrylic april 2020 but have hit a bad patch - none of these are exactly how I wanted them to turn out! Or indeed how the art sherpa did them. All faults with the student, as we know, but I will try and find the square millimetre I am pleased with, for my own mental health.

Poppy field at sunset. Doesn't look a lot like poppies to my mind - but I am pleased with the sky gradient from yellow to blue. That rings true to me. The rest is garbage.

Terrifying lady in hat. My husband asked if somebody was throwing a flower at her and NO that is her CHEERFUL HAT. You just know that if she tips her hat back and looks at you her eyes will be either blazing fires or the endless dark abyss. Let me see, I'm pleased with the curve of the collarbone on her left shoulder. That is in the right place. 

And UFO about to land on house. That is meant to be a ray of light, hope in the storm, sun breaking through etc. Not alien-abduction-and-rectal-probe. I'm struggling to find anything positive to say about this one but perhaps the clouds in the very top right corner can stay. 

Melbourne

I had a quick trip to Melbourne last week for work - didn't get much of a chance to see anything but this is a sunset shot on my walk to meet up with number two - at the theatre school, which was amazing.

I got shown around and met some of the fellow students, who were all very lovely. It was awesome to see the creative spaces the students get and the various studios they are working in ... such an exciting stage of life. I was impressed with the set up - not that I know much about theatre but it all looked very professional. And then we went out for fried chicken.

 

The hotel was fancier than we normally stay in ... and how do I know it was fancier? Because it has a TOILET PHONE. I remember the first time I saw one of these in a hotel, maybe the 1990s? And I thought wow, this is luxury, a phone in the toilet. Simpler times. 

I was only on the tenth floor this time, far more palatable.

The rest of the holiday

I'll put some of the photos up for the second week of the holiday for memory purposes - it seems like a very long time ago now! We had a lovely time with my parents-in-law, caught up with extended family and friends, and went in to the art gallery and enjoyed Brisbane's beautiful winter weather.

I had to work for a couple of days because we are so understaffed at the moment - quite coincidentally I needed to be in Brisbane so took myself off to a hotel in the middle of town for a couple of days and worked. It was very peculiar to do that in the middle of the holiday but needs must. The only downside was the room was on the 38th floor! That is too high for me, I am a small town / small building kind of person. The dining room had floor to ceiling windows, so this is as close as I got ... I would rather eat standing up for two days than sit there.

After Brisbane we went to stay with Brad's brother and his family just out of Murwillimbah in northern NSW - I hadn't been there before and it is the most beautiful part of the world. They are on a hectare or so of land and it is green and rolling and gorgeous. We went to the regional art gallery and this is the view from the front. Incredible.

And they have a couple of very sooky little house dogs that just wanted cuddles. Fine.

On the way back we stopped the night at Coffs Harbour but went to Byron Bay for lunch basically because I've never been there, and it is quite well known in Australia so I thought I should check it out. It was the most perfect day and yes, it is an exceptionally beautiful place. Even in winter the beaches looked inviting ... too fancy for the likes of us, but we walked up to the light-house and had lunch in town, and that was fine.

One last airbnb in Coffs was a cute granny flat on someone's acreage just south of town, then an easy nine or so hours drive back to Canberra on the highway, to see a very very cuddly cat. Not traumatised (not a big enough brain to suffer trauma) just happy to see us.

Painting some floofies

I'm back into it now after the holiday - here we have the next two paintings. Exercises in fur! I quite like fur, it's very forgiving. This fox has its tail in front of its eyes, it's not super clear what it's meant to be from my rendering.

And a little raccoon, nestled in some flowers. Or yellow blobs that are meant to be flowers. It's 'loose'. It's also a terrible photo - too much reflection - it looks better in real life.

Warwick

Our next stop took us into Queensland - we didn't have any burning ambition to go to Warwick but it was in the right general direction. My husband has never spent any time there because it is only a couple of hours from Brisbane and he was always going through it to get somewhere more exciting. And I have never been anywhere so why not. 

Our airbnb was the bottom floor of an old 19th-century house that veered dangerously close to dingy. It certainly didn't have many windows. We went and got something to cook for dinner then came back to find it didn't have an OVEN. Just a microwave. A perfectly normal large, well set up kitchen, but no oven. We spent half an hour looking, in case we missed it, then gave up and ordered pizza. 

It was the night before the annual Jumpers and Jazz festival so everything was covered in crochet. Honestly you can't make this shit up, what is with small country towns and bizarre festivals. It did look like everyone was getting into it though. I hope my retirement small country town has something similarly odd.

In the morning we went out to Glengallan, which is an old homestead that had been built in the 1860s, had a brief heyday before everyone went bankrupt, then left to moulder until about twenty years ago when it was done up, but not entirely. Absolutely fascinating slice of history - Australia doesn't have a heap of fancy old houses and they tend to be either still extremely posh and you never get to see them, or full-on museums and not much fun. 

There was absolutely nobody there (the people shapes on the upstairs balcony are cardboard cut-outs, TERRIFYING) so we roamed around the rooms and the grounds, deciding we didn't want to live there and wondering how anybody could. That entire ground floor was two rooms and a hallway. There were some very good exhibits, and they'd left bits un-renovated, and run out of money on other bits, so just put in random furniture that local people had donated. Excellent. 

And then we drove to my parents in law in Brisbane, which was the whole point of the trip, these were just all side quests. 

Inverell

After Lightning Ridge we went to Inverell, which we both found unexpectedly charming, perhaps because of the cool house we stayed in, and perhaps because it wasn't Lightning Ridge. It wasn't the house we booked, but the lady rang and said there was a problem with the hot water, and we could either turn the hot water on and off outside every time we needed it, or she had another property that might work? We decided not to deal with the hot water meter and moved to this 1940s (?) cutie. 

It was above the river, over the road from town, so we walked in for a supermarket dinner and to see the sights. Inverell is quite pretty. 

We went back to that building after lunch the next day because it was the local art gallery, and we bought a painting by a regional artist. The gallery was a very mixed bag but we found one that we thought nailed the landscape, and that's what you want as a tourist. It is a bit disheartening as a beginner painter because the good paintings were very good indeed, on the other hand there is a lot of shit that locals put up for sale and I reckon one of my fish would hold its own. In some corners. I'll put up a picture of what we bought when I remember.

In the morning the river created a beautiful fog that burnt off soon enough. It was very spectacular from the balcony. This is the inside of the house - a classic of its time! check out the carpet in the dining room. The kitchen was original but worked fine, and we love having all that space. 

We then went for a walk around the reservoir and into the Barayamal National Park, which was lovely. Not as spectacular as the Warrumbungles but flat, which I quite liked. Perfect walking weather, sunny and cool, and we saw exactly two retirees with a spaniel. 

More paintings

Here are some more terrible paintings to break up the travelogue a bit. First up, another fish. A sad looking fish, perhaps in a very small bowl.

A particularly lurid moon over a sea with odd waves. Tsunami? End of the world? You decide.

A rose absolutely not found in nature. This is actually the second time I painted this - the first time I completely failed to resolve the bottom petals so I gave it another go ... and it went a bit strange. The bottom petals are better but the top is odd. 

It was very nice to have a weekend at home - Saturday was a long lunch with friends and Sunday a long walk to counterbalance all the food. 

Lightning Ridge

 After Coonabarabran we spent a night in Lightning Ridge - we had planned to spend two nights there because it's a bit out of the way but couldn't get any accommodation that wasn't a caravan park. In the end we had a very comfortable stay in an airbnb granny flat out the back of someone's house, and one night was absolutely the correct decision, because Lightning Ridge is very odd.

It's opal mining, which apparently attracts the crazies from around the country, and the tourists. So the town is kind of derelict and kind of touristy at the same time, and the countryside is just rocks and dirt. The official stats have the population at around 2,000 people but they reckon it's ten times that in reality. We weren't going to go underground to do any fossicking, so a brief visit was just fine. I did buy an opal pendant though - and wore it to work yesterday - very pretty. I also fixed my collar after I took this photo.

The drive there was very very very flat. And mostly very straight. We got snowed with bits of cotton from behind enormous cotton trucks, you can see it by the road in the photo. And we stopped for the cattle. I'm not sure if they were travelling stock or public grazing, but livestock have right of way, so we sat there for a while.