Beach again

I took a long weekend to make up for travelling/working on the weekend before last and got some beautiful beach time in. Good swell, water not absolutely freezing (although nothing like the warm bath of Fiji), husband and cat joined me ... perfect. There was a peculiar sea mist one morning, just hovering over the far beach. It burnt off quick enough. 

Not much more to say really. This is really my life at the moment, working, painting and spending as much time as possible in the surf. A bit boring to read about ... how about this titbit - number one sent through the uni fee invoice for us to pay (yes, we do that, still cheaper than the private school we didn't send them to) - engineering students have to do some 'other' courses as well, which means creative writing this semester! Good fun, but it is TWICE the cost of the two advanced engineering courses, because the government doesn't subsidise it. I am a bit appalled - surely we need novelists as much as aerospace engineers? Surely?

Different houses

I have fallen down another rabbit hole with a different artist - Gary Frederick and his imaginary places (as he calls them). He uses pen and wash to create these delightful houses and scenes that I have been very happily re-creating, and discovering the joys of a dropped-in watercolour sky at the same time. 

I even splashed out and subscribed to his Patreon at $4 per month, which is where he puts the videos of him painting. Way to support a starving artist! I don't know what $4 will do, but I'm happy to pay it, and when I get bored of doing this I'll stop :)

My new fountain pen that I got for Christmas is lovely for this kind of work. Some of them are inked then painted and some of then are painted then inked ... I think I prefer doing the pen work first because it gives me more certainty, but there are definitely advantages to painting first for wobbly outlined things like trees.

Gary does lovely shadows that I'm trying to imitate, and also great rocks.

I don't know if this will help me much on my mission to sketch the boring urban environment I actually live in ... but I'm learning stuff, I'm sure of it.

More houses

It was very nice to have a weekend at home - I did a bit of washing but generally was unproductive - unlike my husband who gardened away. He is taking cuttings now so they are established in pots for when we move to the retirement home. Will it stop him spending thousands at the nurseries? No, it will not, but he will have five acres to play with, so full steam ahead. It got hot in the afternoons so we went to the Emily Kam Kngwarray exhibition at the NGA late on Sunday, which was AMAZING. The paintings were incredible and she also did batik work, which was just beautiful. I am a bit inspired, I already know how to dye, so experiments in hot wax could be in my future. My retirement future that is.

Here are some more houses that I did - English houses mostly. I like doing this, they look very simple but it takes time to get the shadows and the layers up to make it look like an actual building.

And this last one is a Melbourne house - number two gave me a wonderful book of photos for Christmas taken in the older inner-city Melbourne suburbs. Lots of fabulous photos of people but also quite a few houses, so I painted one of them. I haven't quite captured the run-downness, it's hard to paint. 

Fiji

I haven't posted for a week because I have been in the Republic of Fiji - working, although it is one of the loveliest spots I think my work has taken me. I was presenting at a workshop for MPs of the Parliament of Fiji, which was busy but interesting.

I even managed to wake up early enough for a swim before breakfast, which is very unlike me, but we didn't have much free time and you can only swim on the reef at high tide, which was early morning, so I arranged my schedule accordingly. It was absolutely beautiful, lots of little fishies. Some of the others saw sea snakes but I didn't (probably just as well) although there were some blacktip reef sharks which are about two feet long - enough to give you a startle, although they don't bite. The guy working at the beach stand said that 'all Fijian sharks are vegetarian' which sounds like something you would tell visiting Australians. 

It was off season because of the weather, so not that many tourists, but enough to feel awkward when walking around in work clothes with a clipboard. We finished early on the last day so I went for a long walk down the beach and enjoyed the coconut palms and general tropical vibe. 

Here is a sunset photo which looks absolutely fake but no - not even a filter. It was the most amazing sky.

And this is the typical view from my room! It absolutely bucketed down for about an hour each day... everything was very green. Home again now after a wonderful few days. 

House portraits

From the non-realistic wonders of Shrewsbury to a paint-every-brick suburban semi ... I have wandered off down another rabbit hole to copy the works of Liv who paints buildings. She does realistic commissions for people who want to see their house in watercolour, and they are very charming. Her method is to use Procreate to make an almost architectural line drawing, transfer that to paper, then paint in the colours quite precisely, including painting a LOT of bricks. 

I had a lot of fun trying to copy her. I don't have the tools (or talents) to do the initial line drawing but I've just been able to do it in pencil and because there's nobody saying "my front door is two feet to the left" that works fine for me.

It certainly makes you look quite closely at what is going on, with walls and doors and things. I should try it with Canberra houses but they are all the second half of the twentieth century with garage doors and not much else. Perhaps that's the challenge?

Summer!!!

Yes, I know technically it's been summer for months, but this weekend finally felt like a proper summer couple of days. I was very very happily at the beach - it was 35 in Canberra which is awful and hot - still hot down the coast but you could jump into the sea and cool down... so nice. I had lots of lovely swims, with good waves, and did some painting, and had bacardi with passionfruit sparkling drink which is like a lazy mojito, and was generally contented.

I also wore my other new beach poncho - the one I got for Christmas is lovely but made of good quality heavy towelling and takes ages to dry. So I bought myself a 'quick-dry' number which isn't nearly as snuggly (it's like those chammies that you wash a car with? synthetic) but it works just as well as a cover-up and then dries in time for an afternoon swim. Look at me just a summery little ice-cream sunshine of happiness. 

Progress on the summer project

I am going great guns with my summer project of little beach houses in my strange home-made concertina sketchbook. I'll show these in the order I did them because I think there is some improvement over the last two months or so.

The drawing page is quite small - maybe about A5 size? different to the nice big A3 Ian Fennelly ones I've been doing.

This is the only one with a person in it. It wasn't super successful so the rest of my world is unpopulated.

This is the place we used to rent when the kids were little - although the deck out the front is new! Fancy.

Individually they aren't terribly wonderful but when you look at them all together it's really cool! The concertina is very difficult to take a photo of but you get the idea.

And all spread out on the kitchen bench. I have turned it over and am doing the other side now - just need to take a few more photos. I am not running out of houses yet :)