Friday, March 15, 2024

Second half of the beach house project

We had a long weekend down the coast - Canberra Day - where I went for lots of swims and found the water RIDICULOUSLY cold because Darwin and Fiji have softened me up. But the weather was hot and the drinks were cold and the cat was happy ... friends came over for dinner and we dreamed of retirement (except for the one person that was actually retired, who is absolutely loving it). 


Anyway here is the second half of the concertina sketchbook, with more beach houses.


This is again in the order I did them - not so much of a marked improvement as in the first half - but I think you can tell where I wandered off and did a week of house portraits, or a week of abstract. It spills over.


I have certainly noticed a lot of things I never noticed before. Many of the houses have those fish-skeleton wall decorations, and there are a number of iron pelicans. 


This bessa-brick house is only one room per floor. You can see through to the other side quite clearly. I think they use the back shed for living as well, it had outdoor furniture (that was too fiddly to paint).


When this house was painted blue and yellow they carefully got a blue and yellow matching awning for the front door. I think this was decades ago because it all looks a bit garbage now, but at some point it would have been the chic-est of beach residences.


This one is a bit of an icon - the words La Mer are perfectly respectable things to have at the front of your beach house - but they didn't put enough of a gap between the words so it's always been known as "lamer". The one to the left is "lame" and the little yellow one is "lamest". 


This ugly orange brick one is where the husky jumped the (manifestly inadequate chicken wire) fence and bit Mishka, back in 2015. The house has been sold since then (but it's still ugly).



Individually nothing stunning, but they do look good as a group!!!! I can't believe I actually finished something, instead of darting about.




Sunday, March 10, 2024

Happy happy houses

More Gary houses, in nice bright colours. He likes basing everything - grass, trees, roofs - on a strong yellow. I use new gamboge - I think he uses cadmium yellow - then we drop in some greens or burnt sienna as needed. It gives a very warm undertone that I love. 

These do all kind of look the same but I am enjoying it.

Because of the sketchbook I am doing them all the same size - he doesn't - so some are simple with lots of spare space and some are quite densely drawn. 

And lastly a winter scene. Snow that just exists because of a shadow. Cool ... but you can see a bit of bleeding there. That shouldn't happen on dry paper, I will try another sketchbook next time.

Thursday, March 7, 2024

Darwin again

After never going there once, I have now been to Darwin twice in six weeks - we had three days up there this week for work. It is still very hot, very rainy and strangely unoccupied ... shops and restaurants closed and not many people about. Apparently the population doubles when the dry starts, which I can believe.

I spent a lot of time around the airport looking at various government facilities, and managed to get to the wave pool / waterfront lagoon as well. So lovely, floating about in warm ocean water, watching a huge storm build up. 

In the finest traditions of crappy out-the-airplane-window photography here is Canberra as we were taking off - work is the red dot and home is the green dot :) It was actually a lovely long swoop around the city where you could see all sorts of things ... but perhaps not my finest photo ever.

We went via Adelaide on the way there and here is a slightly better picture of Adelaide's CBD. Not much going on  (which is Adelaide in a nutshell) but at least this one is in focus.

We didn't fly over the Darwin CBD (such as it is) so here is some landscape instead. Very typical! So much water. There would be crocodiles in that.

Friday, March 1, 2024

More Gary Frederick

I'm filling up my new watercolour sketchbook just with Gary's view of the world ... quite a pleasant view, luckily.

I like it because it has all the certainty of lines, and pen and ink, but he also likes a good wet-wet wash for the sky or the ground or the trees. There are twenty pages in the sketchbook so I figure that will be a good place to stop.

It was more-expensive-than-I-usually-spend Winsor and Newton 100% cotton A4 book, and it's not very good. There is something about the sizing in the paper that makes it bleed if you paint over it more than about twice, which it shouldn't do. I will try something else next time.

Tuesday, February 27, 2024

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?

Thursday, February 22, 2024

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.

Monday, February 19, 2024

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.