Colouring in!

The walks taken as exercise while at home isolating with my family produced a sketchbook (previous post). All fantastical landscapes, some including waterfalls.

After a suggestion from my resident art director to turn them into colouring pages and subsequent gentle nudges from them, I’ve been beavering away doing just that.

There has been nobody in the studio to distract me. The whole building has been very quiet. It’s even been hard to get a coffee – in Melbourne!. As a result I’ve been very focused and diligent. I promise.

It’s been a challenge to translate the small A5 rough sketch, with the pencil lead smeared and blurry lines. It was a long process to clean them up, fix any composition errors and generally make them able to be used for colouring.

I began with a scan, make them into PDF format then print them as A3, trace them off (again and again), correct errors (again and again) and set my visual language so they’re consistent.

Et voilà

You can head over to the new freebies page for a high resolution download to print them out on your printer and have at them! I’d love to see the results of your colouring so if you post them on Instagram or Twitter make sure you tag me, @_essayer so I get a notification.

I’ll be working on a few more in the coming months, sign up to the mailing list, follow me on twitter or instagram and I’ll let you know when they’re available.

Cheers,

Pandemic wanderings

Like almost everybody I stayed at home from 23rd March at home until after the Easter break. I’d brought some supplies back home with the view to improving some skills, getting back to basics and exploring some mediums I hadn’t had a chance to get into in a meaningful way for a very long time.

Needless to say, it didn’t quite work out that way.

Not only was I at home, so was everyone else. Where we live is quite a spacious apartment, in theory. Four adults certainly make it feel a bit constrained and I’ve always found it hard to do much with an audience. The thing I’ve learnt about myself is that I’m a loner. Consequently not much experimenting and learning went on.

So instead I took the opportunity to explore the parks nearby. On my own or with a companion from our house I wandered around The Alexandra & The Queen Victoria Gardens and The Kings Domain.

There are sculptures, fountains, a fernery and The Pioneer Women‘s Garden, ducks and bush turkeys. And some the best landscaped public toilets.

Taking my time to see the same gardens repeatedly gave me the opportunity to see things I’d missed, to be amazed and fascinated by the way things grew together and apart, to see the repetition of the planting, how it all coalesced into such a glorious and enjoyable space.

The lush leafy foliage, got ticking over in my brain and so I sat and doodled in a sketchbook with no expectations or rules. It was lovely to play with perspective, interpret what I’d seen, stylise the lush leafiness and image landscapes.

The results were a fantasy, but drew on the experience of the walks and waterfalls seen and explored.

These simple doodled sketchbook drawings have given life to a new project. Now back in the studio I’m creating something new, from something I created from walks I did, enjoying the creativity of the gardeners.

Keep safe and cheers to you all,

Better late than…

Welcome to the new year! Late, I know, but it is still January!

This year is certainly looking busier than last.

We spent New Years at Eden. It’s a beautiful place and everyone should stay away! With it having perfect weather and crystal clear waters I don't like my chances of having a private bit of paradise for very long. In fact the small town was completely booked out while we were there.

 

There is a little creek running through the block where we stayed and I think I scared a platypus! A very loud plop and splash in the water which can only have been made by a large animal in a stream with no fish, so I’m calling it (even if I have no photographic evidence).

I also saw number of different birds, Blue Fairy Wrens and European Goldfinch being the highlights for me. I tried so very hard to take photos and iPhones are good but not up to the task of capturing small birds darting in and out of dense shrubs. Or it might have been operator error.

Cheers,