Yesterday, I uploaded a fresh video to my YouTube channel and immediately realised that I had forgotten to upload the previous one I had filmed, AND had not let anyone know I had uploaded the one before that. There’s also a video I made when I filled my nature journalling palette. Sigh — my perimenopausal brain has failed me. Oh well. I am sure the brain fog will lift at some point.
So let’s fix that, shall we? Grab a cup of coffee and settle in!
July 2022 – February 2023 sketchbook
February 2023 – October 2023 sketchbook
October 2023 – April 2024 sketchbook
Filling my nature journalling palette
Now … we are all up to date! I shall attempt to do better next time. 🙂
This project was first serialised in my Substack newsletter at the beginning of 2024. Remember to subscribe to see my big projects first!
The project was conceived as the COVID lockdown adventure was winding down in mid-June 2022. I was itching to get out of the house to sketch but wasn’t keen on being around too many people, and I hadn’t yet started meeting with my local Urban Sketching group again.
As many ideas do, this one arrived as an ambitious thought whilst driving home from some mundane errand, that I would like to draw each of the local suburban shops and track changes as they are upgraded since our local government seemed to have a program of works underway to do these little facelifts around the place. There were signs up announcing the imminent work all over the place. As it happened, the local shops in my own suburb were slated for a facelift that year. I needed to try to get out of the house and do stuff, and this was as good a project as any to get me moving and sketching on location again. It was close to home, accessible, and usually a very quiet place. Perfect!
The weather in the second half of 2022 and most of 2023 was very wet, so progress was slow for the landscapers. I would drive by every couple of weeks to see what was happening and see if it was worth scheduling a sketching session or if I could capture something new from within the confines of my car. Sometimes, it was months between updates. In the end it took them about 12 months to complete and me just shy of 18 months to finish capturing it.
Dear reader…I should note that now that I have finished this project, I will most likely NOT be doing the same for other local shop upgrades. This took far longer than I thought it might!
Why track changes in suburbia?
Change in our urban environments is constant, and it’s good to see tax dollars at work to improve the community. Sometimes, these changes are rapid, and sometimes, they creep up on us slowly, and having a way to track the transformation really appealed to me. This suburb has seen a lot of changes over the past 20 years or so since bushfires destroyed many homes, so the slow gentrification and overall update have been going on for some time. Modern design new homes nestled between homes that have been there since the seventies. Now was the time for the village centre, as it is known, to be zhoozhed up.
I had been accustomed to sketching fancy buildings and monuments in my urban sketching adventures to date. Working on something closer to home and far more mundane is also equally valid and offered an opportunity to look at my neighbourhood a little closer and to develop my skills. Or, to be more accurate, to dust the rust off my skills that had been confined to virtual sketch walks from photos and videos throughout the pandemic.
I was lucky enough that the work had not yet begun when I started this project, so I started out by sketching the original state of the shops and playground. I had initially thought that the shops themselves were going to get a facelift, too, and I was super excited because they are quite run down. My excitement was short-lived when I tracked down the government project plan page for the upgrades and found that only the landscaping and playground were to get the love and attention. Rumour has it that the shops themselves are owned by an investor who doesn’t live in Canberra and who isn’t interested in brightening things up. Bummer.
All told, I ended up with 23 sketches, and I am pretty pleased with the result. I hope you enjoy them too!
In the beginning there was a little set of shops
The sign reads “Duffy Village Shops” but it’s not so much a village as a suburb these days. I am unsure if it may have been a village when the area was first established, or perhaps they were trying to foster a bit more of a community feel for the place.
The old signage sat up at the corner of the main road with the shops in the distance down the little hill. The parkland surrounding was full of weeds, and one dared not wander over it barefoot for fear of the thorns and various other nasties. Not attractive at all. I didn’t draw this signage until after doing several other “before” sketches. I was filling in time while I waited for the groundworks to begin.
Jim, the proprietor of this little supermarket, would have loved to be able to update his shop! The paint on the posts is all chipped and weathered, and the pavement is cracked and worn. Still, he keeps a great range of things and has saved my butt more than once when I forgot to order something we needed for a recipe.
I really had high hopes that this old restaurant would be given some love. I have lived in the suburb for about ten years and saw it open once in the first couple of months I was there. It has been closed ever since. We really could use a restaurant in the area!
The extent of the landscaping amounted to a bunch of oversized boulders strategically placed in the centre area to prevent people from parking up there under the trees. No gardens, just gravel. It looked dry and tired. I am pleased to say the trees have been preserved though.
I suspect the playground had been updated in the nineties by the look of the gear. Typical Australian playgrounds before then were made from treated pine logs, later found to be treated with arsenic. It’s not exactly ideal for playground material. Two swings, a seesaw and a climbing frame with a slide were hardly inviting, particularly since it was surrounded by a sea of pine bark that turned rather swampy when it rained. Suffice it to say the playground was not well used.
Though unsightly, the back of the shops wasn’t particularly messy, and there wasn’t a lot there to sketch. A couple of bins, and that’s about it. A lick of paint out there would have done a world of good! (That’s Jim’s car!)
Things were still quiet at this point in the process. Not too many people were out and about, and I rarely saw families at the playground. The occasional person would stop and ask me what I was up to, but most smiled and kept walking. It wasn’t until the construction phase, and I had been sighted sitting out sketching several times, that regulars started to stop for a chat.
The long middle!
Months and months of rain and mud, the removal of the old landscaping elements and the earthworks to prepare for the updated play area and forecourt provided endless opportunities for me to sketch.
Kubota digger that I dubbed the killer of playgrounds. The earthmoving equipment became a permanent fixture for several months and served as some gritty art installation surrounded by mud and screened-off fences. Getting a good line of sight to sketch them meant peering through the gaps in the material attached to the temporary fencing.
This little loader looked like it would be a lot of fun to drive!
The old playground equipment looked rather sad and twisted sitting off the side. It seems they had not been gentle in dismantling it. There was twisted metal and broken bits of plastic strewn everywhere.
At least the temporary fencing and shielding material (I have no idea what that stuff is called!) was colourful during the long grey days. This one was sketched from the car because whilst there was a little sun poking through the clouds, there was plenty of intermittent rain too.
Getting to the shops for a while was a bit of a chore. Naturally, the fencing was up to protect patrons, but it meant taking quite the detour to get to the supermarket or the coffee shop. There is also more earthwork equipment, this time between the diggers and the roller.
At about this time, the landscape contractors started noticing me sketching around the place a lot more. They appeared to be quite chuffed that I was sketching them this time. These stonework walls are a consistent feature in the new design, and it took a lot of patience and precision to make sure the rocks fit together like a jigsaw.
It was an exciting day when I saw the new wooden playground installed! Things were taking shape, and the fun part of the refurbishment was starting to take shape.
Shade sails and the canopy for the covered seating area went in just as the colder weather arrived again in 2023. The playground had some new elements added, too, but it was not yet ready to be used.
The home stretch
Finally, we get to see the whole facelift revealed! It will take some time for the newly planted trees to become established, but the landscaper’s screens and fencing have been removed, and local families are making good use of the new facilities. And the coffee shop is always busy. It all looks terrific. Now, if the shop owner could give the building a little facelift, too, that would be great!
The central island the contractors were working on in my earlier sketch is complete, and the new grass is filling in nicely. This is one of the benefits of the vast amount of rain we had during the whole process!
The landscaping from the side. I am so pleased they kept the big old gum trees and some original rocks.
Undercover tables are available for families to enjoy a snack or lunch while the kids play. One setting is high, like a bar table, and the other is lower to the ground, ideal for the kids. Being able to get out of the sun or rain is a brilliant addition to the area.
On one particularly rainy day, I chose to sit in the café and sketch the scene. As it turns out, the fellow working that day was someone I knew from my former life and hadn’t seen for more than ten years. Chatting and showing him the earlier drawings from my project was fun. The coffee they serve is ethically sourced from New Guinea, is organic, and tastes fantastic.
These fabulous wooden ones replaced the old metal and plastic rockers. I love the warmth and added textural element these solid little vehicles provide. I also wish I was small enough to have a go on them!
On the day I drew these rides and the jungle gym in the next sketch, I was visited by a little fellow named Milan, who told me he was four. He was riding laps on his little bike and calling out to me each time he came past, wanting me to see just how fast his little legs were peddling. Eventually, he parked his bike — I needed to remind him to park it off to the side so it wouldn’t get schmooshed by the other riders — and sidled up beside me to have a look at what I was doing and started asking questions about my paints and the colours. So I took a little detour and pulled out a spare sheet of paper from the back of my sketchbook and showed him some of the colours. He started asking what would happen if I mixed some of the colours, so I showed him that too. I started my adding a couple of puddles of pure colour to the paper and then mixed them on the page. His eyes were as large as saucers as he watched the magic happen. Question after question, he chatted away about what was happening. After a while, he decided he needed to ride another lap but then returned to talk some more. This time, he told me all about his bike and his muscles — they were huge, of course! Mum and Dad tried to shoo him on his way from time to time, but I assured them I was having as much fun as Milan was and that he was more than welcome to talk my ear off.
Little Milan had a bit of a climb on the jungle gym, too, but he was far too quick on his feet for me to capture him in my sketch. Needless to say, my sketching adventure took far longer than I had planned that day, but it was worth it to share a sweet few moments with a curious child.
Fancy new signage and matching stonework wall were installed up by the road to replace the dilapidated old one, and fresh new grass has taken over from the weedy, prickled mess that covered the parkland before. The whole place looks lovely and fresh with all the vibrant greens in the metalwork and the new plantings.
And last but not least, the park got a public toilet … FINALLY! No more kids hopping from foot to foot when they need to go mid-play, and no more of me crossing my legs and gritting my teeth while I finish a sketch and my bladder complains at me. It’s plain white now, but I hope that it gets a mural painted on it like some of the others I have seen around town. If it does, I will have just one more sketch to add to the series.
On my final sketching day, I wanted to try at least to feature someone using the new equipment, so I set myself up on one of the benches by the riding track that runs around the jungle gym and was lucky enough to be able to watch this little fellow climb this wall ladder several times, each time begging mum to let him play for just five more minutes … pleeeeeeeease. I smiled as I sketched and remembered all the times I took my sons to playgrounds when they were young. They were forever begging to stay a little longer, even if they were rosy from the exertion or shivering from the cold.
Eighteen months is a long time to stick with a sketching project for me, and I am pleased that I stuck with it. Being able to flip through the sketchbook from start to finish brings a great deal of satisfaction and joy. I hope you enjoyed the journey from afar.
For those interested in the nuts and bolts of my kit, here is my list of gear:
Stillman and Birn Beta Series 7×10” spiral bound sketchbook
Last weekend I took a little trip south to visit my parents in Victoria and decided to make it into a sketching trip as well.
I was working in the new urban sketching Winsor and Newton sketchbook I started last weekend when I drew in Hall Village. I have decided to keep a theme throughout the book to lend it some overall coherence. I am adding a map where it makes sense, a couple of little photos and some journalling to add context to help me remember the day better when I look back through the book later.
My first stop was in Holbrook … Submarine town! I have sketched the submarine before, so I had a bit of a drive around and selected a couple of buildings that looked like they would be fun to get down on paper. I sketched the church first. The spot I chose was in the full midday sun on an unseasonally hot autumn day, and managed to get my arms sunburned in the hour that I was there. Yes, the bush was leaning over like that!
Next, I popped down the street a little way to sketch the Shire Hall and found a nice shady spot to sit under the awning of a pub that had seen better days. My unfortunate choice this time was to sit on the concrete pavement without moving much for the 45 minutes it took me to complete the sketch. My butt, legs and feet went to sleep! When I went to stand up, I very nearly fell over. Good thing there weren’t too many people around! So embarrassing!
Click to enlarge
My next stop was Benalla in northern Victoria. I did this spread over a couple of days because the weather was scorching, and I also wanted to balance sketching time with time spent with mum and dad. I was chuffed when dad asked to join me on my second outing to draw the art gallery. We sat, chatted, and said hello to the locals, who stopped to see what we were doing. Dad read his book while I was concentrating too hard to chat and sketch at the same time. We spent about an hour and a half by the lake enjoying the morning together. All of those angles and peaks were kind of tricky to get right, so I spent longer on the setup drawing than I normally do.
Click to enlarge
On the middle day of my visit, we drove to the nearby magnificent King Valley Wine Region and had lunch at the Gracebrook Vineyards. My folks were lovely enough to put up with me whipping out my sketchbook and paint to capture the landscape that spread out in front of us as we tucked into the delicious Mediterranean-style tasting plate full to over-flowing with local produce and sampled the wine. I had a spectacular sparkling Sangiovese/Shiraz that I loved so much that I bought some to bring home with me. Yum!
I struggle with landscape sketches and tend to put in too much detail for the scale of the sketch, so for this one, I deliberately worked at simplifying the shapes and stopping when I sensed that I was fiddling too much toward the end. Nevertheless, I was happy with the way this one came out.
I had so much fun … I’d love to go back on a day that’s not quite so hot, or even in winter, so that I can sketch the fabulous interior of the cellar door area.
Click to enlarge
Overall, a very relaxing weekend away with family and a productive one at that. I think I need to plan more sketch times when we get out of town!
Way back in September I took myself out for a sketching date out to Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve. The drive out there is a lot of fun, with lots of twists and turns that my sporty little mini leaned into like a champion! It was a wonderfully sunny day and still a little warm even in the late afternoon. My goal was to walk the wetlands Sanctuary track, and try to sketch wildlife if I managed to see any. I took my A6 book and tiny art toolkit palette, a pen, pencil and waterbrush. I travelled very light!
Before the entry to the wetlands there is an abandoned cottage from the late 1800s called Rock Valley Homestead. I stopped in for a wander around and had a sit in a lovely sunny spot to enjoy the garden.
This is a little of what remains of the kitchen. The inside rooms are pretty bare, it is really just a shell of the building. Some of it had been burned in the big bushfires that came through in January 2003. But what is left is well preserved and tended.
my walking poles
The path around the Sanctuary is dotted with wonderful places to sit and watch the comings and goings of the birds, or to have a picnic, or just to listen to the froglets go off.
Wetlands
I was there a little late in the day to catch much of the wildlife, and too early for the platypii but I did manage to see a female black swan on her nest!
She had just taken over nest duty from her partner and was settling in for the evening on her clutch of seven eggs. I was able to stand a couple of metres away and enjoy watching her snuggle and shift to get into the perfect position.
This was a quick watercolour sketch of one of the lagoons along the way … I really need to work on my landscapes! Can you recommend a good online course by any chance?
This creek was so lovely! The bubbling of the water over rocks and around branches was so relaxing. It was getting late by the time I got to this point, otherwise I would have loved to sit and sketch the branches and rocks and grass. I shall have to return!
Snake sculpture
At various points around the loop there were iron sculptures made from scrap metal.
Platypus sculpture
They made me smile!
Kangaroo sculpture
I haven’t made the time to get out of the house much in the last couple of years, and it was so good to get out. I will do it againe!~
I have been putting off filming this sketchbook tour for months now. I wanted to do one with commentary so that I could explain to you what I was thinking when I was creating particular spreads. This week I bit the bullet and did it anyway. It’s not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but we all have to start somewhere, right?
I hope you enjoy taking a stroll through my sketchbook and listening to me prattle on about it! Let me know what you think on the post here or on YouTube!
We’re in the midst of the coldest start to winter in 10 years here in Canberra, so I figured sketching inside at this week’s Canberra Urban Sketchers meet up was the thing to do. We met at the National Museum of Australia, and whilst there are LOTS fabulous things to draw, I have always wanted to draw a dinosaur skeleton, so I settled in the atrium and drew the muttaburrasaurus cast that was towering over everyone. The background ended up a bit of a smudgy mess because whilst I was aware that the ink was not waterproof, I failed to take into account that any moisture from my hands would also make it slide all over the place…or perhaps I was too impatient and didn’t let it dry long enough before resting my hand on the page. I will admit to rushing the background… it wasn’t nearly as interesting as the big pile of bones in front of me.
This week has been a very playful one in my sketchbook. Perhaps because I have had a busy week at work, I’m not sure, but the sketchbook has been filled with fun things 🙂 I am not complaining! Anything that brightens my day is a good thing!
It was a big week for drawing critters … click on the collage to see the the full scans of these guys in my sketchbook album.
At the start of the year I bought myself a bottle of black de Atramentis ink after reading a review on Liz Steele’s blog (this post). I had been jumping between the Noodler’s Black ink in my Lamy Safari fountain pen (the pink one below) and the disposable Uniball Eye for the under drawings with watercolour in my sketchbooks. Both are waterproof once dry, but they both take an awfully long time to dry and more often than not I would smudge a line when I rested my hand in a little puddle of ink, or smear something when I added watercolour before it was completely dry. Also, the Noodler’s black wasn’t as dense as I would like, but the Uniball was nice and dark. The de Atramentis ink has been a wonderful change. It dries very quickly and gives a wonderfully lush, dense black line. It flows well and feels great in the pen. I think I am pretty well sold! I cannot wait to add some of the other colours to my inky stable! I’ll still need to use the Uniball for cold press paper, since the fountain pen nib doesn’t cope as well with the texture, but the de Atramentis inks will be my go-to for daily drawing fun!
February is looking like a continuation of the fun. I plan to keep going with the Sketchbook Skool daily drawing challenge, but I have also signed up for another class to keep developing my skills and perhaps learn some new techniques. So keen!
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It has been a particularly wet, rainy week, so to fill some of the time I watched some art lessons on Craftsy in a bid to improve my urban sketching and watercolour work in general. I have wanted to improve my streetscapes for a long time because they tend to be the heart and soul of travel sketching. I want to travel more and capture the places I visit, and I want to capture my adventures in a way that is at least a little bit recognisable to me!
So on Sunday, I was looking for suitable reference photos in my stash, and I came across my holiday snaps from a trip to France a few years ago. At the time I took a heap of photos to use as references to draw from for my travel journal each evening (we moved far too quickly at the time to sit and draw or paint in situ, so I constructed my journal pages in the evenings and finished a large portion of them at home at the end of the trip), but also in the hope that I would get to draw them in a more detailed way at some stage. So…fast forward five years, and I want to draw … and I discover that I had captured some good references and some woefully unhelpful ones. Apparently this is a skill you learn over time too. What will work as a composition and what will not. What will translate to a sketch, and what will not. What lighting will produce dramatic effects.
After much fussing about I chose a photo of a street scene from inside the Mont Saint Michel village and set about doing a “quick and loose” watercolour streetscape using the techniques I had learned during the week. I sketched up a rough pencil outline with the big shapes and then went in and added detail with pen before hitting it with watercolour. This is the result. I consider it displeasing given that it looks like it is being viewed in a carnival magic mirror. :S
What I don’t like about this piece….
The perspective on the left handside of the drawing is off. I lost my vertical lines at some point along the progression of buildings and it is looking a little like a fish eye lense attacked it.
The colours are muddy. I think I need to figure out how to exaggerate lights and darks in a bland photo to get more contrast (perhaps explore tube paint rather than pans to get juicy colours for depth too?) and experiment with using colours other than what i perceive as a direct match with the scene – ie trying to capture the essence of the scene and playing with reflected colour.
But for all the things I feel are wrong with it, I know that it’s an improvement on previous attempts.
Here’s a street scene from my “France” travel sketchbook back in 2011. It’s from a different place (a village south-west of Paris called Chartres), but it’s easy to see that I have learned some things since then about perspective and learning to be looser and lighter with my pen strokes and quicker with on the spot type sketching in order to capture a scene. I didn’t even bother finishing this one… I gave up in despair.
Incremental progress is a funny thing.
We don’t see it unless we keep our “failures” to look back on. I learned that lesson when I started powerlifting as a way to get healthy. A friend who had been at it a long time encouraged me to take a “before” photo so that I would be able to look back and see progress, which as it turned out was a fabulous thing, because I didn’t feel like my body had changed but comparing photos, I could see a clear progression and improvement. I could not see improvement by looking in the mirror because the changes were so small each day, but cumulatively over months they were substantial. I am discovering the same with my art. Comparing these two pictures I can see that I have made some improvements over time, but see that there’s more improvement to be made too when I compare it to the work of artists I admire.
Here are some of the things that I am telling myself as I work to slowly improve my art this year. Michelle… listen carefully……
Learn and practise the rules and master the basics before you try to eyeball something or bend the rules. Watching lessons by artists that have been at it for a lot longer than you have and attempting to emulate their shorthand is not helpful.
Give yourself permission to fail, but make sure you learn the lessons to be learned and move on mindfully. Realistically, failure is not something we can avoid in creating art, or in life for that matter. Take the time to examine things critically and work to improve. Always.
Try not to start a new venture on a project that is too complex… you are setting yourself up for unnecessary failure. Start small and simple and work your way up to the more complex tasks. I think I chose a scene that was perhaps a little too tricky for my skill level at this point.
Keep reminders of past flops so you can see how far you’ve come, and don’t be afraid to share them. Other people are learning too, they may be able to take a leap forward by analysing how you messed up. Or there may be someone with more skill or more acute perception that can help you improve by pointing out where to tune your technique. You will likely end up with sketchbooks and loose sheets piled up with scenes that make me cringe…but you will at least have something to compare to, and see how far I’ve come over the years.
Be consistent in your practice if you truly want to improve. The only way to get better at representing what you see in the world on the pages of your sketchbook is to do it regularly. Every day would be ideal, but not practical at this point, but a couple of times a week will still yield results, albeit a little slower. Sure life gets in the way at times, but if you want something, you need to make time. End of story.
I tend to talk to myself quite a lot, especially when I’m trying to learn something. I don’t always get intelligent responses, but there you go 🙂
What are you telling yourself this year?
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I discovered, quite by accident, a few weeks ago that there is a group of sketchers that get together regularly in Canberra (one of them saw my Goulburn post and contacted me) and today I decided to stop being such a hermit and join them. Time for me to meet some new people!
Quite aside from my normal social anxiety, I hadn’t picked up a pencil or paint brush since the end of June and so I was feeling more than a little apprehensive. I figured I had best practice a little and started preparing yesterday by sketching of some blossoms in my back yard just to get the feel of it again. I had forgotten how relaxing it can be (smacks self in the head).
Here’s what I ended up with today…Nothing quite like going from flowers to artillery! I have drawn the War Memorial building itself a couple of times in the past and wanted to try my hand at something a little more detailed, and since the weather wasn’t too unpleasant outside, I settled myself down next to a 9.2-inch howitzer from World War I. I started out by mapping the proportions of the gun in pencil before going in with my rollerball ink pen and then the Pentel brush pen for the darkest shadows, and then finally with the watercolours. Â All up it took probably an hour and a half or so from setup to dry paint.
The group met back at the cafe after a couple of hours of dispersed sketching (we all went and found our own “things” that we wanted to capture) to compare sketches and enjoy a coffee. I found it fabulous how we were each in the same geographical location, but came back with such a wonderful and diverse set of sketches.
I’ll definitely be meeting up again next month at Floriade! If nothing else it will push me to be a little more regular with my sketching and perhaps prime the pump for some more ‘proper’ art pieces for the shop. Here’s the warm up piece I did yesterday… Â
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