Stables and ponies

My 5 year old was given some money for her birthday by her doting god mother to learn how to ride a horse. Now that it is the school holidays, we decided to enrol her in pony camp - a 2 day affair to learn how to ride, groom, etc ponies. She was most excited and enjoyed it thoroughly.

While I was sending her to camp, I had the occasion to browse the Centennial Park stables, which are numerous and noted many picturesque possibilities. I took some photos as I didn't think they would take too kindly to me drawing on location. The instructors objected and I had to reassure them that I wasn't some kind of pervert. I told them I would delete the photos and they were for the purposes of art. Luckily I don't look like a pervert myself, or I might not have got away with it.

These two little girls were waiting patiently for the whole camp to go riding at Centennial Park. You can see that the stables are very dark behind them. I used a green wash over canvas. Canvas texture is very rough, so you can see the strokes very clearly.

I'm going to attempt to capture the motion of these ponies as it intrigues me how they can be done. Degas and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec did several paintings of horses galloping, which I thought very impressive.

Portrait for Mother-in-law's 80th birthday

Those of you following my blog may remember that it is my mother-in-law's 80th birthday and I promised her a portrait of herself. Of course I promised this sometime in January and thought it easy enough to complete one in time for mid April. This was not to be. I did many portraits but was not satisfied. Finally, in a bit of a panic, I did one that I was pleased with. It has her in a characteristic pose. Unfortunately, the framers couldn't frame it in time. Well, it has finally been collected this week and here it is.

Due to the glass, there is some reflection that I could not get rid of, what a pity! But I think it is such a pleasure to draw older people. They have such interesting lines, creases and folds.

Beachscapes

I set myself up under a Norfolk pine at Moonee to draw the beach. The colours are rather bright but as a portrait artist my pastel range was not capable of subtler shades of sand or bushes. Further trips to the art shop are required.

The next one is of Sawtell beach, which has a neat little lifeguard hut in lovely orange and blue (whoever designed it knew their complementary colours!). I was sitting on an observation deck and once absorbed in the task was not in the least bit bothered by people coming and having a peek.

The last one is of Digger's beach. There are of course, many many more beaches at Coffs Harbour that are worthy to capture, just that time is so short!

Diversion into landscape

The school holidays are on and we booked at Christmas to stay a week at Coffs. My sister in law and her family live at Central Bucca, near Coffs and so we could catch up. We had a lovely social time. For the first time ever, I packed a subset of my materials and equipment for a trip. Could only fit in some pastels, charcoal and a couple of sketch books, A5 and A4. The A4 book consisted of watercolour paper, which I put some washes over. As it turned out, this was perfect for vacations... the paper size was just small enough to be able to complete a drawing in about 30 mins, which is just about the time I had anyway. And they weren't unwieldy to cart around.

Of course the Coffs coast is a place of great natural beauty. There are numerous beaches and even at its peak, they aren't anywhere as full as Sydney beaches are. Besides the beaches, the mountain range comes very close to the sea at Coffs. This means that there are opportunities to draw the bush and potentially the astounding views from banana and avocado plantations on the hillsides.

We stayed at an apartment near Moonee Beach. Moonee creek runs into the beach and the creek was stained a deep tea colour due to heavy falls the first 3 days we were there. Eventually, the sun came out and here is a drawing of our view from the apartment at sunrise. We had a view of trees and the creek beyond. It was really quite lovely.

We took walks to Moonee beach and played at the beach. However, access to the beach was via the creek and one had to wade about waist deep through the creek (where you couldn't even see the bottom!) to get to the beach. This was not very practical for carrying art material! There was another way to get to the beach but due to the heavy rain, the path was extremely muddy and slippery and once again not conducive to the setting up to plein air sessions. However, I took lots of photos and if anything comes out of this I will post them here.

Lake Russell Gallery is a very special place - it is located next to a lake and the gallery has lovely art and the cafe is very nice as well. The day I went there, it was wet, so I did this drawing in the car.

I also did this drawing from a photo.

The wet weather provided some opportunities to complete sketches of my family.