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.