Colours of the desert

In an attempt to get the palette right for desertscapes, I painted some rocks and then used soft pastels to highlight them.


Incredible as it looks, these are the colours of central Australia. I've struggled to capture the desert and now feel that pastels are probably the best medium.

Banana coast revisited

After some fiddling I finished my acrylic version of the banana coast. It's a view that I love, combining the rural views with the Pacific Ocean.

Discovering watercolour

The gregarious Susie Murphie was a delight in this one day workshop I attended this week at Art Est. Susie is a 5 colour is enough watercolourist and all shades mixed with these limited colours will 'go' which makes sense. Previous workshop focussed on drawing with watercolour lending an interest. Now I want to learn how to paint watercolour without the pen as a guide.

The first thing we learnt was that the more dilute the watercolour, the less intense on paper. It all makes sense of course but there are 5 grades of consistency and ways of telling which by how runny they are on the palette.

We did still life as it's the easier subject. But here is the reminder of what I have been taught time and again, shadows look most vibrant when the complementary colour is used. Put purple with yellow, green with orange and blue with red.

A bigger canyon by Hockney

On a visit to the NGA in Canberra, the piece that was outstanding was the compilation of 60 canvases that made up David Hockney's Grand Canyon. In photograph, it doesn't look very impressive but in real life its size, scale and colour creates a sensurround experience. And it is very similar to the landscapes at Uluru and King's Canyon. The trees may be different but the rock formation is similar. The colours are just as astoundingly vivid.

Australian landscape

On a train journey from Sydney to Canberra I was struck by the landscape rolling by. Once past Campbeltown, bucolic green fields unfold, hedged by pine trees. There were lots of lorikeets and rosellas and once I spotted a wallaby leaping past in a gum jungle. And past Goulburn the rolling open pastures makes the sky seem so vast and blue. I itched to paint it all. I realized how much I loved the Australian landscape when I went to NZ 2 years ago and didn't feel at all inclined to paint. Perhaps it was the newness of it all and the strangeness of the flora. I also felt overwhelmed on a recent visit to Uluru. It was so red and so different from coastal Australia. At least there are gumtrees at Uluru. I remember thinking how wonderful it was to encounter a gumtree at the Italian Lakes and how homesick I felt.