Last Week: Establishing a routine and a rhythm and thoughts about repetition

I am loving my morning routine! I walk to a local cafe, order a coffee, plan my day with my Get To Work Book and then map out details of my latest project. Once my watercolour is dry, I walk home and get stuck into work. (BTW I normally tick off the completed tasks – not sure why I didn’t do that last week.)

This routine is SO wonderful and the ‘cafe thinking time’ has really helped me sort out some big picture planning for my big current project – all will be revealed tomorrow! But I have ended up with a lot of coffee sketches in my book this week. There are plenty of other things I could draw in the cafe, but a 5 minute watercolour sketch of my coffee is just the right amount of sketching to get my creative juices pumping. If I start drawing the views or the people then I will probably spend more time sketching than planning – and these cafe visits are all about starting my work day.

I don’t care so much about having a lot of coffee sketches, though the lack of tea sketches is a little unsettling – “is it really a Liz sketchbook?” I am also still working on perfecting a quick painting of the coffee art (still losing my whites and trying different ways to achieve the foam) and am enjoying this challenge. So I am not tired of sketching my coffees yet. However it is the repetition in the composition of the pages (Tuesday and Wednesday) that got me thinking about how to mix it up. It gives me something to work on this week!

A few other thoughts

As I indicated in my cross hatching post on Friday, I haven’t had much time to do some watercolour sketches this week as my new project is taking so much of my time. But its ok – I like having some whiter pages in my sketchbook.
If you missed it earlier I tested White Nights watercolours – here and here.
Palladio is obviously ‘architect of the month’ – hey?
I am loving this A5 portrait format sketchbook but painting over the gutter is getting to me. The sketchbook is almost finished, so I will be going back to my standard 9 x 6″ landscape Alpha soon – more about my sketchbooks here.
Some times I like having a ‘text only page’ in my book. This week’s Sunday page isn’t going to even get a title! If you haven’t noticed, having neat handwriting contained in a column or block is something that is important to me (it is the architect in me!)
On Friday night I went to a wonderful exhibition by Peter Rush so have included a few photos at the end of this post. Please check out his work here

Ok, here we go…