Ah! So great to get back to my classes today – I love it so much! It is hard not to love having a opportunity to share the joy I get out of sketching, to hang out with a great bunch of sketchers, to spend a few hours in a nice patisserie, and sit out under a tree, by the harbour sketching a Sydney icon and a building I adore. Well that is what Week 1 of my Exploring the Rocks class was all about.

We are using as our classroom a prison cell! A nice cafe in a historic police station has tables in the cells – Le Pain Quotidien.  One large cell at the back is perfect for our introduction. Today we were looking at some basics – seeing and drawing shapes, how to start, what setup (if any to do) and do a few classic drawing exercises – contour drawing, gesture, and a more measured approach. We used our cakes and coffees as subjects today!

We then went out to put these ideas into practice and share some typical things that happen when we sketch on location… how to live with risks! The Sydney Opera house is a lot of fun to sketch- so many angles and curves and steps … and the class produced some wonderfully expressive continuous line sketches of it.
We finished off by adding some watercolour and introducing a few very basic techniques..and the importance of mixing juicy washes(look at the colour on those pages!

It was a big day – an overview of what we will be  expanding on in the coming weeks. I think the group shot shows how much fun we were all having today. What an amazing classroom we had today!