I am sorry that my blog has been totally ‘edges’ this month, but well, sometimes my blog is an accurate description of what my life has been! So… I am pleased to finally share with you something different – a few everyday sketches that I have done in the past month. With the exception of the last sketch in this set, all of them have been done in the last week once the huge hurdle of content generation for the course was over. Ah! I feels good to be able to make a little time just for sketching!

This sketch was very enjoyable for me to do – a fun exploratory sketch of a church  by Palladio in Venice. BTW I am in a bit of Palladian mood at the moment, so just warning that there might be a few sketches coming up of his work.

     
As the resounding vote was to leave my first page unfinished, I sketched the rest of my kit on the next page.

A celebratory cronut at The Missing Piece – my favourite cafe at Macquarie Centre.

A healthy lunch (not drawn) and green envy smoothie at Element 6 cafe in West Ryde. I had forgotten that I replaced the mixed DeA raw sienna ink in my blue sailor pen with a mixed dark green – but it was just the right colour for this quick sketch while waiting for my salad to arrive.

I LOVE playing with water-soluble tools… (the less said about this sketch the better!)

Left over cakes from Kurtosh and a quick sketch of my Get To Work Book... which I love very much as it is helping me plan all my tasks on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.

Reviving an old tradition “Friday Night Baroque”  and thinking about the day I drew S.Susanna sitting on a large traffic island on the streets of Rome and a great pizza I ate afterwards. In fact my memory is inaccurate… I sketched S Susanna from the cafe while eating the pizza as I was too nervous to sitting on the traffic island!

All the new cafes in Macquarie Centre had long queues on Saturday afternoon so I ended up at the Coffee Emporium (where the old T2 tea house was). I was very emotional being there again after sketching the space over 100 times – my outings there played a big part in the development of my sketching style. I miss the tea house and the wonderful staff so much so it was a nice touch to have a pretty cup to draw – although it made the memories stronger.

A completely inappropriate grouping of objects – sorry Palladio! Ah! the randomness of my life.

And finally, a very crazy ‘having fun with textures’ sketch of a very uninteresting subject.

As I was scanning these sketches to share with you all, I was thinking how ‘old hat’ the subject matters are: cafe visits and architectural sketches from photos. Because I thrive so much of being out urban sketching, I find everyday often uninspiring and get a touch frustrated when I don’t have my daily sketchbook filled with on-location sketches.

But while I have been writing the descriptions for these pages I realised that there is quite a accurate description of last week:
Preparing my kit for my upcoming Launceston travel sketching workshop, technological challenges, longing to get out and do a little architectural sketching but even though I am sketching from a photo I can still play games with my edges, my celebratory ‘end of Edges lessons‘ cafe visit cut short by another urgent project so I only got to sketch my cake and not sketch a cafe view, quick lunch due to only 30 minutes parking and testing another Launceston idea, stuck in traffic (and more travel sketching ideas), too busy talking over morning tea to sketch so I recorded the left overs later, a big day planning and catching up with the rest of my life, a night off (Friday night baroque), mouth pain(thankfully improving now!) more Palladio… and of course a pretty cup!

So what am I complaining about?

The ‘moral’ of this story (blog post) is that it doesn’t really matter what you sketch –  somehow life will be recorded and encoded in the lines and shapes on your page. Another ‘moral’ is that ‘your boring everyday life ‘often makes the most interesting pages when you come back in a few years time.