On Saturday I organised the first ever SketchingNow meetup at Observatory Hill Park, Sydney. This is something that I have wanted to do for years, so it was good to finally set a date and location!

This meetup was for participants of the Watercolour On Location which has been running since the beginning of September. 

We started the meet with a 30 minute Q&A session where we chatted about some of the challenges of sketching with watercolour on location. The highlight was when a number of sketchers shared their kits and we discussed various ways for securing water containers.

Then we had 1.5 hours to sketch and this was the result. Very impressive don’t you think?

We then had a lovely lunch together and it was so great to be able to discuss some of the main themes from the course, and other sketching related topics as well.

As for my sketches… I did this one in my A4 landscape Moleskine before the meetup started. Things have been so crazy for me lately that I knew I needed to do a solo sketch to start the day. Sketching on my own has been an important way for me to process things and feel grounded.

I then did a second version of the same view but I was chatting non-stop during this one and wasn’t focusing on my sketch at all.

I then had 20 minutes left before the ‘throwdown’ time, so this was a quick 15 minute version of the Observatory.

At lunchtime, I wanted to do a sketch but was talking a little too much to even start. I then explained to the group how when I’m catching up with a friend I will ask them to tell me all about a certain topic and then use the time while they are talking to do a quick sketch. So to demonstrate, I asked someone to explain their job in more detail and was able to do this quick sketch. It’s not complete, but is a good record of a lovely lunch.

Thanks to everyone who came on Saturday. I really love teaching online, but there is definitely something special about meeting in real life. I hope to do more of these SketchingNow meetups in the future.