Northcliff Hill

After weeks of gorgeous Spring weather our little band of only three sketchers decided to go up to the second highest point in Johannesburg, Northcliff Hill for the 360° view. It turned out to be a cold, windy, overcast day so John and I, in our light spring-y clothing, cowered beneath the ridge where we couldn't see much of the scenery, but were at least out of the grip of the chilly blast. Barbara came a bit better prepared in a warm jacket, so perched on a rock with more of a vantage point, and sketched us!

 I sketched the landmark Northcliff water tower, struggling with perspective again - although the top of the tower IS wider than the bottom, should I paint it so?... I thought not but should have - mine doesn't look much like the real thing - when John posts his version you'll see what it does look like! I spotted a little bit of Joburg skyline in between the long grass and somebody's eagle's eye home - what a place to live!

When our chattering teeth interfered too much with our sketching abilities, we decided to go back down to the suburbs and warm up over coffee and lunch at the Mugg & Bean. I faced the view that attracted me most - the display of yummy looking cakes and pies, managing to control my impulse to order one of each by drawing them instead.

Earlier in the week I had been painting a mural for the local primary school concert, as I mentioned before. I took a small break to sketch the children rehearsing below where I was on the stage, in the hall - very sweet but very lively and multitudinous!!

Glazed over

I've been painting more, sketching less lately (as well as painting the backdrop for our local primary school's annual concert again, many years after my children left there and grew up) so another long absence here - I attended the final session of Greg Kerr's course I posted about here, last week after missing the third one while on my travels. This was about learning how to glaze with oil paints - the images gleaned from our original source material - mine being on 12"x12" canvases, my ladies with umbrella, black and white cow, wooden fence and seed pod, which I changed from a honey-locust to a jacaranda - an attempt at iconography, but too hard and complicated to explain!

One panel started with a bolus, or red oxide ground, the layers of warm and cool colours built up slowly and patiently, drying well between each one (hard for somebody used to instant results with pen and watercolour)

One on a white ground, where the layers produced much more brilliantly coloured results, and took a lot longer to get to neutral shades and depth of tone.

 And on a green ground, which produced different results again of the layers of transparent colour - we were to lift out areas from each glaze to preserve colours we wanted to keep. The white crayon outline of the original drawing ended up as the 'radioactive' glow around the cow.

We finished the paintings off by adding veils of pure colour, and lastly, very sparingly, white. They are very dark, shiny (because of the Liquin used as medium) little paintings, hard to photograph, and I don't know if I would paint like this as a rule, but I'm very happy to know how to do it.
We worked on our three acrylic paintings too with oil glazes, tying them together as a triptych, lifting and knocking back, and I learnt another blending technique with the fan brush, which I've never quite known what to do with, to get a highly polished looking finish - still thinking about those. I feel, at last, as though I'm getting to know exactly what to do with the wonderful 40th birthday present my husband gave me mphwmph years ago of a bunch of oil paints, canvases and brushes!

Fast lines

On Saturday our Joburg sketching group went to Brightwater Commons, a shopping complex with a big open air area with markets, exhibitions, children's playgrounds and a skateboard park. We decided to try and sketch the acrobatics of the skateboarders - what a challenge that turned out to be! These two sketches took me all afternoon - most of the time was spent staring at the flying figures, trying to work out which limbs went where, a mental 'snapshot' and then the quickest of lines to pin them down on paper.

I used my Lamy fountain pen, filled with the precious Noodlers Bulletproof black ink that Liz Steel very kindly brought all the way from Sydney to Lisbon for me, which allows watercolour washes over it without running into black and grey mess (though sometimes I enjoy that effect, so have other watersoluble pens in my kit). In the bottom sketch I added a second layer of figures over the black line ones, with another treasure bought in a Lisbon art shop - Prussian Blue Ecoline Liquid watercolour in my thin waterbrush - voila, no clogging! - its such a lovely drawing tool, especially for these fast flowing lines.

After Lisbon... France

After the anticipation, preparation and high excitement of Lisbon, it was a different kind of joy to unwind in the northern French countryside of Pas de Calais. Our daughter and her boyfriend welcomed us to their lovely farmhouse home and we proceeded to enjoy all the charms of a tiny French village - from the noisy next-door rooster to the cow who craved human company, the visiting Dutch orchestra, the family jam-producing homestead, and the drives to surrounding Somme battlefields, village markets and sea and riverside towns, it was a feast of new, blissful and picturesque experiences. I would have to spend weeks, slowly, to sketch even a tenth of it, but this was a sociable, and mobile - lots more walking! - time with family and friends, so these were the few scenes I did get into my sketchbook. I hope to get the chance to do lots more some day.  

Sitting on the doorstep of the house, looking out of the gate to 'The Cité' - all of ...six? houses in a row, with the cow's field behind them.

The gateway to The Abbaye, where we gathered one evening with the villagers to listen to the orchestra and choir from Holland - heralded by a march through the town with bagpipes (?!) and a very quaint sort of barrel orchestrion.

The garage housing a very old Landrover that valiantly transported its travellers most of the way round Europe, but depositing them rather suddenly near Barcelona, and needing to be towed back to its resting place under the grape vines.