Waterkloof Air Show

I've wanted to sketch at the annual Air Show at Waterkloof Air Force Base near Pretoria for a long time but always find out too late that it was on. This time my son and husband announced they were going a day or two before, and I baled out of other sketching plans to join them. It was a terrific day - so many diverse people, displays, machines and aircraft - I started slowly with the US Air Force band playing under the wing of a huge C-17 Transporter, but gained momentum and lost inhibitions as the day wore on.

The people on the ground were just as interesting to me as the aircraft flipping around (of course these weren't all in the air at the same time, I just added them as they caught my attention) missing a few as I tried to scribble the crowds' excitement at their tricks. Families having picnics, men of every age and stage behaving like kids at a magic show, girls flirting and couples canoodling, and all the time cameras, long lenses, cellphones and tablets being waved around to capture the best shot of the day. A long time since I've spent a whole day out sketching - I think I rediscovered a certain lost love for it, even though the drawings aren't very pretty.

At the train station going home were these two glamorous women, dressed head-to-toe in white, with white umbrellas, baskets and boxes on a white trolley. They seemed bizarre until we remembered that it was the night of Dîner en Blanc, where people dressed only in white gather somewhere to be taken to a secret destination for an all white dinner (entirely different from Old South African connotations!) . I discovered later it was at Wits University, under the stars, on a night where we had the most dramatic, destructive hailstorm I've seen for 30 years or more, those elegant white umbrellas wouldn't have stood a chance - in fact I see it was abandoned, not surprising in the least.

Fisherman's cottage

This is one of the fisherman's cottages at Arniston, where we holidayed - this old section is called Kassies Baai - and the whole place is a national monument, dating back 200 years, which for South Africa is a long history - I know it won't impress some of you ancients with 700+ year old architecture, but we are very proud of these humble little abodes! They look charmingly hand-crafted - uneven walls, rounded edges and softly moulded edifices. The people living there have inevitably embraced the modern world - electric power lines, cars, trailers and caravans now embellish the simple time-worn village - but the feeling lingers on...
I zoned in on the cottage above, trying to define the shapes of the white-washed walls with subtle variations of colour (which aren't so subtle after all) - a painting I've been thinking of doing for ages - it's a start, but I need to try it again... and again... (on Canson Not 24 x 32 cm)
The little sketch on the right isn't finished, but it gives an impression of what the light is like there on a sunny day - glaringly bright, the whites of buildings and sand melding into each other, and everything sun-bleached and washed out.

Now listen, here's something exciting! I've been invited to be a correspondent on the Urban Sketchers blog!! I feel very honoured to be joining the amazing sketchers there from all over the world - and to be another of the rather scarce dots on the map of Africa. I'm going to have to get out more to keep the urban sketches flowing, but that's a good thing - I've been rather house-bound of late. My introduction will be on the 1st of February, I think, so come and visit there, wont you?

White azaleas

I should have been ironing, but it's a beautiful day and the white azalea bush is in full bloom, so I thought I'd carry on with the quest to learn to paint white subjects in watercolour. I had to do quick sketches in my accordian sketchbook, as, really, it's piling up into a huge mountain (the washing). What I think I learnt from these two - the first rather carefully done with much concentration and squinting, the second dashed off while waiting for the washes on the first to dry - is, not to squint and concentrate so hard...I prefer the second one...and fewer but larger areas, or shapes, of pure white ie. the paper, seems to produce more of the clean, sunlit look I'm after. I still have to work on the subtle colour changes within the white, and tone and shadow and some more soft edges... The dog felt it beholden upon him to bark and wildly chase after everyone who walked past our front gate, near which I was sitting on an upturned bucket, so any interesting textural effects are from him kicking up sand into my palette.