winter

Winter in the Park

Yesterday I posted a sketch I did and today here is a photo of the same spot plus some surprising shots of roses in bloom, don’t they know its late December?

Last Sketch of the year

27 December was the last meeting of the Hotham Park Sketcher’s group. Two of us were sufficiently recovered from festivities to make it out to a dry but chilly park. I settled myself in front of the gravel garden pond and attempted to catch the plant textures  but soon got cold. I did take a…

Alder: Into the canopy 3

This is part of a series based on looking into the canopy of the trees in Hotham Park. I may need to do a little more work to tidy one or two loose ends but its nearly there. I somtimes  wonder why I start things like this!  

Big tidy up in the Park.

Keeping a park the size of Hotham looking good is a huge job and there has to be a nice balance between formality and wildness. Sometimes the wildness gets the upper hand so recently there has been big clean up with brambles and overgrown beds cleared, including the conservation pond which had completely reeded over….

Last Sketch of the year.

I met with the sketcher’s group today, it was COLD but here is the result. 2017 has been a very unproductive  year artistically for various reasons which I won’t bore you with but I’m ready to roll for 2018. As I have given away or sold quite a lot of my paintings I need to…

Winter Sketching

There was a bitter biting wind wind when I arrived in Hotham park for our fortnightly sketching group. We normally sketch outside for an hour then into the cafe for coffee and share but today the three of us migrated to the warm cafe to sketch from the windows there. I did manage one sketch…

A cold sketch

This morning there was a heavy frost so I went to the sketching group at the park well wrapped up. The light was amazing and the hour went by very quickly. Nearly all the leaves are off the trees now and their bones show an amazing range of colours  in the winter sun.

Snowy landscape, monoprint

Because the weather is so unsuitable for hanging around under trees sketching I am drawing on images from my sketchbook to create some of the monoprints I’m doing. Using black ink lends itself to snow scenes and here is one based on a drawing of a tree I did a while ago.

Finishing touches

I have put the finishing touches to this by painting in the crows. Hotham Park has a large population of crows and rooks strutting around and nesting in tall trees. The crows are unusual in that they have white feathers in their wings.