Some time ago I found an old wiro notebook in a drawer. A scruffy wiro bound notebook with a photo of 2 men in a kayak with a bear on the front cover. In that notebook I found terrible sketches drawn in pencil made while travelling in 1991. One sketch leapt out at me. It was a rough pencil sketch of Mt Ararat from a backpacking trip to eastern Turkey. The sketch really surprised me – it was a very basic pencil sketch, drawn using a .5mm technical pencil on a cheap notepad. The sketch is just black and white… To my surprise the sounds and smells of the day came flooding back. Meeting some Kurdish goat herders and their flock near the base of Mt Ararat, about 10km from the Iranian border on a bright sunny but cool, alpine day. Along with memories of driving across the mountain steppe in an old Renault 19 and the smells of chai and coffee in a Doğubayazıt pasta solunu. It all came back come flooding back! Why did it evoke such vivid memories? I’m not really sure to be honest. Maybe t...
It's our third year camping up at Pataua. The place just doesn't get boring, each year I seem to find new things to sketch. This year I had the Moleskine landscape watercolour book from the Singapore Symposium. It's great to sketch in, the heavyweight watercolour paper soaks up miles of colour and the landscape format works really well for widescreen beach sketches like these.
Cyclone Victor passed us by early in the week leaving us with some pretty large surf. It was fun getting blasted by the big waves and watching boogie boarders 'going over the falls' time and again, but they seemed to come up smiling every time.
There was no way I was going to try and catch such big waves on the paddleboard, so we spent a lot of time paddling up the estuary disturbing the odd stingray visible in the clear water, jumping off the bridge and platform. A harvest session picking pipis and cockles gave us a tasty lunch one day.
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