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...
My plan was to do a ‘nice’ sketch of Carlile House on Richmond Road in Grey Lynn. Unfortunately it started bucketing down and my watercolour started running off the page! Turns out lots of sloppy half dry watercolour and Posca paint works quite well in a sloppy finger-painting way so it was actually a blast - and - it does actually capture the broken down look of the place. Very impressed with the newer @hahnemuehle_global Greybooks, they must have added more sizing to the sheets because it doesn’t seem to cockle like the early ones did. I’ll be back on a sunny day and have another try at a ‘nice’ version.
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