I spent 12 wonderful days in Wellington during January. The reason for the trip was to teach at a 10th birthday event for Urban Sketchers Wellington (huge thanks to Andrew James and the amazing admin of USK Wellington for inviting me and organising such a great event.)

New Zealand has many beautiful natural wonders but for this trip I decided to stay put in Wellington. I had my everyday work to continue doing (including two livestreams for the Live Version of Watercolour) and so this was more ‘remote working with more sketching than usual’ rather than ‘vacation’.

As mentioned in my last post, the theme that I was focusing on for January (thanks to my Sketching Adventure Community on Patreon) was unused supplies. And this meant that I packed Inktense pencils and Tombow markers as well as my watercolour and Neocolor and a few other tools (just in case). 

As it turned out I ended up mainly using the Intense and Tombows together – although I did use watercolour for some cafe sketching.

I filmed two update videos (here and here) and hosted one livestream going through my entire collection of sketches from the trip inside my Sketching Adventure Community but in this blog article (and the next two posts) I’ll share the more important sketchbook pages plus some photos.

Monday: First sketch at the airport and first time combining Tombows with Inktense.

Inside the Qantas flight (very dull interior with no colour!)

The first sketch in Wellington was done with Andrew and interestingly we both used a purple marker as the main colour. 

A quick sketch of theplan of the serviced apartment that served me well for my stay, an extension cord (bought to enable me to do livestreams up against the window) and my view.

Tuesday: I spent the morning doing prep for my workshop and then roamed the streets and lane ways.

I really liked the Cuba St area of Wellington – very sketchable.

I did this quick Inktense and Tombow sketch of Glover Park before heading back to my room.

Then I had a Watercolour livestream to prep for! Here is a photo the next morning just before I went live.

Wednesday: The first of 4 or 5 visits to a great cafe nearby – Prefab. This was my pre-livestream breakfast.

And then I had another cafe sketch visit after the livestream!

Clyde Quay Boat Harbour: This was also a very sketchable view – starting with the green shape of the trees and then picking out the left side of the volumes.

The finished sketch.

A 5 minute watercolour sketch while waiting to be picked up by Andrew.

 
He took me on a very scenic drive to the beach and although it wasn’t raining when we got out of the car – it started pouring as soon as we opened our sketchbooks.

Here’s a screenshot from the video I filmed at the time.

Thursday: Another day, another cafe. It was a very wet day so I had a leisurely brunch which was lovely.

I ended up at the Te Papa museum sketching objects.

And then had so much fun sketching some stuffed Kiwis!

That afternoon the rain eased and I met up with some local sketchers (Andrew, Dave and Caren) in an interesting suburb of Newtown.

Friday: Another day (raining) and another cafe visit.

The USK Wellington event started that evening – it was great to meet lots of local sketchers and see Murray Dewhurst again. It was very inspiring to look through his sketchbook and see all his beautiful gouache work. I was talking too much to take any photos other than this one (while Murray was sketching us all).

More about my workshops in the next article!