Australia Day and some other recent pages

January 27, 2021 | Leave your thoughts

Yesterday was Australia Day – our national public holiday and a day that I try to record in sketch form in some way. A few of my previous Australia adventures include:

This year my Australia Day celebration existed simply in sketching a lamington.

My weekly schedule at the moment includes a very focused Monday and Tuesday as I review work done as part of my Sketchbook Design course and then prepare for a livestream – and this week was no exception. So I spent a lovely day working on Sketchbook Design stuff. Now why didn’t I think about public holidays when I planned the Group Run-through schedule? 

This page is the result of a 10 minute demo at the end of last night’s livestream… with an extra 5-10 minutes of additional lines and washes added this morning. I chose the Three Sisters as my subject because it was Australia Day – I normally choose Scottish scenes since most of my on location landscape sketching happens when I’m visiting Scotland. I’m still contemplating whether I should add a background (more of the Blue Mountains) to this sketch. What do you think?

So overall, even though I didn’t get out sketching, I had a great Australia Day. It’s such a blessing to love your work so much!


In other sketching in the past week…


Here is the lamington sketch in context and another landscape sketch. Ha! guess what, it’s a Scottish scene.

Both of these sketches were done as part of Sketchbook Design and the pre-painted pages exercise. (For those of you doing the course I explained more about this in Livestream 4 – replay is up in the classroom.) A little out of character, hey?


A bit of a random page with some collage (part of Sketchbook Design Lesson 1) – some lovely Paris tea sent to me by Wendi (thank you!!!) and some rough sketches during a family Skype call. This page is taped on one side only so that I can read the stuff below it.


A day when I realised at dinner time that I hadn’t sketched anything that day and then a ‘secondary sketch’ (another element from Sketchbook Design Lesson 1) of my current arrangement on my desk – back to normal now that all the filming is done for the course.


And finally a crazy pre-painted sketch of my usual visit to my local cafe with a quote at the bottom of the page from one of the wait staff! It’s sometimes hard to focus on my work when I’m here due to all the fun conversations I have with the Goodfields gang.

So there you have it… a fun few days of sketching!

There is no doubt that my sketching and page layouts have been really boosted thanks to the incredible group doing the Sketchbook Design course at the moment. Wow wow wow! And I’m so happy to read inside the classroom that many other people are sketching more, feeling more confident and most importantly, are happier with their work.



Finally… just to let you know….

As we are now just over 3 weeks into the course and it will be a little hard to catch up, I’ve decided to close the doors to new signups for Sketchbook Design this Friday 29 Jan at midnight Pacific Time. This will enable me to focus fully on the current Group Run-through and the current lesson each week. (Note: If you have already doing the course… nothing changes for you – you’ll continue to have lifetime access to everything inside the current classroom.)

I’m not exactly sure when I will open the doors again but it will be in a few months time and the price will increase a little (it has turned out to be a much bigger course than I had planned). So if you want to signup for Sketchbook Design this week is your last chance at the current price. Find out more here.

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