Melbourne Trip 2016 Part 6: Final sketching day with friends

March 29, 2016 | 4 Comments


I am finally getting a chance to finish off my summaries of my recent trip to Melbourne. So here are the sketches which I did on my last day when I had a lovely relaxing sketching day out with my two great friends Alissa Duke and Angela Williams. I hope that I never take for granted the great privilege of being out to hang out with a few sketching buddies, just chilling and roaming from one sketch to the next.

I was pretty tired after my big week – my commitments with the Watercolour Society of Victoria, prepping for and then running a 2 day Sketching Architecture workshop – and didn’t really feel as if I had much energy to sketch. But as a result of hanging out with these two friends I managed to do more than I expected.


We started with our five minute FSS challenge which I wrote about earlier.


Here is mine.


And then we crossed the road and I sketch the pub on the other corner. Jackson and Young.


Next I needed a coffee and a (shared) cake so we headed to Brunetti at City Square. The coffee and lemon tart hit the spot.


Then as we were discussing the upcoming Urban Sketchers Symposium in Manchester, we had to sketch the Manchester Unity building. And then I sketched another building from the same spot.


Time for lunch! So we went to a dumpling place in Centre Place – one of the iconic laneways of Melbourne. I did an unsuccessful sketch initially – I was getting a little bit of sketcher’s fatigue and the buildings came out too low, so I simply started again.

I am not sure when the last time I abandoned a sketch was, and can’t remember having a spread like this with two attempts side by side. But hey, I like the overall effect – especially with some food thrown into the middle of it! It was then time to head for the airport. What a great day and way to finish my busy visit to Melbourne. It is funny that when I take the pressure off to produce I normally do more than I expect – are you like that too?


And just to finish I want to share this photo (posted to Instagram and Facebook at the time) of the Friday evening which I spent with Angela. The caption was:

Eating is secondary on this dining table!

PS. finally – a huge thanks to everyone that left a comment on yesterday’s post. There are a lot of great thoughts…and I am keen to respond to them all soon. Sadly I have no internet at home today so only doing the essentials ie. new blog posts (I know people as disappointed when I miss!) I feel really limited without internet to my main desktop computer. Aagh! life is so hard when we become unplugged –  hey??

4 Comments

  • Ray Ridgway says:

    Hello Liz …… As a grateful viewer of your website and Foundations course, allow me to suggest more postings of your loose, pre-painting, just ink sketches. It’s quite interesting to see the basic ink sketch both before and after the painting. I’m at the early stage of trying to improve my ink basics before moving on to the painting, and assume that there are others who feel the same. Today’s posting of the two ink-only sketches, the initial failed one and the secondary successful one, was quite helpful. Thanks so much for all your greatly appreciated output.

  • I like your combination of quick sketches and more complete ones. And your “failed” one just shows us that not every sketch has to come out perfect…although to most of us it looks fine. I think we are harder judging ourselves than the work of others. The table from Friday evening made me smile…when I get together with sketching friends our meals often look like that too. As for your question, I think that when we relax and the pressure is off we sometimes do more than we expect because we are enjoying it more. That happens to me too.

  • Emily D. says:

    Oh I love that last photo! All those lovely paint tubes. 🙂

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