On the last full day of my road trip I headed to a very special country town – Canowindra.

For starters, it has a cool name! It is not pronounced Cano-windra which would be the logical way to say it. Instead, it is Ca-nowin-dra. And the ‘nowin’ part is like ‘noun’.

But most importantly it has a truly wonderful curving main street that is delightfully rundown. It is also non-touristy so as I sat on the streets sketching I was surrounded by locals who were coming into ‘town’ for everyday chores.

The street contains a great variety of building types with a number of grand verandahed buildings.

Back in 2021 I only had less than 2 hours and it was raining so I was very happy for a lovely warm sunny day this time!

As usual, my first stop was to find a cafe and have a coffee (needed after an hour of driving on winding narrow pot-holed country roads) and I immediately started sketching a verandah!

This was a warmup sketch from my outside table at Finn’s.

The second sketch that I did was re-doing a view that I drew in 2021. I was sitting cross-legged on the ground for this sketch (I think this is the only time I sat this way all week.) A few locals said hello which was nice.

I then wanted to do a closer view of the big pub located on the curve of the street…

… and was happy to discover a bench that I could sit on.

There are just many interesting views of this street!

This quick pencil sketch and the one below were done looking left and right while sitting on another bench.

I really enjoyed doing these two quick sketches (5 minutes each).

After some more walking around I ended up back at my car and this was the view from the driver’s seat. For this sketch, I added colour selectively and started thinking that this could be a good technique to explore further when sketching complex scenes.

I suddenly realised it was almost 1:30pm and started to worry that I wouldn’t find lunch. But thankfully I had 3 minutes to spare until the Finn’s kitchen closed. While waiting for my meal I had a good chance to review the sketches I had done so far. It was a pretty productive morning!

After lunch, I wanted to keep sketching!!! This one was down sitting on a bench right at the curve of the road.

And then another quick pencil sketch from another bench. Oh! I love this place so much!

One final image – a photo from the big pub on the curve. The street was very quiet at 2:30pm!

Here are all my pages from my lovely time in Canowindra. It was very special to be able to do 8 sketches of different views of one street during a 4-hour period. And once again I really love the way that some buildings appear in a number of sketches.

I was just starting to get into the groove sketching these country towns… and just like that it was time to head home the next day. I’ll keep my drive home for the next article. 🙂