Month: March 2026

My wife has been doing sketching and watercolour for a bit over a year, and has recently been going to a few different sketching groups that meet up around Sydney to socialise and draw together. This morning one was meeting walking distance from our place, and she asked me to go along. We walked down with Scully and I took a small folding chair to sit on. My wife had used the chair before, but said it wasn’t convenient for her paints, since they had to go on the ground and it was too hard to reach them.

When we got there, she found a place to sit on the root of a fig tree, which was lower to the ground and more convenient. The group was pretty casual, with about a dozen people there. The subject was a Victorian terrace house, mostly covered in ivy. Everyone I saw was doing watercolour work, but I like to just sketch in ink or pencil, so I completed my sketch pretty quickly.

For this one I used two different grey felt tip pens:

Others including my wife were still going on their watercolours, so I flipped the page in my sketchbook and took out my selection of grey watercolour “brush” pens:

That gives a much looser style, since the pen tips are broader and it’s difficult to do fine lines, so I need to work in blocks of different shades of grey. Although the packet says “brush pens”, the tip is actually a flexible felt tip. Then I tried my Japanese brush pen:

This pen is an actual brush with bristles, supplied with ink from the reservoir. I really like this pen, because it behaves more like a calligraphy brush, and you can do thin and thick lines more easily than the felt “brush” tips. Finally, I pulled out a 2B pencil:

Unlike the pens, a pencil can produce different darknesses by varying the pressure, so can create shadows with varying intensity. I’m pleased with how these different media show off different aspects of the same subject. By the time I’d finished these four drawings, my wife was ready to go, having completed her watercolour drawing.

Finally, to show you the actual building, I took a photo:

As you can see, I ignored the car parked in the foreground and interpolated through the foreground trees as well (plane tree, and the fig tree that my wife was sitting on a root of). I also didn’t include any of the background buildings. I considered that, but decided against it. Anyway, it was a fun experience!

When we got home we had lunch, and then soon after left for an afternoon tea at my wife’s mother’s place, with my wife’s brother and sister as well. We had a few little cakey things cut into bite-sized pieces, including a very nice salted caramel tart.

Then we drove home and I had my only online class for the week: the older students doing the current affairs news stories. Today we discussed:

• Austrian climber found guilty after girlfriend froze to death on mountain – considering questions about whether the mountaineer should be held responsible for safety of his climbing partner or not.
• And the follow-up: How responsible are climbers for each other’s safety? Mountaineers react to manslaughter – thinking about how this might affect mountain climbing as a recreation.
• Meet the mapmakers recording every remote road in Australia to keep travellers safer – talking about how trusting technology can make people ignore common sense.
• Instagram to alert parents if teens search for self-harm and suicide content – discussing whether this is useful or harmful, and if Instagram is shirking its responsibility to keep teens safe online.
• The Chinese AI app sending Hollywood into a panic – thinking about the potential impacts on the movie industry.

It’s always an interesting class, with some very thoughtful opinions and comments from the students.