I spent about an hour and forty minutes drawing and painting this outside today. Usually I draw outside and paint inside. This is the historic fire station on Argyle Street in Hobart, Tasmania.
Hobart Fire Brigade
My thoughts are with those in New South Wales and Queensland where bush fires are raging. Three lives and over 150 homes have been lost. I hope the wind changes direction to stop the fires in their track and that good soaking rain falls upon the scorched and blistering dry land. Take care, everybody.
Thanks for stopping by and I hope that the upcoming week is kind to you.
I arrived back in Tasmania from Canada on Monday. Two days later, and still rather jet-lagged, after work, I walked up to pick up prints I had ordered. I passed the historic fire station and thought I should quickly try to draw this. Ten minutes into the drawing and I had had enough.
When I was in Canada, I did two urban sketching sessions with Oliver Hoesser. He introduced the grey texta (felt pen), which you can paint over. This captured my interest A LOT. This is potentially a much quicker way to apply shadow. I trialled it with this quick sketch and my conclusion is that this is a great tool for sketch books, especially holiday sketching when you’re trying to capture scenes, events and people on the fly! It can really be a time-saver not having to wait for paint to dry to add the next wash.
grey textas
For new urban sketchers and/or watercolour, this removes one step, simplifying a challenging medium and task. Urban sketching is a bit like learning to drive there are so many things to think about and check, you can feel mentally exhausted after an hour! So, if you can simplify adding shadows that can really help people from becoming too discouraged when learning. Watercolour is a challenging medium to control, whereas, a texta is much easier to handle.
Water colour pencil, Artline pen and grey texta blocking in some of the shadows. I chose to ignore the large shadow on the bottom half of the building.
I usually draw in the shape with a water colour pencil (learnt this from Liz Steel), then add pen and paint. I found that my watercolour pencil lines on the Stillman & Birn paper acted as a resist and kept pushing the paint away. I had to keep applying paint to the edges of the watercolour pencil before it finally more or less accepted it.
Added paint at home
The historic fire station on 79-81 Argyle Street, Hobart is a whole street block long! Since 1911, for 92 years, it was the Fire Brigade’s operational headquarters. It is now a museum and the restored building currently contains a wide range of historical firefighting equipment ranging from hand drawn firefighting pumps, turn of the century firefighting trucks, antique uniforms and historical documents and photographs.
The Unfurling Artist: journalising creative journeying 