Once a month I get together with a few local artists for a drawing group. It’s a chance to catch up and chat about what we are working on and spend a couple of hours outside drawing. We have favourite spots to go to and mix it up a bit. Our last location was at nearby Hastings Point, at a picnic table under the shade.
We’ve been meeting together on and off for nearly ten years and in that time I’ve got over my fear of not being too representational. I usually bring along scraps of paper that I haven’t allocated for any particular project so that I don’t get precious about scribbling and mucking around with ink or charcoal.
One time it was raining and I took out my bits of paper and floated them in the mud. This started a whole body of work about floating papers in water. The good thing about being outside is it doesnt matter too much if you make a mess.
Looking out from my seat at the picnic table I started drawing a pandanus tree, very roughly. I used Derwent Inktense pencils so when you add water they become like ink and you can blend the colours with watercolour washes.
It’s a completely different experience than working in the studio. where I spend a lot of time refining works, which can of course lead to ‘over cooking’ the composition. More! More, I keep thinking. I am learning about the value of empty spaces in a composition.
Feeling quite happy with my little drawing, I thought I could turn it into a folded book. A few people added suggestions about having it stand up with sticks so I had to puzzle out how to make casing for the sticks to slot into. I sewed a backing sheet of the same size paper with spaces for the sticks to slot in. The stitching became a drawn line feature on the back.
Making that little object was a good in between time filler for when the collage I’m currently working on, gets pressed between glueings. It’s my biggest collage to date and I get a bit overwhelmed by its scale. Day by day I sit with it for an good half hour before I can commit to the next layering.
I’m using that idea of a silhouette for the tree. It was fun cutting out the twisting shapes. The rest of the composition has been more of a challenge. It’s still a work in progress as I start cutting out leaves and getting a bit looser with the structure. We’ll see how it looks by the end of the week.
Pandanus Panorama 2025 ink and watercolour on paper