Happy Holidays!

Merry Christmas, Happy 2013 and all of that. Catch y'all again next year!

Sebastian Vettel

The dreaded Sebastian #Vettel finger. All Zbrush +f1fans

Ahhhh, Blood

Count Dracula knows fine blood. He drinks it out of a glass. Refreshing.

All Zbrush. Quite like the hard surface tools.

Happy Halloween!

Worldwide Sketchcrawl 37 - Flinders Street

Holbien Watercolours + LAMY Safari pen

I have a new LAMY pen... yeah those ones that exist inside a glass cabinet signifying that they are somehow more superior-er.

The flow is really something else - I'm guessing catered for connoisseurs of calligraphy. It comes out dark, and stays dark even if I applied watercolours on first.

Not to mention, I sat in the rain doing this. The drops splattered my page but it gave it a nice effect.

Here are some other sketches from the day after the jump. Started off at Starbucks (as you do) and then some heads on the train back.

Blue Mountains - Corel Painter Plein air

Not too far out of Sydney are the spectacular Blue Mountains. A clear, crisp and seemingly endless landscape full of inspiring locations to paint.

Which prompted me to try something different; haul a laptop and bushwalk over rocky terrain. Yes, I figured that traditionals were too messy and bulky to carry, and the iPad was too cumbersome to paint on. What I found out in the end was there were alot of disadvantages using the laptop method too.

Running against battery life was part of the problem. Poor screen brightness in the open sun was another (I hid under the shade of my coat to block the sun off my screen to the bemusement of passers by). And ofcourse, laptops really aren't meant to be exposed to drizzle or any other of nature's extremities - so it's limited physically.

All in all it was a fun experience - one where I think I'll spend several days calmly picking spots to paint rather than to rush around with an immanently setting sun.

Below is a screen capture of the experience. I think you can see how I struggled at the beginning to lock in a value structure - with the rolling clouds and what have you. But towards the end I began to enjoy it alot more.

Made it onto TV! ...

Albeit for a brief, brief period.

But I'm glad ABC arts reporter Annemaria Nicholson gave the work a shout out at the Bald Archy exhibition.

Although the other networks picked up the Bald Archy exhibition, they didn't show any ailing Rupert works at all. I think we all know why right?

Click to see the full story!

Worldwide Sketchcrawl 35 - Sydney

Last weekend was my first Sketchcrawl in Sydney and there were 30 artists, young and old, whipping out their pencils and drawing. Having done Sketchcrawl's in Melbourne for so long, I was inspired (and secretly jealous) how large the community was here - to see how eager they were to sketch the world around them.

The group went to Cockatoo Island, a relaxing 15 minute ferry ride from Sydney. It was a beautiful and alien looking place. Old machines, warehouses and buildings over looking the Sydney skyline. The one above is yet another iPad sketch. I was barely on Cockatoo Island when the scene just grabbed me. It was an overcast morning and a little damp, this seemed to saturate the colours on the cliff faces. Yet right next to it was a giant, man made warehouse which was coloured a fading sky blue. Rarely in the modern world, I think, would this exist anymore, nature would just get mowed down. But here they seemed to co-exist, frozen in time.

The sketches below are from a more traditional media known as "pen". They are shot on a more prehistoric thing called a Nokia phone camera. Unfortunately I don't have all my equipment here so for now, this'll do.

Please do yourself a favour and check out the brilliant work of the other Sydney sketchers. And while your at it, the rest of the world!