Gill and I have now managed to get back into our weekly sketching mode and have had some pleasant mornings sitting in the Koroni sunshine.

I've been experimenting with different styles of collage just recently, and trying to finish some to put them up onto my website. I now have 5 completed and they are really rather varied, and don't necessarily compliment each other!  In the two below, I've tried to keep things a little simplier than usual, and also with more subdued colours, which I'm starting to like for a change. Its a start I guess.....

Finally a warm day and a chance to go sketching with my sketching buddy, Gill.  Its been quite some time since our last jaunt, so we headed somewhere familiar, the gorgeous St John the Baptist Monastery, just a nice stroll through the castle grounds in Koroni.

We chose two separate spots, and sat perched on our stools, taking in the birdsong and the warm breeze - sigh... this is most definitely the life!  Here's what I came away with....

In my endeavour to get my sketchbooks and travel journals somewhat more finished and consolidated, I enrolled in Sketchbook Delight by Alisa Burke  http://www.shopalisaburke.com/collections/online-classes. The course is done via a blogsite, and I thoroughly enjoyed it, and am still working through various parts of it.

Lisa comes across as a very relaxed and likeable person, and as a lot of the course is done via video, that's important! Her own artworks and journals are wonderful and a real inspiration.  I did work through most of the exercises, though didn't actually put them onto the Flickr site. What I have so far managed to do though, and this was the whole purpose of doing the course, is come up with a way in which to do my travel journals which I'm happy with, and in my own style. I've been getting rather frustrated with trying to work my sketches into visually interesting pages, whether its when we're travelling, or whether I'm sketching locally. I often seem to end up with a sketch hovering over a plain white page, with no idea where to do next, and with lots of blank pages in between.

So the time has come to whip these numerous sketchbooks of mine into shape.  Below is an example of one of my 'new' double spread pages, not necessarily complete! This is the beginning of our recent trip through to France, and onto Australia. The sketchbook I'm using here is my favourite type - a landscape Moleskine with lovely thick watercolour paper.  Now, if only I could do something about my dreadful writing!

I'm currently reading this delightful little book (I doubt I've ever used the word 'delightful' before, but its somehow perfect here). I became aware of it some time ago and finally managed to obtain a copy from  Christopher Lambert, the author and artist himself, so I do feel rather privileged to have a copy. Its a tiny book, with very small and fairly hard to read handwriting. When the author started out on his solitary trek from Le Havre to Rome, he kept this journal of his daily progress intermingled with beautiful coloured sketches. At that stage publishing it was probably the furtherest thing from his mind, so you can certainly excuse the size of his handwriting! He manages in this small space though, to capture the essence of the countryside, towns and villages of France, Switzerland and Italy along the way. You can almost feel the hardships (like the aching feet), but then also the pure joy when the simplest and unexpected things occur. 

He walks through some of the places from our recent travels and I've jotted down some interesting sounding villages for us to take a look at!  Anyway, if this book does 'cross your path' at any stage, (pun intended), it is well worth a look.

I've just realised in horror that its March next week, and this year is slipping by with very little input from me on this blog!
Sooo I've decided its time to get tough, and I am now setting myself the goal of posting each and every week, no matter where I am, no matter what I'm doing.  Stay tuned  for this week's post.... 

This is not quite the blog I intended posting, but its a start. 

Not too much happening creatively, but I feel things beginning to improve, particularly on the collage front, and also after a session making stamps today with Gill.

Meanwhile, I have produced some cards for a friend's recent birthday, using a selection of my Greek paintings and also some of my photos taken locally. This is something I would like to do more of, and perhaps make some bookmarks, gift cards etc as well. Its nice to be able to use my art and photos in this way. 

Despite my hopes, very little 'creativity' has taken place since we left Europe in early October. I had such good intentions of all the sketches and paintings I might conjure up whilst I was in New Zealand and Sydney, but in hindsight, it was all a pipe-dream! I tend to forget how life revs up a few notches in Sydney, and just how many cafes and restaurants I can manage to visit in one day!
My visit to Auckland though, culminated in a request that threw me out of my comfort zone and provided me with quite a few hours challenging hours. An old friend (not old in age, but 'old' as in the fact that we've known each other nearly 40 years), commissioned me to do a large collage for her son's wedding. The collage was to be an interpretation of the area in Western Auckland where he'd grown up, and now still lives. We spent a morning exploring the area where I tried to absorb everything and take photos. One concern I had was the "green" everywhere - a colour I don't use very much in my paintings these days!
Once in Sydney my thoughts of working outside were stopped by the constant rain, so I set myself up in the garage using the wire clothes dryer as my painting table.  I started by doing some sketches of the 3 or 4 of main 'points of interest'.... then the collage began and I got myself mentally into New Zealand mode and by brain conjured up images of paua shell, cabbage trees, tikis and the like.  It was an incredibly interesting exercise! The largest collage I've completed to date is A3 and this was 4 times that size, so at first there seemed to be an awful lot of paper to cover, but once I got into the grove, I could have kept on forever!

It been a very busy year and 2012 is just around the corner. I look forward to catching up with my rather neglected blogs, resuming my weekly paintings and sharing my latest creative endeavours very soon.