en plein air

Watercolour sketching in the Botanical Gardens 

Sunday, 15 September 2013

This week our en plein air painting outing was to the Botanical Gardens. As Toowoomba gears up for the annual Carnival of Flowers the gardens are filled with spring colour. Although florals don’t generally feature in my artwork, it was a beautiful morning to sit in the sunshine, surrounded by flowers, with a watercolour palette and sketchbook.

My watercolour travel kit is a set of twelve half pans in a metal travel palette, two folding kolinsky brushes, a small spray bottle and tiny plastic cup, sepia fine ink pen, 2B mechanical pencil, a few tissues or small rag, and a sketchbook. It all fits in a 15 x 20 cm bag. The joy of working with this small sketchbook is that there is no pressure to produce an artwork for public display. It is an opportunity to sit quietly and observe intently, to paint for the sheer pleasure of paint on paper.