October 6, 2025October 6, 2025 by Leonie Andrews

Progress?

The one thing I’ve noticed with the new sketching technique I’ve been trying out is that it takes a long, long time fir my paint to dry. In turn, this means it takes me way longer than normal to complete a painting. Indeed, it takes me longer than I usually spend having a coffee.

Last weekend, I got this far with my sketch, probably 15-20 minutes longer than my coffee lasted.

As I finished sketching, I realised that there were several sections that really annoyed me. However, I couldn’t be bothered to spend even more time at the cafe than I had already.

So last night I fixed the bits I wasn’t happy with. Extending the umbrella canopy to make more sense of the top left corner and adding the darker section along the bottom. “Don’t be afraid of the darks, [colours that is]”, as a sketching friend often says.

I’m happier with it, but is any artists ever truly happy with what they do?😀

On a more practical note, I also realised that one time saver I could do was to paint a base layer of high-tone colour onto my pages before I went sketching. This should save me 10 to 15 minutes of drying time at least.

July 27, 2025July 27, 2025 by Leonie Andrews

Two cafes

I’m currently thinking about two cafe sketches that I did this week. The sketches both included obscured figures but have a very different feel to each other.

The looser composition of the one on the left gives a much wider view of the surrounding scene. It also reflects that I was sitting at some distance away from the people I was sketching. I always do the figures first, just in case they get up and leave – which they did before I finished the background. On reflection, I can also see that the proportion of the obscured person is not in keeping with the main figure. I think the composition would have been stronger if I had corrected this error.

My sketching set up with a small palette, travel brush and small sheets of watercolour paper.

The second sketch is much more focused, not only because the main person was sitting at the next table. Her focus was elsewhere and that big collar on her parka meant that she wasn’t noticing me sketching her. Again, the second obscured person was of interest to me. They also left shortly after I sketched them in.

One thing that I think helps make this second sketch pop are the dark shadows behind the cups. Many of us are ‘afraid of the dark’ when it comes to watercolour painting and yet, in the majority of cases, it’s just what a sketch needs to bring it to life.

I’ve also been trying to apply some advice from Singaporean sketcher Andrew Tan, who is an illustrator and comic book writer in his day job. He notes that to get a story across in a comic, you need to focus attention on the main character. You can do this by ensuring that there is a strong contrast between the focus of your attention and what surrounds it. Hence, the dark wall behind my person. There was indeed a shadowed wall behind her, but I dialled it up to help bring even more attention to her.

I think this is a much stronger composition

I regularly sketch at both these cafes. So, having these two side by side has prompted me to consider bringing a much more focused view when next I’m cafe sketching.

June 29, 2022 by Leonie Andrews

Walks, Cafes etc

We have been doing a lot of walking since the pandemic started, originally prompted by restricted exercise periods for months at a time. Now walking is a regular activity and each week we try and do a slightly longer walk. We often break this up with a coffee, in our Thermos, or at one of the pop-up coffee carts that seem to be proliferating along popular walking tracks around the city.

Covered with a nice paperbag from a local bookshop

I hate carrying too much on these walks so I now carry this home made 10×14 cm sketchbook made of paper offcuts. Here are some of my recent sketches.

Coffee at the pop-up coffee cart Mt Taylor. In reality the Golden Retreiver wasn’t quite that long in the body!😄

A Thermos of coffee when we walked around the base of Mt Taylor

Patrons at the local coffee shop, a stop on our walk around Lake Tuggeranong

Bonus Black Swans with an almost fully grown cygnet.

April 11, 2022April 11, 2022 by Leonie Andrews

Back to the Cafe – March

March turned out to be the month that we finally returned to cafe sketching – so far. I must say that I am a little bit rusty and am having to re-learn some of that flow I had previously. The fact that we have drawn every week for a month is quite a development in itself.

So without further ado…

April 7, 2018April 7, 2018 by Leonie Andrews

A fistful of cafes

I have been refining my coffee sketching process this year, applying the KISS principle (‘keep it simple stupid’) to what I carry in my bag for impromptu sketching sessions. A test card of watercolours, a pencil, a pen and a waterbrush and a ‘book’ made from one sheet of A3 watercolour paper. Both the book and the colour card fit into a plastic sleeve from an old bank passbook (gosh, do you remember those?). Here’s a shot of the set up.

Each A3 sheet is folded in half horizontally to make two panorama style pages. These are folded in half then sewn together through the fold. Each side of the panorama is the folded in half again (as you can see in the photo above), which means the final size all folded up fits in the plastic sleeve.

The completed booklet

Here are sketches from my latest book. What I really like is that, depending on your layout you can sketch over part, or the full stretch of the page.