We spent yesterday at at Surf Beach near Bateman’s Bay, on the NSW South Coast, just under two hours drive from Canberra. It was our first official swim of the summer and we plan to make a few more trips over the coming weeks.

Because we like to maximise the amount of time we spend on the beach we always take our beach shelter/tent thingy, otherwise known as the ‘Sand Palace’. This allows us plenty of shade to retreat to between swims and, as I discovered, makes an excellent place from which to sketch your fellow beach-goers without being too obvious about it. Luckily for me I’d recently re-read Lynne Chapman’s post on some of the classes she’d done at the 2013 USk symposium in Barcelona which included some great suggestions for quickly capturing people (in a drawing that is). To quote from Lynne

“… if you want to catch someone’s brief pose, you can use watercolour, just one colour, to quickly capture the main shape, then use a watercolour pencil to add just enough line to pick out details, while the paint is still wet.”

It all sounded so easy until I put my brush to the page. My first few attempts were dodgy to say the least, but I did like the umbrella, fluttering in the breeze.

First attempts at capturing quick sketches of people and an umbrella, watercolour and pencil, 8 January 2015

OK moving right along, I started my second page. I seemed to be getting the hang of it. This time I quite like some of the figures. I have however, cropped the page, thereby sparing you from one of the most heinous landscapes I’ve painted in recent times.

Second page, some better results. Watercolour and pencil, 8 January 2015

By my third page I felt I was starting to get the hang of the process. I’ll keep working on this approach as it yields good results.

Some fun images including people carrying inner tubes and the beach flags, watercolour and pencil, 8 January 2015