The renovation work is continuing at our local shops, but that doesn’t seem to be stopping anyone from dropping by for a coffee.

The last two weeks I’ve been drawing the machinery on site. Unfortunately no good figure sketching opportunities have arisen since my previous post on this subject. Two weeks ago I drew the bobcat, which was parked up at a pretty uninteresting angle to where we were sitting.

The bobcat, 16 march 2016, coloured pencil and graphite on gray toned paper

I’m not very excited by this drawing, I could have used the coloured pencils more effectively, rather than just ‘colouring in’.

Last week we found a better seat to observe what was going on. Thankfully the small digger that was being used to work on the replacement of the drainage system was parked at a good angle to our table.

Small digger, 23 March 2016, coloured pencil, ink and white chalk on gray toned paper

This time I thought a lot more about how I was going to use my colour, which was probably helped by using the pen for the initial drawing. I kept my drawing loose, which is how I prefer to work. However there was one glaring mistake. I didn’t look carefully enough at the angle of the digger before I started. Had I done so I would have seen that the bucket was actually well below the level of the tractor treads. So now I have a more interesting composition instead, with the bucket tucked in the middle of the sketch.