BIG DRAW September Farmers Car park building

Level 3 roof top of this car park building offers unique lines and perspectives.

Checking out each others' results

Panoramic view

Bledisloe Cup activations

I produced a programme of entertainment activities to enliven the incoming crowds to Eden Park.

This was a double - header new Zealand v Australia.

Silver Ferns v Wallaroos

All Blacks v Wallabies.

Acrobats from Dust Palace

Drag Divas glamming it up

Kapa Haka group laying down the challenge

My Green Room ingenuity to fill a urn from a shallow basin

A special moment when the Kapa Haka group Thanked the Crew with a song. 

The Crew. A veritable United Nations!
New Zealand Chinese. Malaysian Chinese. Hong Kong Chinese. Filipino. Samoan. Sri Lankan. Iranian. Pohnpei.

BIG DRAW August Onehunga

The icons of Onehunga, Dress Smart and Churches!

Amsterdam - Urban Sketchers Symposium 2019

This was my third symposium, and first visit to Europe. I had a great time and it was so awesome!

Amsterdam is such a photogenic city, you can sit anywhere and get a great sketch.

Let the journey to Amsterdam begin. Auckland to Brisbane -and the requisite airport sketch!

Layover at Brisbane airport. Nothing appears to change here. Same furniture. Same sculptures. 

Flying 14 hours from Brisbane to Dubai with Emirates. Luckily the flight wasn't full, and we could spread out over four seats! Even then, there wasn't huge amounts of sleep, so after getting bored with endless movies, I sketched.

Zuiderkerk [South Church] was the hub of the symposium.

Workshop with Marion Rivolier. Tried to use my markers to approximate the water colour techniques she was teaching.

Workshop with Roisin Cure, goose quill and brown ink - very nice to work with.

Workshop with Eduardo Bajzek. A technique that gives a great moody effect.
Really enjoyed this one, as it bought me back to my roots of pencil work.

Before heading to the symposium workshops each day, I used three cool mornings to complete this sketch of the amazing buildings of Amsterdam

As a member of the USK Social media team, I seek out and repost every night to the Instagram account. At the symposium I also did quick interviews of sketchers, which was fun. But in the lead up, we noted that we were approaching 200,000 followers, so we wanted to commemorate this. We sent out a call for involvement #USK200k, then we selected the finalist, and I edited them into a power point to be played at the symposium. It was a fun project, and we got close, but it wasn't until after we got home that we actually hit the 200k mark. Nevermind. I reformatted the presentation into two Instagram videos, and we celebrated from afar.

The silent auction at the final night function -great art donated to fund raise for the USK committee

The final big photo of all 600+ sketchers.
I met up with some awesome old friends, and made some new awesome friends.
So very satisfying on so many levels.

The 2020 symposium was announced for Hong Kong at Easter.
Unlikely I'll attend, but that's OK. My pattern is every two-years, and I've been to HK several times before.

BIG DRAW June - Whau Art Festival

We participated in the Whau Art Festival, and sketched a couple of the town's biggest icons - the Spider and the Race Course.

It was chilly, but we were lucky, and dodged the Winter rains. At halftime, we stopped for lunch at the All Goods Art Base, with pie, sandwiches and hot soup!

 

BIG DRAW May. Lumsden Green

I good place to draw with lots of stuff to focus on - buildings, trees, people, cafe, sculptures...

First entry into this new sketch book. A good challenge to do wide landscape but also split across two compositions

BIG DRAW April Swashbucklers

After the success of the 'Let's Sketch Auckland ' weekend, we returned to Swashbucklers for another sketch session.