The temperature hotted up over the weekend, and while it is mostly true that everyone in Perth tends to flock to the beach, I tend to hang back in the shade a little bit more. One of the most daunting things about sketching out in the bright glare of the Australian sun is the fact that it would literally blind you.  It does get quite difficult when you have to switch between looking at the scene in front of you and the page right below you.  I tried sketching with my fountain pen today – I am not normally a fan of fountain pen sketching because of the fact that I press to hard and it digs into the watercolour paper but I wanted to try something a little bit different in the 10 minutes that I had before I had to be somewhere else.

I was at Scarborough Beach, Western Australia. The waters were iridescent blue, while the sand was taking a bleaching under the Australian sun.  Usually there are some shrubbery dotted everywhere between the pine trees and and the beach.  It was almost 11am and walking on the sand would be an occupational hazard so I didn’t really want to tempt fate.

It was a great opportunity to use viridian green, as it is a colour I almost never could find a use for in such a sunburnt country such as ours. I am also quite pleased that the brown ink rendered the sketch less harsh than normal. Looks like this could be a keeper.