On Location in Vassilitsi

Vassilitsi Village is one of my (many!) favourite places for drawing & painting here….

And this week I visited with the ‘On Location’ sketching group… 

We met at the church and started, as usual, with a couple of warm ups – drawing with the non-dominant hand…

The group then went their separate ways, each seeking out their own appealing subject matter…

I spent most of the morning wandering the streets searching out the artists, who were secreted away in back alley-ways and tucked into doorways…(thank goodness for my Greek – without it I still wouldn’t have found a couple of them!)

It was a gloriously sunny day,  quite unlike the previous week in Finikounda!

We had a couple of brand new group members – a professional artist from Australia; a new recruit from the six week intro class and someone who hadn’t drawn at all since childhood…

Everyone is welcome, as the object is not to compare skill level, but to enjoy the process, exercise those drawing muscles, spend a pleasant morning out and about….

with people who share a common interest….maybe try out a new approach, and build confidence in drawing in public…

Everyone’s work is invariably different (thank goodness!) – it’s great to get inspiration from each other’s technique/approach…. 

swap ideas and spark creativity…

One thing that shouldn’t be underestimated, is that drawing on location is more challenging than drawing at home, or drawing from a photograph…

There are interruptions – albeit pleasant ones – such as lovely old ladies proffering home-made biscuits and cups of coffee…and wartime tales of the 1940’s….

And there are so many decisions to be made as to what to draw and how much of it to draw….then the light changes quickly…etc…

All this on top of the usual measuring of angles and relationships and choice of paint colours….phew! But it’s definitely worth it!  Here’s some of the group at the end of morning looking at all the paintings…we had to re-locate quickly as the wind whipped up suddenly, so we took refuge behind the church…

Someone had brought their lovely painted stones along to show the group, but I think they somehow got missed in the last minute shuffling about….so here they are! Fab.