Coffs Harbour has two main tourist attractions. One is the Pet Porpoise Pool which is an excellent spot to kiss seals and pat dolphins and even have a swim with them. It is always a great day at the Pet Porpoise Pool. The other is The Big Banana. There is a little artistic license in this sketch. I left out the gift shop, the snack bar and the History of Bananas building. From this perspective you can't see the lolly (sweets) factory, the puzzle shop, the toboggan ride, the snow slope, the ice rink or the water park, so it was easy to leave them out.
There is a fine tradition of Australian artists sketching and painting Luna Park in Melbourne. I love these works. They capture the essence of the conflict between fun, fear and sleaze in Luna Park and other attractions like it. When I look at them I wish I lived in Melbourne to be able to paint it too. Then I realised - we have the Big Banana right here! I could paint it. That idea was firmly implanted into my 'one day' basket right up until Clare drew Luna Park in Kerry's moly and posted it off to me to follow on. Too good an opportunity! But it's not the same when it is a conflict of fun and sleaze only, without the fear. I'm left thinking 'it's just a big banana.'
4 comments:
Wow. Love this little bit of hometown pride/rivalry you have going with this book. Perspective on the flowerbed letters is great. What media did you use?
Thanks Melissa, I actually left all my Pitt pens and watercolours in Sydney when I visited last week! The are in the mail to me but I don't have them back yet. I thought if I don't do this now I never will, so I dug around looking for a media to inspire me and found a sample box of Atelier Absolute Matte acrylic that I used a couple of times when I got them several years ago. They are different when it comes to mixing colours, but I don't really like gouache in Moleskines because it gets a bit flaky. So I thought I'd give it a try. It looks to me like most of the other drawings in the book are in pencil. I don't use pencil at all, in fact I don't think I own a full set of colours. I guess I do use them for specific things and I have those colours. But there is no way I could have done it in pencil either. Paint it was.
There is a blogger somewhere 'out there' who collects pictures of 'big things'. The banana fits very well here - what can I do - big egos on Capital Hill? :)I will have 5 pages - something very big!
Great to have a peek inside the whole book....it looks fantastic.
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