A few holiday’s sketches

Rimessa barche – fine lungomare lato Corace

Quadrivio Nalini

Golfo di Squillace

Tetti – Catanzaro Lido zona Corace

We spent the past week in Catanzaro Lido (Southern Italy), my hometown. The weather was great, sunny and warm, but not too much you get sunburned and your watercolours dry while still on the brush!
Because we went visiting my family, we had baby sitters for my little Miss O basically all day long and that gave me the chance to go out by myself and do some en-plain-air sketching. I had planned to bring with me an A4 Moleskine watercolour pad I bought a few years ago with the plan to fill it in with sketches of my hometown. However, the pressure I felt when thinking about the size and the commitment required made me decided to bring my usual large moleskine pad. It was a good choice, but now I feel I’ve gained enough confidence to bring my larger pad next time. I was hoping to be able to draw a bit more, but feel quite happy with the overall results. All drawings and watercolours were done on location, with only a few touches added later on.  

Up in the snowy mountains

Aschi Alto – Abruzzo, Italy
We went visiting my in-laws back in February this year. They live in central Italy, up on the mountains and it snows a lot during winter. This sketch was done on location, during one of our afternoon car trips. We pulled the car over the side of the road (we only saw one car driving on the same road that afternoon!). It was cold outside, so I stayed in the car. Shame about the electricity lines, which I love in general; they came out too big, but I didn’t really have a flat surface to keep my sketchbook steady.

The 52 project: week 7

We spent the week in Italy, visiting my in-laws. It was cold and snowy for most part, but we had some sunshine and a clear sky towards the end. Little Miss O had a great time playing with her grandparents, the dog and her little cousin. As we spent a lot of time together, we took lots of pictures, both with the camera and the phones, and it was difficult to choose just one that would represent the week. Here is a bunch of  this week photos.

Reading time

Out for a walk

Painting with mama

On the snow with papa
This week you:

Insisted on brushing your teeth every time we went in the bathroom.
Refused to dress up for the Carnival parade. And fell asleep as soon as the parade started.
Had a temperature one night and made us watch two episodes of ‘In the night garden’ at 1am.
Asked to go and play with the dog, hundreds of times during the day.
Note: I’m publishing this post on Monday this week as we flew back to England on Sunday.

Christmas Holidays wrap up

It was awesome! We spent the holidays in Italy visiting our families. We were up on the mountains until Boxing Day and down to the beach until the Epiphany. We had snow, Miss O met her first cousin, we exchanged presents, we had cappuccino and cornetto for breakfast (almost everyday!), we walked on the beach, we went skateboarding, we enjoyed the sunshine and the warm weather, we loved have family around, we had our first sleep through the night (pure bliss!), we had lots of good food, we went to the local market, we had ice cream. WE.HAD.A.REALLY.GOOD.TIME.

This week in pictures

So like everyone else on the blog sphere, from time to time I will be sharing a summary of my life through pictures. I take most of my pictures using my phone, it’s always with me and it doesn’t require much effort. The only phone app I sometime use is Instagram. I do love Instagram and its filters, the vintage feel is quite cool and you can easily turn uninteresting pictures in more appealing ones. My Instagram pictures are posted on twitter as soon as I take them, I usually give it some thoughts before shooting, trying to catch more interesting subjects. The phone camera is for everything else, including videos, and the pics stay on my phone until needed.
This week I’m sharing both Instagram and phone photos.
The Instagram topic for this week is the beach! We are having an unbearable heat wave and spending most of the day at the sea.
The rest of the time is spent having fun watching Miss O doing new things…like standing up holding on furniture and trying to climb out of her cot…so much fun!
The photo layout has been edited using a free iPhone app called “photosplit”….it does what I need and it’s easy to use. Shame about the app tag on the final layout.