Hunter Valley Gardens

Its not often i post pictures of the family here (i try to keep it about the art) but on the weekend we took the kids to visit the Hunter Valley Gardens in the Hunter Valley for those of you from overseas its where many Australian Wines are made Its just beautiful there.
Here is a link to the their website.



On the day we went they were having a Teddy Bear's picnic for the kids which was ok but kids really they just loved running around on the paths and looking at the flowers and ducks and wot not :) They have a storybook garden where the garden is themed around many of the nursery rhymes which was good, i would recommend it for the kids. My youngest Will just loves flowers and he was stopping to smell the roses on many occasions he was too fast to get a good photo of though.

Anywho, back to the art i got lots of good reference shots and i throughly enjoyed the day out for this reason as well. As i was walking around i was thinking about Monet in his garden and what it must be building a garden like this from scratch and the inspiration of drawing with all the fabulous colours and shapes in it everyday. Unfortunately with two kids you dont get any time for sketching but i have a couple ideas there that i might post another time.

So i thought i would leave you with a few of the snapshots of the day.



Not sure whether you will be able to see but the picture with all the foliage and white flowers. On one of the leaves there is a butterfly in there which given the right treatment i think make a really good picture. I would love to do this one as a coloured pencil piece i think i could really make that beautiful unfortunately i think all those leaves would drive me completely mad so i am not brave enough to tackle that yet .. but you may see a few test runs in the future.

You will also notice in the spirit of Monet they had a water garden there with water lilies and lilly pads. It was all very dreamy :)