A couple of months ago my husband and I did something delicious – we spoilt ourselves by running away from the children for the first time in about a decade.

(Yes, we did leave a tame grandmother to cook them “real food” – like lamb roasts, freshly made lasagne and other truly grandmotherly stuff. I think our daughter was a tad disappointed when we came home in fact …)

Anyway – we ran away for five whole days all by ourselves. We flew to Darwin and proceeded to completely spoil ourselves without the tiniest twinge of guilt. My idea of a true holiday is to be able to sit uninterrupted with my sketchbook, interspersed by visiting craft markets and eating yummy food. And I got to do it all. The drawings may not be brilliant, but I love how they remind me of the things we did, and what we saw.

Watercolour at Litchfield Park, Northern Territory
Watercolour at Litchfield Park, Northern Territory

These were drawn at Litchfield Park – the scenery was fantastic, and I just wish the weather had been better for drawing. I didn’t have much time to do the watercolour sketches in between dodging raindrops. I think the colours got a bit muddy, and I would have liked to have made the waterfalls clearer. Maybe a bit of opaque white could have come in handy. Oh well.

Darwin ended up being quite a good sketching trip for me. I’ve got quite a few more pictures to stick up, but for some reason my little netbook is going at a snail’s pace, and I don’t have the patience for it anymore tonight.

But I wanted to get SOMETHING on to this blog, because it seems so naked! I hope it doesn’t bore any visitors to tears …