Basketry in the Gardens.

As part of our ongoing quest to try new skills, we attended a basket weaving workshop at the Calyx in the beautiful Botanical gardens in Sydney. (same place that we did our drawing class last month!) We had a nice morning learning how to weave and I have already forgotten all the technical terms that were used. It is definitely fun and interesting to keep learning new skills and the setting is so beautiful, if you are ever in the area we would highly recommend visiting. Not sure what is next on the list of activities but will keep you posted. 

Here are out two takes of the basketry class..

Leanne : top left and bottom right

Justine : top right and bottom left

Learning new skills

On Thursday we participated in a drawing class at the Calyx in Sydney's Royal Botanic Gardens.  It's a beautiful building -full of light and air -with an amazing garden wall backdrop. Perfect inspiration for creative pursuits of any kind. With a table full of beautifully shaped objects from nature's bounty, we chose a few of the simpler shapes (lemons, leaves, garlic) and began to draw.

Our teacher pointed out the light and shadows and gave us a few tips on shapes, perspective and shading. She was very encouraging, with positive and helpful comments that made us feel like we were doing really well. We did learn quite a bit and hopefully we will continue to practice at home. Actually, we were happy and a bit surprised at how well we did!

It's always great to try something new, meet new people and  be creative. A morning very well spent.
Here are our two takes from our drawing class....

top left, bottom right -Leanne

top right, bottom left- Justine

Christmas in the city

Last week we had a lovely time strolling through the city looking at the Christmas decorations, everything looked so colourful and pretty.  We hope you have a wonderful Christmas and a very happy new year and look forward to showing you many more of our collaborations here on two takes in 2018. 

Reptiles and wildlife macro

This week we attended a reptile and wildlife macro workshop with Canon collective. We used some canon cameras with 100mm macro lenses that were set up in stations with speedlite flashes and various reflective surfaces to enable us to have some fun shooting these beautiful creatures. As we don't usually use flashes in our photography it was interesting to see how lighting makes such a difference to the final result. 

Here below are photos of Tardini, the magnificent tree frog, Goldilocks, the Darwin Carpet Python and Squirt, the Macquarie turtle. They weren't always happy to stay still so we had to be patient and manoeuvre ourselves into the best position to capture our models. We were pretty happy with some of the results. 

Leanne: top left, bottom right
Justine: top right, bottom left