One Adventure Ends, as Another Begins…

Sadly, the wonderfully inspiring 5th Usk symposium had to come to an end eventually (sigh).

So many goodbyes! On Sunday, I felt quite melancholy as I sat alone, painting this picture:

But, I needn’t have worried: it was only a pause in the action. 

The next morning, I packed up my gear and left Paraty (although those stones did their level best to stop me):

But I wasn’t headed home just yet. I got a bus (an extremely comfortable bus, as it happens) bound for Rio, with my sketch-buddies Liz, Esther and Suhita. It took over 4 hours, but we chatted the time away to nothing.

When we got there, we quickly checked into our hotel and then immediately got ourselves back out, on a mission to meet up with a Marc Holmes, Laurel and Shiho, who’d arrived the day before.

There was just enough light left for one street sketch, right in the city centre, surrounded by bustle and noise and cars and buses and traffic police… and mosquitoes, who immediately set about my exposed ankles. You can just spot me in the photo below, doing the drawing above, if you look carefully:

Then we hit a very posh cafe lined with MASSIVE mirrors. I copped out a little, by not attempting to capture the reflections of reflections of reflections:

We ate and sketched, until finally even I began to wilt.

But after a night’s sleep, we were ready to start all over again. We met up with even more sketchers and embarked on an extraordinary day of sketching high up in the air, on Sugarloaf Mountain. But that’s another story…