I finally arrived at my destination 24 hours later than planned, after 5 flights,2 taxi rides and an unscheduled overnight stay in Sydney, which all started with fog on the runway at Sydney airport… but let’s forget about that, and start exploring Revelstoke!

My first sketch is a view from the back of my son’s place. In this town it’s very difficult not to have a mountain view from one of your windows, and we can see at least three mountains from Ian’s house. This is Revelstoke mountain, and the foreground is a workshop on the right, with someone’s overgrown back yard on the left. I quite like the way you often see industrial stuff in Revelstoke with these picturesque mountain backdrops – although it’s now a fast growing ski resort, it’s always been a working town with a railway line running through the middle of it. You can’t actually get off the train at Revelstoke if you’re doing the trans Canada rail journey: most of the trains that pass through are enormously long goods trains, similar to the ones we see in Australia.

I used watercolour and a bit of pencil on lightweight watercolour paper for this – it took about an hour and a half.