A Margate mum is drawing her way around Hobart’s best cafes, turning everyday shopfronts into watercolour art that’s sparking a wave of community connection across the city.
Bec Hopson, who works a corporate job by day and picks up her paintbrush after her two young kids go to sleep, has built a growing following on Instagram with her distinctive illustrations of local coffee spots.
Late last year she launched a Hobart coffee calendar featuring 12 local cafes, one for each month, designed to encourage people to get out, support a local business and catch up with someone face to face during that month.
Around 350 people are now working their way through the calendar this year.
Some of the cafes featured are Maxie Coffee, Shake Coffee Roasters and Audrey Coffee.
“I just love drawing local architecture,” Hopson told Pulse.
“I’m a big coffee fiend, so I’m always at cafes.”
“I also think that we live in a world where connection is becoming harder and harder to come by and the coffee shops are just a wonderful place to find that.”
Hopson said the response from cafe owners had been overwhelming, with many telling her what it meant to see their space captured in her style.
“For an artist to go to your shop and draw it up just sparks a completely different kind of conversation amongst their fan bases than what would happen on their own page,” she said.
Drawing wasn’t always part of Hopson’s life.
She picked it up during COVID while pregnant with her first child, enrolling in a travel watercolour sketching course so she’d have something beyond parenting to focus on during maternity leave.
“It was such a different way of connecting with the memory of a place,” she said.
That’s now five years of practice, and she’s turned her attention firmly to Hobart’s cafe scene.
Her next move is a collage bringing together 12 cafes into a single piece of art, which she plans to turn into fine art prints, tea towels and merchandise including hoodies.
“I’ve had a lot of comments on people wanting to put this on hoodies, because I’ve made one for myself and I’ve been wearing that out, and I get so many comments on it,” she said.
Several cafes have already run with her designs.
Happy Larry has put her artwork on a jumper, while others have used it for tote bags and social media promotions.
Hopson said hundreds of people responded to a recent Instagram post asking where she should draw next, prompting her to consider turning the collage concept into a series of three to five pieces featuring different sets of cafes.
“It’s about the community rather than the individual business,” she said.
A new calendar for 2027 is also in the works.
Hopson’s art and updates can be found on her Instagram page (@pablopandani) or at www.pablopandani.com.au.
The name is a nod to Pablo Picasso and the pandani, an endemic Tasmanian tree.
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