Three attempts to capture the animation of Bath city centre, drawing people as they pass by, near or far, focussing mainly on the faces and posture and not worrying about overlaps. I was sat down, so some of the closer figures loom over the others. I drew the outlines of buildings, signs and pavements first to give me a loose structure to place the pedestrians in, and then just settled into people watching and bamboo dip-penning!
Sorry for the lack of recent posts; there’s no particular excuse, just the usual Christmas busy-ness and all the rest. I was still out sketching though, so here are four evening scenes in central Bath. Winter’s a busy time for Bath with a very popular Christmas shed chalet market attracting thousands of extra visitors. In the first two I slightly tilted the scene to be able to show more of the people and the streets stretching away into the distance. The third was from an upstairs cafe, so no tilting needed! (The first’s drawn with a fude fountain pen, the second in pencil, and the last two with bamboo dip-pen)
…all done late evening to keep up the daily drawing habit/obsession, and all drawn with bent-nib fude pens, great for both strong blocks of shady ink and fine lines for hatching… (Many of these have been posted to this fun group of fellow self-sketchers)
…and 168 others from the past few years!
Sketches from a trip to London, including trying out a new entry level iPad with Apple Pencil for drawing (I’m using Paper by 53 as the sketching app; it’s very basic in options so not too distracting with choices, but responsive enough to be expressive).
The view on the train to London. Resisting the urge to ‘undo’ is tricky with the iPad. Years of sketching in ink helps, but…
Looking down from the stairs that wrap around the central rotunda in the British Museum (sketched with the Confucius fude pen). The totem poles were being carved in 1850, around the time the museum was being built.
The view looking South from Parliament Hill sketched on the iPad. It looks a bit washed out, and I’ve been using black for my lines since then.
(Here’s the same view sketched in bamboo dip-pen with watercolour last summer…)
A few individuals seen about town, sketched on the iPad.
My reflection in the window opposite, on a rattling and swaying tube train from Oxford Circus to Paddington, on the way home (Sailor fude pen).
And finally fellow passengers and pigeon waiting in Paddington station (sketched with the trusty fude pen)…
Two original pistols from World War One. They could have faced each other in combat on a battlefield, now meeting in peacetime(ish) one hundred years later on a table in Shropshire, while I drew them with a bamboo dip-pen. A German officer’s Luger automatic, and an English officer’s Webley revolver. Very different guns to handle; the Luger is mechanically sophisticated, light, well balanced, while the Webley’s basic, heavy, and tips forward. But both lethal, and now out off action.
Other guns drawn over the years in various museums and collections…
A while ago I became fascinated by the strings of cars I passed as I moved around the city; always there, curling round the city’s contours, but rarely noticed… The mania passed, but it was good practise! (All done when I was using Lexington grey ink in a trusty Lamy Safari, and before I became equally obsessed with drawing people, so the streets look oddly empty…)
Various attempts to sketch sequences of time passing, in most of my favourite media…
Looking many many miles West from the top of Liverpool’s Anglican cathedral; across the city centre and docks, across the Mersey to Birkenhead, right across the top of the Wirral peninsula, then across the Dee estuary, past an offshore wind farm and out along the North Wales coast. The cathedral’s the biggest in Europe, the fifth largest in the world, the longest in the world (!), and has the tallest tower in the UK at 101metres. The tower’s so tall I could see for miles in all directions, but I chose this view to sketch as it covered the the iconic Liver Building, the Wirral (where I grew up), the building where my father worked for many years, and two buildings he designed, which was nice.
(De Atramentis ink in Duke Confucius Fude pen, and watercolour)
Here’s a rough idea of the area and distance covered… (according to this site the horizon/limit of a view from 100m/330ft up is about 22miles. The cathedral is on a hill, making the total height above sea-level 154m/500ft, and the horizon 27 miles away!)
Some previous urban panoramas (South of France, Manchester and Stockholm)…
Six small gouache/opaque-watercolour sketches from a train heading South along the England/Wales border; each about the size of a credit card. The view was changing all the time but the sky was (relatively) consistent minute by minute, so this was where I started each sketch. Once this was dry (two minutes?) I could add the tops of hills with a fairly crisp edge for the horizon line. Then I worked fast to add the mid/foreground details as they sped past: was that a hedge? Ooh more trees! Happy accidents abounded and extra trees, hills and valleys magically emerged from washes merging and paint running. And all while listening to fine music through noise-cancelling headphones, bliss…
Here are two equivalent sets of train landscapes from an earlier attempt to use gouache about five years ago. Flatter and more ‘poster like’?
Instead of walking along the Mendips (sketched here, and here) last weekend we went walking in Crickhowell, South Wales, on the edge of the Brecon Beacons. Here’s a quick sketch from the ruined castle shortly after we arrived, rain threatening…
Saturday was dry so we walked up onto Pen Cerrig-calch. Here’s the view from the top, looking across to the distinctive peak of Pen y Fan top right, with the Usk valley narrowing towards the hills. The pencil was perfect for slowly feeling out the contours, patterns and details of the landscape, hedges tracks and trees gradually giving way to open moorland.
Sunday was very wet, but during a break in the rain I sat in the graveyard of St Edmunds, my eye caught by the cottage gable and the telephone pole. Inevitably I was joined by pigeons, the one on the right watching me while grooming itself. Crows gathered and wheeled overhead, the bell chimed five and the drizzle returned…
We left the next day, here’s a gouache sketch as we sped from Abergavenny to Newport…
Mostly drawing 