Okay so the make a sketch a day in May is going really well, but I haven’t posted all the pictures yet.
This is a sketch in video format of a glass of lemonade I drank in the Fire Station Restaurant beneath Waterloo Station in London. The restaurant beats eating in McDonalds or Burger King within the station.
Enjoy!
Continuing with my epic painting a day in May – Today London’s Shard. I have painted this once before about 8 months ago and I find the whole structure fascinating. I first saw it when the building work had only just commenced at ground level at London Bridge station. This view is looking up from St Thomas’s Hospital next to the Mcdonalds. A wonderful combination.
It is good to sometimes photograph the progress of a piece of work to find out where things go wrong! I created this painting in 5 sittings although I forgot to take a picture of stage 4!
Stage 3 – First light water colour washes to establish the main areas.
Stage 2 – Ink drawing making any corrections.
Stage 1 Pencil sketch – although I usually go straight in with pen.
Sketch as it appears in my sketchbook.
I have a lot of problems with trees not least that I have a tendency to be colour blind in the green/brown spectrum. The sketch is of a tree in the Breamore House estate. I spent a lot of summer weekends on the estate with the Theale Miniature Steam Club at their annual steam event.
I had a second attempt at the tree…
In both images I have failed to get the size of the tree to be convincing. The shadow in the ink drawing is correct but the tree canopy is not right. I may give this another go on a bigger bit of paper using charcoal and wash.
Sketch as is appears in my book:-
I was quietly pleased with this portrait of Samuel – even more so when I showed Sam and he recognised himself! This is a watercolour sketch on cartridge paper. This was drawn from a phone I took while at a wedding.
Samuel is in the yellow t-shirt and in a row of babies born around the same time. In order from left to right, Lexi, Alex, Henry, Oscar, Samantha and Samuel.
This is a cartoon sketch of Samuel at Odds Farm on the tractor. I have created a background to include sheep – in reality there was a muddy looking pond with a solitary duck and a plastic cow. At Odd’s Farm I was the only one who fed the animals, Sam and Debs tried but left me too it!
This is a incomplete painting that I started…It’s Samuel on another tractor at Odd’s Farm but it didn’t work for me in the end.There are some nice passages of light and dark but I didn’t manage to get the wet-in-wet effects that I was after that worked well for the first portrait in this series of sketches. I might try it again as part of my painting a day for May 2012.
Last year I filled 2 sketch books by making 1 sketch a day in the month of May and August. This allowed me to explore some ideas from pictures I had taken and also to help develop my sketching technique.
This sketch is from a picture I took while I was in London at the Bankside Gallery. Debs and I had stopped in Costa Coffee for a drink when workmen turned up. They sat outside in Falcon Point Plazza where they must have been doing some work. I intend to work this image into a bigger painting. I was attracted to the bright orange overalls in an area that was mainly concrete in colour.
This is how the picture appears in my sketch book.
Royal Brompton Incarceration Tour (6 of 6)
What follows is a series of very random sketches.
‘Mummy, Daddy missing fix it’ - Having a son and Cystic Fibrosis is a challenge when you are fit and well. Skype offers a unique way to communicate with family while you are cooped up in hospital. Sam was a bit surprised to see Daddy on the Ipad when the normal viewing was Justin’s house followed by Charlie bear. And in the sketch below I was upstaged by Space Chimps and as I tried to say hello to Sam I knew my time with him on my Sony Xperia Ray would be cut short with the words ‘…Bye Daddy, Monkeys on.’ Thanks Sam.
As mentioned before the Royal Brompton Hospital has won awards for its food. Below is what was described as fish and chips – I’m a snob and I like Haddock. This was most definitely a white fish in batter production. But in the Royal Brompton Hospital all is not lost when you have Cystic Fibrosis and the additional call menu – order from the normal rations or top up with greasy spoon tucker…Doily Hell as one person commented on Facebook.
And now some nice Town houses that I saw on some walks I managed around the Chelsea and Hammersmith area!
Royal Brompton Incarceration Sketch tour 2012 (5 of 5)
Having signed my life away to the Foulis ward register and promised not to return drunk and be back in time for tea I hit the streets of Old London Town in search of adventure and Dinosaurs at the natural history museum where I was promised history would come alive by there website…
I have to day that the experience did take me back in time…to school day trips. There were lots of school kids running about making fun of the animatronics. Trying to find innuendo in all the items of the cleverly placed gift shop at the end of the dinosaur exhibit.
So the next sketch is the Dinosaur in the main hall of the Natural history museum.
Walking back to the hospital it occurred to me that there are a lot of mopeds in London and I stopped to draw them – completely missing the opportunity to draw the Row of Boris Battery Bikes.
I worked up the original sketch into the following finished painting.
On of the things I tried to find in the urban London jungle was hidden beauty – I think I found it in the run down garages in a side street off of Cromwell Road. I was particularly struck by the bright green doors at the end of the alley way.
