From up on the downs

A selection of quick sketches made yesterday on a short walk aong the Wayfarer's Walk over Cannon Heath Down and Watership Down.

Walk and Draw in Kingsclere

Two little sketches from earlier this month. It's been a busy few weeks, so I didn't stop to draw ... I just drew. Both sketches made with a Derwent Graphik Line Painter pen
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Left: Looking down George Street towards the church, with the downs rising behind the tower. A variant on a view that I tend to call "the heart of the village".

Right: The Village Club and Brown's Bungalows on George Street.

Sketchcrawl - Oxford

Radcliffe Camera, mixed media on sand-coloured Murano paper

This was my first Urban Sketching event. Rose and I tagged along with the London Urban Sketchers on their day trip to Oxford, invited by the organiser, Isabel, who is Newbury-based.

It was a wonderful way to spend a sunny day in Oxford - a town whose beauties are many, and which was jam-packed with tourists, graduating students and sundry other folk. There were quite a lot of sketchers among them... 

We all met up three times: at the start, at lunchtime, and at the end, when we laid our sketches down on the floor of the town hall for the whole group to see. The rest of the time, we were roving sketchers...

Click here to see the full set of my sketches on Flickr

Portsmouth: All Along the Waterfront

Molotow hybrid acrylic pens

Actually, we didn't cover anything like the whole waterfront (just the bit between Gunwharf Quays and Southsea), but the conflation of those two song titles (Bob Dylan via Jimi Hendrix, "All Along the Watchtower"  and Simple Minds, "Waterfront") has got stuck in my mind.

Southsea Pier

Mixed media: watercolour; Conté "Pierre Noire" and other sketching pencils; white Uniball

Yesterday, Rose and I were in Portsmouth again. The "Great Waterfront City" has a lot of very interesting things to see and, indeed. sketch.

Naturally, we gravitated to the waterfront itself and made our way up to Southsea, where we stopped to sketch the pier. Somehow, the slightly neglected-looking end of the edifice was the most intriguing part...

soft chalky pastels with charoal on turquoise paper

See Rose's interpretation here.