Thursday 30 July 2015

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.

Saturday 11 July 2015

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

Friday 10 July 2015

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.

Thursday 9 July 2015

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.