One Sketch #67) Ibex

It cannot be too hard to cope
With the fact I'm not an antelope
So would you people please take note
Misnaming me really gets my goat.

Yes, I felt for variety's sake I ought to pick something other than a Swansea building to sketch for today, and so I came to settle on the ibex. Why? Well, I'm a long time quizzer, and the ibex is one of those creatures where people almost always get the wrong idea about what it is. If you ask people what sort of mammal is an ibex, I guarantee that the majority, if they answer at all, will call it an antelope. Yet it's a goat, and when you look at it, it is hard to imagine why anyone would think that it's anything else.

One Sketch #66) Mount Pleasant Baptist Church

A place of quiet prayer
And of peace
Transplanted to South Wales
Via Ancient Greece

Yes, being as it's half term week and Swansea is literally on my doorstep, it's another sketch of an interesting Swansea building for today. I look at the portico of the Mount Pleasant Baptist Church, and more than anything else I'm reminded of the original Tate Britain Gallery in London.

One Sketch #65) Mumbles, Swansea

The pier's still closed
And that's a shame
But at least there's ice cream
All the same.

Took my grandson all the way to Mumbles, which is about half an hour down the coast from Port Talbot, only to find that Mumbles Pier is still closed for renovation. It was the same story last year, and I have to say - what's on it which takes so long to renovate. I mean , it's just a pier - no buildings to speak of apart from the lifeboat station, just a boarded platform reaching out to sea.

One Sketch #64) Urban Sketching in Swansea

Although not every building
Is of very great renown
There's much to see
And much to sketch
In our ugly, lovely town.

Bank holiday Monday, and having returned from visiting my parents in Worthing I was itching to get out and about with my sketchbook again. I bought a new pack of pens, and was champing at the bit. Beautiful weather in Swansea today, and now that I'm sitting back in the house I'm feeling a bit burned again.

One Sketch #63) Waterstone's Swansea

A real Aladdin's cave indeed
For those who dream
And those who read

Yes, this imposing branch of Waterstone's is in fact the Grade II listed former Carlton Cinema, originally opened in 1914, and closed as a cinema in 1977.  I moved to South Wales in 1986, and it would be several years after that that the building would reopen as a branc of Waterstones. The original ornate spiral staircase has been preserved, but everything else of the cinema interior has long gone, sadly.

One Sketch #62) Saturday 26th May, Grand Theatre, Swansea

I could've been upon the stage
If Life had turned a different page
It's too late now
So blame my age.

Swansea's Grand Theatre - originally opened in 1897, so Victorian, if only just. It was bought outright by Swansea council in a rare act of foresight in the 1970s, and is still owned and operated by the council today.

One Sketch #61) Lazerzone, Swansea

Laser fighting's not for me
It's really not my cup of tea
I find activities like this
Bring out my latent pacifist.


As an end of course treat I accompanied a group of pupils to Lazerzone in Swansea. Lazerzone, as the name suggests is a place where kids get to shoot each other with Lasers. Rather than slicing each other to pieces, all this does is set off sensors on their vests which register hits and convert to points. I'm sure that you know the sort of thing. What makes Lazerzone interesting to me is that it takes place in the building of what was previously the Castle Cinema, and indeed, the rear of the building, sketched here, still has the castle cinema sign on it.

One Sketch #60) Old Hospital Bed

My tonsils gave me constant gyp
The Doctor said, "Let's get a grip,
It's time that you were sent, old Scout
To hospital to whip them out
I wasn't brave, just sad and glum
And made a fuss, and cried for mum.

One of my classes had to produce a piece of autobiographical writing for an assessment, with the them being a time that you learned a valuable lesson. I wrote one as an example, telling of how , when I was 8 or 9, I had to go into a grim old Edwardian hospital in Ealing to have my tonsils out. Horrible as the place was, the anticipation of having my tonsils out was far worse than it actually happening.

One Sketch #59) Victorian Pillar box (Weds 23rd)

A wonderful thing is a pillarbox
It takes a long time just to fill a box
Whatever its size
I think you'd be wise
To admit that a mail box is still a box.

Not sure what possessed me to go for this very early Victorian pillar box, but I like it. I think that it's well known that the first UK pillar boxes were the brainchild of a certain Mr. Anthony Trollope, far better known probably for the huge number of novels he wrote, including the excellent Barchester and Palliser novels. The novels, sadly, are no longer widely read. The pillarboxes, though, show every sign of being an important part of British life for the foreseeable future, email notwithstanding.

One Sketch #58) Bela Lugosi as Dracula

There once was an actor called Bela
A frankly quite sinister feller
I'd not be surprised
To learn he resides
In a coffin he kept in his cellar

At work today I have two classes currently writing their own gothic horror stories as an end of unit assessment. So old red eyes seemed an obvious choice. I think I've made his face too long - to me he seems to have more than a touch of the John Travoltas with a dash of Prince Charles thrown in.

One Sketch #57) Ealing Christian Centre - Former Odeon Cinema

At night
In the dark
Do you play host
To the flickering ghosts
Of flickering ghosts?

I'll explain that cryptic verse. This is the Ealing Christian Centre, an Elim Pentecostal Church. I have no issue with that. When I passed the building it looked to be in very good condition, and I thank them for that.

I grew up in Ealing, and when I was a kid, Ealing contained 3 cinemas - the Studios 1 and 2 (formerly the Lido) which was very much the bargain basement - the ABC in Ealing Broadway which was a step above, and then this building,which was the Odeon Cinema and very much the best of the bunch. It was built in 1932, in very much a Spanish Moorish sort of style. The cinema - which was a Coronet Cinema by then, closed as a cinema in 1985, a year before I moved away from Ealing for good.

I'm not really sure what prompted me to want to sketch the building today. But I'm glad that I did.

One Sketch #56) Ford Zodiac - Cardiff Classic Car Show

Unreliable, slow
thirsty, and prone
to breaking down.
For all of that
Not only wines
Are vintage.

I've been wanting to sketch a classic car on the spot for some time now. I wasn't planning another trip out sketching after yesterday in front of City Hall, but if the mountain won't come to Muhammad. . . I reckon that this Ford Zodiac is slightly more than 60 years old. So actually it's older than me.

30x30 Direct Watercolour 2018

Over on both Mac Taro Holmes' and Liz Steel's blogs there's announcements about 30x30 Direct Watercolour 2018. It's a challenge which works on a similar basis to the one week 100 people challenge earlier this year. This is from Marc's blog: -

What is #30x30DirectWatercolor2018?

·        PAINT 30 watercolors in 30 days, from June 1-30 2018.

·        POST your paintings in our new Facebook group: <HERE
We’d like to centralize the discussion around this group, to spare our usual sketching clubs all the extra traffic this might create :)

·        HASHTAG your work on any other social media (twitter, instagram) with the hashtag: #30x30DirectWatercolor2018.
Any size, format or subject is ok. 

·        I plan to paint in watercolor, working as directly as possible. But if you want to tint drawings, or add in some mixed media, we’re not going to be enforcing rules. I won’t however, have a lot of advice about techniques I’m not thinking about this month.

·        Our goal is experiencing sustained daily practice. If it’s better for you to do seven paintings on the weekend instead of one a day, that’s totally ok. Same with posting progress. One a day makes a good story – but do what works for you.

·        It’s also completely normal if you fail to make 30! Or to need a few extra days. Like any marathon, just participating is the first reward. Though I’m sure any of us can catch up with some super fast, super small sketches if we have to!

I plan to have a go, which will probably mean painting more sketches as watercolours in order to keep up my personal one sketch a day for a year challenge.

Sketching Tips 6: Watercolour or not?

Here’s a confession, good people. I’ve never been much good at using watercolour. There, I’ve come clean. I am so jealous of those people who, with a few brush strokes, can transform an ordinary black and white outline sketch into something with depth and beauty. I can’t. 

However, this doesn’t mean that I don’t try, and maybe I’m kidding myself, but I do think that I’m improving. If I show you what I think as some failures and successes, and draw what advice I can from them, then hopefully you might agree.

* What have I learned?

1) Don’t be afraid of colour

Compare this sketch which I made in 2016 : -

With this sketch of the same piece of sculpture from 2018

The later sketch is better drawn in the first place. It has a more appropriate use of detail, and the angle is far more dramatic for the viewer. But even allowing for that, the colours are so much more vibrant on the bottom sketch, while those on the top one look weak and washed out. Generally it’s better to go too bright, rather than too watery. I didn’t leave the large areas of white negative space in the bottom picture either, and this seems to have worked better for me.

2) You can use colour to unify disparate elements in a page in our sketchbook.

Now have a look at these two pages made during a solo sketch crawl: - 

                                                                                               
Now, as individual sketches I didn’t feel that there was anything drastically wrong with either page. But the sketch elements have not been linked together at all. Compare them with these two pages, made literally a couple of weeks later: -

Colour here is the linking principle between the disparate elements of this sketch made in the Waterfront Museum in Swansea. On a slightly smaller scale, this sketch from the Swansea tramshed museum works with colour in a similar way: - 

 3) It can make a huge difference the kind of paper that you use.

One of the difficulties of making these colour sketches was that I’d been using my sketchbook to do so, and while it’s great for ink sketching, it makes it harder to use watercolours than it should be, since the paper tends to resist, meaning that you don’t get anything like an even spread of paint off the brush. So if you are considering trying to add watercolour to an ink sketch, you might do well to make your sketch on watercolour paper. For example, compare: -

This is a sketch from Gower Heritage centre made in my sketchbook. Compositionally I think it’s great, but apart from a few areas it still looks washed out. I had the devil’s own job painting in the cockerel’s brown feathers, for example. Since struggling with this I’ve always tried to use more appropriate paper if I have any intention of adding colour to a sketch. 

4) You can get better results using minimal ink lines, and using different tones to create shading. 

Now this: -

-is a sketch that I made in Kaunas, Lithuania, and it’s one of very few sketches where I think that I was close to achieving what I was trying to do with line and wash. I think that this can be ascribed to the fact that I knew that I wanted to make this a line and wash picture, so I consciously cut down the amount of detail that I put in with the pen. I left the shading for the paint.

One Sketch #55) RAF 100 celebrations - Typhoon Eurofighter outside Cardiff City Hall

The grey bird sits
Inert but deadly
Waiting to make its way
Through hardship
To the stars.

In the South Wales Sketchers Chapter Facebook group yesterday Scott, one of the members, posted that today and tomorrow their are a number of historic RAF aircraft on display outside Cardiff City Hall, as part of the RAF centenary celebrations. Well, I am not the kind of sketcher to look a gifthorse like this in the mouth. I made several sketches, which you can see below. The only problem was that there was nowhere to sit so I had to sketch standing up, and the positions I wanted to stand in to sketch were right out in the open, so my neck is quite nastily sunburned. Never mind.

One Sketch #54) Horsey

Racing is a business first
We know that's true, of course
Forgive me if I have to ask-
What's in it for the horse?

In the last 18 months or so I've painted and sold several pictures of racehorses, so, stuck for inspiration I went back to my old faithful subject. Here's some of the paintings made in the last year or so: -

The Home Straight

Racing from Newmarket

Over the Sticks

Frankel

One Sketch #53) Gymnast

I coulda been a gymnast,
Although it may sound crazy
The only thing that stopped me
Was, I'm just too flipping lazy.

Just wanted to sketch some movement today, and I remember that a few weeks ago on BBC's Big Painting Challenge the participants had to paint a gymnast in movement, so I though - now there's an idea.

One Sketch #52) Bubble Car

I think an Isetta
Is really cool
So never mind
The ridicule

Yes, I remember seeing a few of these in London when I was a very small boy, and I've always liked them, and two other German Bubble cars, the Messerschmidt Kabineroller and the Heinkel Trojan very much. Since I sketched my other dream car, the Jaguar XK120 a week or two ago I decided to even things up a bit.

Yes, I did make this sketch on Wednesday, but it's been a busy week. For the last three days I've had to make quick sketches at lunchtime at work, and haven't had time to post them until now.

One Sketch #51) Waterloo Bridge

Where are the Samaritans?

Look around

They are beside you

In front of you

behind

Look in the mirror

And let one look back at you. 

On the way driving home from work yesterday, I had the radio on and was listening to Radio 2, as is my wont. A guest on Steve Wright's show was a very interesting chap called Jonny Benjamin. He was telling of how he was saved from carrying out his suicide attempt on Waterloo Bridge by a passing good samaritan, and of his subsequent internet search for the man who saved him, which forms the subject of a TV documentary he made, and a book he has just published. 

As a depressive myself, I found him, and his work campaigning to raise public awareness of issues regarding mental health, to be quite inspirational. 

Another biro sketch made in a snatched 10 minutes at lunchtime at work.

One Sketch #50) Ant

Alone, I am nothing
But I am not alone.
Alone, I'm worth nothing
But I am not alone
Alone, I achieve nothing.
But I am not alone.
And a million nothings
Are something.

This is actually a biro sketch I made it in work today. The inspiration was the fact that since the weather has become warmer we've developed a little bit of an ant problem here in my house. We found where they were getting in, and my wife bought some ant killer. Now, I have a bit of a problem with this. I don't want to go killing them. So I picked one up, told him what was going to happen, and that poison was being put down, and he had to warn his colony. Since my wife put down the ant killer, we haven't seen any. I can but hope that it's my warning which did the trick.

One Sketch #49) Eurovision

Eurovision Song contest -
I do not mind the singing.
The problem is my waking up
To find my ears still ringing.

Like a lot of people, every year we have a party to watch the Eurovision Song Contest, which took place last night. My kids, grandkids and spouses were all present, and that's a lot of us. Eurovision occupies a unique place in British cultural life, I would suggest. I wouldn't want to try to define exactly what that is, but love-hate just doesn't get it.

My favourite was the Austrian entry which came third, although I like dthe Israelis entry - pictured - as well. Incidentally, this is a sketch I made with watercolour pencils, which I've only ever used once or twice in the past.

Tips 5) How much detail is too much? How much is enough?

When people comment on my sketches, they are more likely to comment on the amount of detail in them than anything else. There’s no doubt that I’m a novice when it comes to simplifying a scene to try to describe it accurately in as few lines as possible. When it comes to detail I often lay it on with a trowel. This is often not a conscious decision, it just happens when I make sketches. Sometimes I’m lucky enough that it works. Other times, not so much. 

Here’s a couple of sketches from 2017 where I think that the amount of detail works to the detriment of the overall picture.

This one I made in Alicante Airport. It’s not a very good rendition of the scene in the departure lounge because it’s far too busy, and there’s too much detail in the background, which distracts your eye away from the figures in the foreground, which should be what the sketch is all about. If I did it again, I’d pay  far more attention to the figures, and include more detail, and then just use some vague outlines with no shading at all for the background.

This one has the opposite problem. It shows the Charles Bridge in Prague, and it’s just not busy enough. It’s little more than an outline. There’s a very vague suggestion of some of the brickwork and some silhouette figures on the bridge. But that’s it. To be fair, it was a very cold day in Prague, and after the ten minutes or so it took to get this far, I was just frozen and my fingers were numb, so I stopped, and I never found the right time to go back and complete it.  

This is another one which is just too busy. This is the Domkirche, the Cathedral in Berlin. I caused my problems for myself by sketching it so large, which didn’t leave much room for anything else. If I’d had a smaller cathedral in the centre of the page, that would have given me more room to very lightly sketch in what was around it, which I think would have worked a lot better. 

Detail isn’t the be all and end all. Here’s the very first sketch I made with a specialist sketching pen.

When I made this sketch it was something of a eureka moment. To me, this isn’t at all detailed. There’s a lot of simplification gone on, and the shading isn’t very subtle. Yet when I look at it, I see St. Katherine’s Church. I even think the simplicity of the foliage in the background works. 

This is just my observation, but I think that the eye tends to be drawn to the areas of a sketch where there is the most detail. Now, there’s no rule that says that you have to try to make your reader focus on the dead centre of your sketch. You may want to offset the main focus towards the right, left, top, bottom. But if you have a very detailed area away from where you want the viewer to focus, it is going to drag their attention away. If you have competing areas of detail, this can make it difficult for the viewer to know where to look in order to ‘decode’ your sketch. So let me show you what I think is a far more successful ‘busy’ sketch. 

If you were to cut this vertically down the middle, then you’d see that there’s far more detail on the left half than the right. In fact your eye should be drawn to the most detailed area, the two figures in the foreground, and the bridal shop they are passing. This is because this is the ‘story’. The two people are my son in law and my daughter, who had just become engaged – it was serendipitous that we passed a bridal shop, and I asked them to walk past it a few times while I sketched their figures. Then I let them go, and I sketched in everything else. Your eye is led down the street by the way that the details on buildings and figures further along the street becomes less clear as you go further along the street. I wanted to show a glimpse of Cardiff Castle on the other side of the street, but kept the road blank, the trees in silhouette, and the castle with minimal shading so that they are never a distraction.

More traditionally, this next sketch places the centre of attention clearly in the centre of the page. This is Dylan Thomas’ Boathouse at Laugharne. The danger I found when sketching it was that the most detailed part of the sketch is actually on the bottom left hand where the wooden beams and railings are by the side of the house. This was in danger of pulling the viewers’ attention downwards, so I used quite heavy shading on the opposite side, and sketched in a lot more detail of the bushes around the bottom and the right hand side than I might otherwise have done, which balances the railings, and hopefully keeps the viewer’s main attention on the house. You might compare the bushes with the dearth of detail in the wall on the top right hand corner, and the sea and shoreline on the left. 

Both of these demonstrate that while you might not have much control over what elements have to be in your sketch, you do have choice over the amount of detail that you use. You can get surprisingly good effects by combining very detailed areas, with areas which aren’t more than outlines. 

* When you’re in the early stages of making your sketch, look at the scene you’re sketching, and think carefully about the areas which need more detail, and those which would be better sketched in more lightly. Too much detail can be confusing to the viewer, too little can also be confusing, and may not engage the viewer’s interest.

The last sketch is one where I feel that I got the balance right. The most detailed area of the sketch is the Altes Museum entrance in the background. Everything else becomes lighter as you move closer to the reader, and further towards both edges of the sketch. The tree trunk on the right, for example, is hardly there at all.

One Sketch #48) Insole Court

Built on the sweat of the many
For the comfort of the few
Now, a free pleasure for all.
(Apart from the cappuccino
Which is bloody expensive)

Today was monthly sketchcrawl day with the South Wales Urban Sketchers chapter. Insole Court was also the venue for the February sketchcrawl which was the only one I've had to miss this year. Lovely place if you like this kind of sprawling, heavy Victorian Gothic revival architecture. Even if you don't, the grounds are well worth a look.

I thoroughly enjoyed this, not least because about half a dozen people all came up for a look while I was making the watercolour sketch above, and were very complimentary. My ego needs all the boosting it can get.

One Sketch #47) Pirate

A pirate was a criminal
A taker, not a giver
These rotten bums
Were soaked in rum
When bidding timbers shiver.

So, yesterday I was looking for inspiration. Not finding any, I closed my eyes, and said out loud to no one in particular, "The first thing that comes into my head is what I'll sketch." Heaven alone knows why the word 'pirate' came into my head, but that's what did. So I quickly sketched this, based on Captain Jack from the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. Apparently, he based his character on Keith Richards, which is why Richards himself appears as Jack's father in one of the films.

One Sketch #46) World War One Tommy

Born a son of the soil

A westcountryman,

An artisan.

Not especially well educated

In all ways, unremarkable.

Asking for little

And receiving less.

No soldier, but a baker.

Now, just a random number

And a name on a gravestone. 

Sorry about that. I'm currently working on poems by Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen  with some of the children in work, and whenever I do this, I can't help thinking about my great grandfather, a man called Edgar Bennett. He was my father's mother's father, and was killed on the first day of the Battle of Passchendaele. I always knew he had been killed in the First World War. but it was only a few years ago that I managed to find out when and where. I'm fairly sure that when I visited his grave in 2016, I was the first member of the family ever to do so. 

One Sketch #45) Red Rose

Oh yes, oh no,
I know that seconds fly
But would a rose look
Quite so perfect
If you thought
It wouldn't die?

I knew that I was going to be pushed for time to make a sketch. I looked around my desk at work, and saw this piece of lined paper, and a red gel marking pen. About 7 minutes later there was this rose. That's about all there is to it today.

One Sketch #44) Happy Buddha

The little Buddha on the desk
Is really very wise
He knows the answer to the question
- Who ate all the pies?

I've been following some of the Sketchbook Revival tutorials, and one of them invited us to make pictures including Buddha. This is about as close as I'm likely to get. Come to think of it, with every year that passes I resemble the little fellow more and more.

One Sketch #43) Pierhead Building Cardiff

"It's half past ten."
Says Baby Ben
The sky is blue
My arms are red
My bald patch burning
On my head
My eyes are blinded
Arms are dead
But there's nowt
I'd rather do instead.

I enrolled in the free online course Sketch Revival a couple of weeks ago, and this weekend I've tried to catch up a little on some of the tutorials I missed. In this one I tried to put to use Liz Steel's tip of doing as much sketching with the paintbrush as possible, painting in the blocks of colour, and only using the ink pen later on around window details and the like. This is the result. It's the Pierhead Building in Cardiff. I sketched it in ink in 2016.

The ink sketch is certainly more detailed, but for a sense of place, the painted sketch is better.