One Sketch 332) (Weds 20th February) Fleet Street

City of Smoke
Frozen in monochrome
Between two wars.

Now you know that I love street scenes, don't you. You might also know that I love Old London - although anyone who says I grew up in Old London is unkind and technically inaccurate. Born in the 1960's, don't you know. I was looking at some old photos looking down Fleet Street towards St. Paul's, and was very struck by the one which I based this sketch on.

One Sketch 311) (Weds 30th January) Westminster Abbey

For a thousand years
My bells have tolled
For kings,
And their dust,
Is my buried treasure.

Not a lot to say, other than I've always had a bit of a soft spot for the good old Abbey in my home town.

One Sketch 291) Tower Bridge

Maybe it's because
I'm a Londoner.
- No maybe about it.

Okay, so, the prompt on Sketching Every Day today was - famous or not so famous landmark. Well, I'm very sorry , but whenever I hear the word landmark, my first thought is normally of my hometown of London. Yeah, I haven't lived in London for over 30 years, but I was born there, I grew up there, and I went to London University. You can take me out of London, but you can't take London out of me. I quite like to compare this to a sketch I made of Tower Bridge last year -

Now, this isn't a bad sketch. I quite like the sky. But I'd like to think I'm now using colour more effectively.

One Sketch 232) London Tram

Slow, rattlesome
Uncomfortable
And for all that
I'd give a lot
for a time machine
to take me to ride one

Yes, given the Sketching Every Day prompt transportation, there was only ever going to be one choice for me.

One Sketch 223) Sepia tone tram in Kingsway tram tunnel

I do like trams
I'm just that sort of bloke
I wish I'd seen them
Trundling in the Smoke.

I made a sepia toned painting of an old Swansea tram some weeks ago to christen my new studio (or spare room, to use the technical term) and I was really pleased with the results. So I decided to make a companion piece. I've been working on an acrylic painting of a London tram for weeks, and so I decided that this quick piece was going to show a tram in my own home city. The Kingsway tram tunnel was rather unique for the UK. It's a cut and cover tunnel which was exclusively built for single ecker trams, to link the northern and southern London tram networks. As you can see , they did eventually use double decker trams in the tunnel. Part of the tunnel are still there, which is how I came to read about it in the first place, since it features in several works on disused stations of the London Underground railway - go figure. What remains is now grade 2 listed. The last trams passed through in April 1952.

One Sketch #186) London Underground Railway

Wherever I go
Wherever I might be
When you get down to it
The Tube's for me.

Yes, dearly beloved, this completes my set of sketches of the current city tramways, light railways and underground railways of Great Britain. I don't intend to say that much about the London Underground, since a few months ago I sketched an old District Line train at Ealing Common, and I tried to explain my love of the Tube then.

Well, this makes 12 sketches altogether - which, come to think of it, is a full calendar. Would you like one? Drop me a line and we'll come to some arrangement.

One Sketch #183 (HALFWAY THERE!) Docklands Light Railway

I have to say
It's quite a strain
To write yet another verse
About a train.

Can you believe it, dearly beloved. 183 sketches and we're into the second half year. Being as 365 is an odd number, with yesterday's sketch we weren't quite halfway there, and with this one we're now just over halfway there.

So, the Docklands Light Railway. This opened just after I moved away from London, but I've ridden on it once or twice.

One Sketch #129) The Elizabeth Tower - Big Ben

Nostalgia
Homesickness
One man's meat
Another's poison.
Maybe it's because
I'm a Londoner.

Another prompt from the Sketching Every Day Facebook group. This one was to make a sketch using an iconic symbol from any country. Well, mine's as good a place to start as any, I would say. I live in Wales - and in fact I've spent more of my life living in Wales than in England - but the fact is that I am English, and still think of myself as a Londoner. So an iconic symbol of London it was.

I've produced a sketch of Tower Bridge in the past, so I didn't really want to do that again just now.

 Which still left Big Ben, the Tower, and St. Paul's. What I liked about this was that as well as the iconic clock tower, it also shows a red double decker London bus, and the framework shows us looking out from inside a red phone box. Incidentally, I didn't actually plan it this way, but the red framework is suggestive of the Cross of St. George, as on the English flag.

One Sketch #97) Old Type B London Bus #30x30DirectWatercolor2018

In London streets
And Flanders fields
A rumbling presence
And a rattling good ride

I've been meaning to paint a B Type bus for a while. As it happens, I made a charcoal sketch of one three years ago -

The comment in the verse about Flanders fields is because B Type buses - nicknamed Ole Bill after a popular cartoon character of the time - were transported across the Channel and served as troop transports along the British sectors of the Western Front.  I can't prove this, but I personally feel that Londoners' love affair with the red double decker bus began with the B Type. And no, though a Londoner myself, I'm not old enough to have seen B Type buses on the streets of the Capital, thank you very much. I do remember Routemasters very fondly though. But that's another subject for another day.

One Sketch #88) Sutton Hoo Helmet Replica

I sing of a dark age
A wind age, an axe age
I speak of the splendour
Of kingdoms and kings
The wrath and the rage
Of the warriors' wyrd
And the cunning and craft
Of the art of the smith.

No idea what inspired me to sketch this today, but it's an artefact I'm really fond of. The original isn't quite as photogenic as this one, in the British Museum near the original, which was made by the armourers of the Tower of London, I think, but it's a faithful representation of what the original would have looked like originally.

One Sketch #79) Buzz Aldrin in Biro

Who can imagine
The incalculable worth
Of taking those first firm steps
Beyond the Earth?

Why Buzz, I hear you ask. Why not Neil? Well, there were very few photos actually taken of Neil Armstrong on the surface of the moon. But it's more than that. I have a brother who is a year older than me. He was 6 and I was 5 when Apollo 11 landed on the moon. His name? Neil. So whenever we'd play at being astronauts, he got to be Neil Armstrong, and I got to be Buzz. Could have been worse. I also have a brother 18 months younger than me, and he had to be Michael Collins back on the command module.

Why did I suddenly think of this? Well, in yesterday's post I made mention of childhood visits to London's Natural History Museum. Well, this would always be accompanied by a visit to the Science Museum next door, and one of the star Exhibits was a mock up of the lunar module, and the actual Apollo 10 capsule.

One Sketch #73) New Hitachi built Intercity Express train (Wednesday 6th)

The future is arriving,
Although it's rather hard if
You live out in Port Talbot
- Electricity ends in Cardiff

This is one of the brand new Hitachi Intercity Express trains which have been running on the main line from London to Swansea for the last couple of months. They run on electricity - with the only problem being that there is no electrification between Cardiff and Swansea, and there is going to be no electrification between Cardiff and Swansea. It also has a diesel engine though - dashed clever. I never thought I'd say this, though, but I'll be sorry once the old 125s are completely out of service.

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 #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 #33) Old London Underground District Line Train

You know, I'm not really sure what prompted the rush of nostalgia yesterday which prompted me to make this sketch of an old District Line London Underground Railway train. Whatever it was, this is partly how I remember London Underground trains - big, boxy red District line trains. I grew up in Ealing, at one end of the District Line, and I've always loved the Tube, representing, as it did, the thing that was going to take me into the centre of the city, where interesting things like the Science Museum and Natural History Museum awaited.

I can still feel it
The sheer excitement
Of rumbling through Hades.
Tartarus and Elysium
Looked much the same
As we snaked through
Plague Pits
And Roman ordure
And surface within yards
Of spacecraft
And dinosaurs.

Taking Inspiration

In my previous post I described the South Wales Urban Sketch group’s monthly sketchcrawl, to the Cornerstone Café and Gallery, to see the exhibition of the work of our friend Gary Yeung. I knew they were good, but until you get close up to them you don’t realise just how good they are. One of Gary’s pictures was sketched in Café Zest in the House of Fraser in Cardiff. The sketch looked out of the window. Everything outside the window was painted in line and wash, while everything inside was left as line drawings. I thought it was extremely effective, and so I decided to take inspiration from it.

This view is from the Gaucho Tower Bridge steak house restaurant. Great view.

Looking at it, I think I’m on the right lines and got close to what I was trying to do without quite scoring a home run. I think that the line drawing foreground is still just a little fussy, and could have done with simplifying. Likewise I think I should have gone even bolder with the colours, since it just looks a little washed out. I need to persevere.