One Sketch #82) Amsterdam Windmill (Friday 15th June)

Arms akimbo
Harnessing the wind
Which sweeps like a wave
Across the flat lands.

No difficulty explaining this choice. yesterday, Friday, was my birthday. My family have bought me a city break sketching trip to Amsterdam in October - and Amsterdam is one of my top 2 must see destinations. They are simply the best.

One Sketch #81) Swansea Tram

Alas, we are reduced
To little more than
Rattling ghosts.
Fondly remembered
Perhaps even loved
But gone.
Not for good,
But forever.

I couldn't help returning to one of my favourite subjects. When I moved to South Wales in 1986, I'd never heard of the Mumbles trams before. Well, to be fair the tracks were ripped up before I was born. But the Mumbles railway was the first ever passenger railway in the world - horse drawn, but nonetheless, the first.

One Sketch #80) (Wednesday 13th June) Giraffe #30x30DirectWatercolorChallenge2018

Some may think me ugly
Some may think me pretty
But please don't say I look like
A horse, designed by a committee

I don't know really why I picked a giraffe, other than I think that they have really interesting features. Sorry - not a lot more to say than that.

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 #78) Triceratops Skeleton #30x30DirectWatercolorChallenge2018

It's mightily impressive

And that's to say the least

It really must have acted like

A very horny beast.

I loved dinosaurs from about the age of 5 onwards. for the 5 year old me, my idea of a good day out was being taken on a tube train from Boston Manor to South Kensington to visit the Natural History Museum and see the dinosaur fossils. Of course, Dizzy the Diplodocus isn't there at the moment - he's on a tour. Still I loved the triceratops skull as well. 

I'll be honest, I still like dinosaurs. Why else would I look back on my visit to Berlin last year, with the visit to the Berlin Natural History Museum as a highlight - what with it housing a Brachiosaurus skeleton, and the most complete T Rex. 

I'll be honest, the first sketch I made today was this biro stegosaurus, sketched in a break at work. 

I'll be honest, when this one worked out, it seemed a natural leap of the imagination to do a watercolour of one for the direct watercolour challenge. 

#30x30DirectWatercolor2018 Paintings 14 and 15 - Union St. Swansea and The Rumble in the Jungle

Union St. Swansea, Holland and Barrett

Muhammad Ali v. George Foreman, 1974, Zaire - 'the Rumble in the Jungle"

The Swansea painting at least keeps up my urban sketching, and as for the other, well, I enjoyed making the horse racing painting yesterday and so I really fancied doing another sporting one - and being a lover of boxing, I thought if you're going to paint boxers, then paint the best. 

One Sketch #77) Landseer Lion in Trafalgar Square #30x30directwatercolorchallenge2018

I guard the Admiral's Column
By day, and then by night
Not bad when you consider
I have neither bark nor bite.

This is my 16th direct watercolour for the 2018 30x30 challenge, and I have to say that of all the paintings I've made so far, it's probably my favourite. This was all sketched with the brush as I painted it, and I don't think it would have been any better if I'd sketched any of it out in pencil beforehand. The only trouble with it is that my scanner is funny about certain colours - mostly blues, and so while this photo shows that the lion itself is a combination of blues and greens, in the sacan it's mostly greys.