One Sketch #84) Racing Buggy (Sunday 17/6/18)

I do this under protest
I did not ask
For my blinkers or harness.
Don't think for
One minute
That I'm enjoying this.
(Don't tell anyone
But I am.)

Okay, so on Saturday, all of a sudden this convoy of horse drawn racing buggies went trotting down the street in front of my house. Seriously. A couple of hours later they all came back, and I captured this one in a photo and used it to make this sketch. As a postscript, two of the silly buggers got drunk in the night and went for a jolly along the M4, and ended up having what I believe was probably a very awkward conversation with members of the South Wales Constabulary.

One Sketch #83) Prague Tram

Simple pleasures here
A city in the sunshine
Seen through tram windows.

April last year I paid a city break to Prague. This is inspired by memories of the trip, where my love affair with Central European trams was consummated, as it were.

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.