Section 1 Piccadilly Line - Heathrow terminal 5 - Heathrow Terminal 4 - Heathrow Terminal 2 and 3

Sketching Trip 1) Heathrow to Acton Town

Although the Piccadilly Line goes out to Heathrow now, there was no airport when the District Railway first opened the line to Hounslow West, which was called Hounslow Barracks. In fact there were no airplanes either, since the line was built in 1884, decades before even the Wright Brothers’ first flight. It’s not my brief here to give a full history of the London Underground – far better people than me have already done that. However, briefly, the District Railway, as the Metropolitan District Railway, came into being in 1864, the year after the Metropolitan Railway ran the world’s first underground railway service from Farringdon to Paddington.

Although separate companies, originally the Metropolitan Railway and the District Railway worked fairly closely together, although this era of cooperation didn’t last. Although the District Railway was originally formed so that a complete circuit of inner London could be made – which eventually became the Circle Line – this was not actually accomplished until 1884, the same year that Hounslow Barracks station opened.

The Piccadilly Line originated as the Great Northern, Piccadilly and Brompton Railway, and opened in 1906, serving stations between Hammersmith and Finsbury Park. The railway was acquired by the Underground Electric Railways Company of London, owners of several of the lines which would come to make up the Underground network.

In the early 1930s the UERL’s CEO, Frank Pick, decided on an expansion of the Piccadilly Line from Hammersmith to Hounslow and to Uxbridge, using the District Line’s tracks. Many of the stations on these two western arms of the line were rebuilt at this time, and many of those stations still remain.

The line was never extended past Uxbridge on the more northerly of the two arms, but during the 1970s the line reached west, as far as Heathrow airport, becoming the first subway or metro system in the world to have a station in an international airport. Which is I think, the cue for my sketching journey to begin.

I tend to feel a certain gratitude towards the three stations at Heathrow. When I was quite a young child we’d often venture as a family into the centre of the city, and however good the day was, the inevitable end that all good things come to would inevitably mean waiting on a cramped platform for three Rayners Lane or Uxbridge trains to pass before our one service to Hounslow could come along. This started to change when Hatton Cross opened, and completely changed when the first Heathrow Station opened in 1977, as Heathrow Central. Today it’s just one of 3 stations, and called Heathrow terminal 2 and 3. There are also stations for Terminal 4 and Terminal 5.  To be honest, with their underground ticket halls, and lack of surface buildings, the Heathrow stations remind me very much of European metro stations. There’s no distinct station buildings as such, they are just part of the huge terminal buildings. Very nice if you like that sort of thing. Still, we must acknowledge that the original Heathrow Station was, I believe the first metro station in the world within an international airport. In fact, in my travels around Europe in the last few years, the only other one I have thus far encountered is in Madrid.

I have it on pretty good authority that you are not actually allowed to walk from one terminal building to another, and to be honest, even if you were, what with the understandable climate about airport security I wouldn’t have been tempted to kick off the walked part of this section of the line here anyway.

I admit it - I've been in a rut

- and I needed a new project. I've hardly posted since I finished my 365 day challenge earlier this year. It doesn't mean I haven't been sketching, but I just keep making excuses not to post. So I've come up with a challenge which I call - Drawing the Line.


(Cue: Mission Impossible theme music – followed by voice issuing from car cassette deck) Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to sketch all 270 London Underground stations. Good luck Dave. This tape will self destruct in 5 seconds.(Smoke billows out of cassette deck)

I like a challenge. In my previous article, I praised the street level station architecture of the London Underground, especially when compared to other European capital city counterparts, where striking station superstructure is very much the exception to the rule. This article was accompanied by a few sketches I’ve made. As I wrote it, I was struck by the thought – 4 stations? Is that all? Thus was born the idea of this challenge.

Any excuse for a return to London and a visit to the Tube is always welcome, but I realised that the best way to achieve this is to not make sketches on the spot, since even a lightning quick sketch takes over half an hour, but to take photos, and use these for reference back home and at leisure. So these are not true urban sketches, I hasten to add.

Rules

Yes, rules. What is a challenge if not a game, and what is a game without rules? The fewer the rules, the easier it is to stick to them, of course, but I decided that if I was going to take my task seriously, then a few boundaries would be necessary. So:-

Rule 1

No drawing stations you haven’t visited during the challenge.

Basically, this is to stop the challenge being too easy. Otherwise, what would be to stop me calling up photographs on Google Images from my comfortable desk in South Wales, and then sitting and copying them in my comfy armchair with a nice cup of cappuccino by my side?

I did consider stipulating that all sketches had to be made on the spot. But It takes me between 30 minutes and an hour to produce any sketch worth looking at, and working this way, bearing in mind the limited number of times I can actually get to London in a year, the task would threaten to last for several years. So In practise it involved emerging from each station building, and taking photos I’d need to make the sketches later on.

Rule 2

On each section of line, you must walk between at least 2 of the stations overground.

If I still lived in London, I might well have made it a rule that you have to walk between every stations. But again, this is ruled out by the time constraints. I still wanted to get a flavour of the context of some of the stations though, and it seemed to me that this was as good a way of doing it as any.

Rule 3

You have one year – 365 days – to complete the sketches.

250 sketches are a lot. Still, from March 2018 until March 2019 I set myself the challenge of making at least one sketch a day for 365 consecutive days. I completed the challenge, but it wasn’t always easy, and required discipline. So while I know that the project is do-able in a year, it’s also enough of a challenge to hopefully keep me interested.

Rule 4

Stations on more than one line only need to be sketched once.

Pretty self explanatory that one.

Cardiff - 21st Sept

Just a few sketches made in Cardiff on Saturday

2017 - 2018 - 2019 - Castle Comparison

Yes, I thought it might be interesting to compare three on the spot watercolour sketches I made of castles during the last three years. Let's start with this picture made in Kidwelly Castle in 2017:-

Actually, I look at this now, and I think that it's not as bad as I once thought it was - for a long time I hated it, and despite me having on many occasions said that you should never be ashamed or try to hide your own work, I did feel annoyed with it. Why? Well, this was one of my early line and wash pictures, and it didn't end up looking anything like I wanted it to look. Why? Well, the ink dominates everything since I think that the ink outlines are just too heavy here. Also, it might have benefitted from some ink shading as well, apart from just shading in all the windows completely. More than anything else, though, I made the beginner's error of being afraid of colour, and applying washes which are just too pale.

So let's come forward to last year, when I made this picture in Kidwelly Castle again:- Now, I'm very pleased with this one, which I made as a direct watercolour. So you can certainly say that the paint isn't overwhelmed by the ink outlines, as there aren't any. It is actually better than it looks in this scan, since my scanner doesn't always pick out blue very well - the sky is less blotchy than it looks here. The shadows within the doorway arches I like here, and generally I think it's quite a successful composition. However there are just a couple of features which ight have been a little more distinct if I had made some minimal, judicious use of ink outlines.

This last picture is the one I posted a couple of days ago, and wasn't made in Kidwelly Castle, but the rather less impressive Ogmore Castle outside Bridgend. This is a genuine line and wash picture, and I'm pleased with it. Well, I'm always pleased with a picture just after I've finished it - in most cases. I like this because I'm using the colour as effectively as in the previous picture - in fact probably a little more effectively, but also the ink complements the paint, working with it rather than dominating it. This is a lot closer to what I wanted to do with line and wash when I made the first Kidwelly Picture.
* I made the key decision when I started that I was going to take a double page spread in my sketchbook. This would mean that I wouldn't have to really squeeze the scene down to make it fit, which also meant I could include more details.
* I started on the sketch intending that I'd make the monochrome ink sketch, and decide later whether to apply some watercolour. However, in order to keep my options open I didn't apply as much hatching and cross hatching for texture as I might have done. Likewise, I deliberately left a lot of areas for the paint rather than the ink to create the texture.
* I ended up spending a lot of time working on the main layer of ink. It was only when I had most of the ink down on paper that I made the decision to apply colour.
* The first wash I applied was the blue wash for the sky. I moistened the areas where the sky was going to be with a wet brush, then applied the blue immediately onto the damp areas. It is actually a lot more even than the scan suggests.
* The second wash was the grass. I applied a layer of blue to the shadowy areas on the left. Then I waited for sky and grass to both dry before applying more.
* I worked with successively darker washes of brown, mixed with varying amounts of dark blue and crimson to the stone work, applying the lightest wash first, and allowing it do dry. Dabs with a small brush created the stone work.

Castles near Bridgend - Coity and Ogmore

I so enjoyed the sketchcrawl on Saturday that on Sunday, and again on Bank Holiday Monday, I wanted to go out again. The only tiny regret I have from the sketchcrawl is that I didn't try to put watercolour washed on the craw - I could have done, because I had paints with me.

So I did a little research on relatively local attractions, and came up with the two castles. The first sketch I made of the gatehouse at Coity. It's not awful, not by any stretch of the imagination. However it wasn't quite what I was trying to do. Not quite. There's not enough of a contrast between the front of the gatehouse in the light and the side in the shade. The greenery of the mound isn't very well done either. However, there are things which I think aren't so badly done. The small tower on the extreme left of the gatehouse has a lovely colour variation between the brown walls and the moss on it. Also I think that the front of the gatehouse is more effective because I did enough line work with the bricks and stones, but not too much, and the patches of different shades complement this. If I'd extended the wall on the right, maybe it would have been more effective. I didn't try to make another one on the Sunday because I was gasping for a coffee, and my son and daughter in law live nearby.

So, yesterday, then, and a visit to Ogmore Castle. There were generally more people about that there

had been in Coity, and that was a good thing because it meant that a few family groups came up to where I was sitting at different times, to have a look and a chat about the picture. I know that not everyone enjoys this aspect of urban sketching, but I usually really enjoy it. So, the idea was to have another go, and use what I felt could have been done better with the Coity picture to make a better picture of Ogmore.
One way that I did this was to take a double page in my sketchbook. This meant that I could sketch the ruined keep of the castle large enough to be effective. I made the ink sketch first, and used quite a bit more shading than I had on the previous. However there were still a load of spaces where the light and shade was going to appear through the use of the paint. I probably used about 6 subtly different shades for the brickwork, and the patchiness for me does convey the feeling of rough, broken up brickwork.

South Wales USk group - sketchcrawl saturday 24th Aug - Rhondda Heritage Park

This Saturday - 24th August - saw the monthly South Wales Urban Sketchers Group sketchcrawl, this time to the Rhondda Heritage Park. I wasn't able to make the April, May and June sketchcrawls, and was in Alicante at the time of the July meeting. So it was really nice that I was able to make this one.

The Rhondda Heritage Park is situated in what used to be the Lewis Merthyr Colliery. I had a pretty good feeling that this was going to appeal to me even though I have never visited before, since I love industrial architecture and machinery, and I wasn't disappointed. Here are the three sketches I made during the crawl:-

Dyffryn Lower School Line and Wash

Decided to try to shake off the sketching cobwebs this morning, so took out my pens and my paints and made this. The subject is Dyffryn Lower School which is probably the closest school to my house. It wasn't actually what I set out in order to sketch, but it just seemed an obvious and natural building to do.