Sketching Britain Part 2

A few more sketches done over the years. After I published the first article a few days ago I had a couple of emails wanting to know how I got started and could I publish some really early ones. You mean the grotty ones....? Well I started for no real reason at all other than I felt like it. And I was on holiday in Devon so had time on my hands.

This was done on that first holiday. Lines. No shading. About a quarter hour and move on quickly because that bloke over there looks as though he might come over to peek...

From the year after, this is the lock gates at Bude where the canal joins the sea. This was done on a tiny pad. At 1680 pixels screen width this will be pretty much actual size. I was joined by a young teenager and started to feel a bit embarrassed. "It's better than I could do!" he said. I started to get a bit more confidence.

Boscastle, north Cornwall. It was quiet there, I did three drawings that day. Amongst other things I learned that drawing rocks is not that easy... But this was not too bad. The Pixie House, a tiny ancient cottage with a sagging roof and a souvenir shop.

And after a couple of years I was ok with standing in public view and having a go. Even so I never spent more than half an hour and there's still not a lot of shading. Drawing trees or grass was still challenging and backgrounds just tended to be scribbled. Later I'd take scribbling to new levels, but not just yet... This is the Coastguard's Hut at Scarborough. A stone gateway with what looks like a Tudor timbered second storey. But that's another storey...

Polperro, 2001. This was done after ten years of intermittent pencil twiddling. The background shows signs of more meaningful scribble to suggest wooded background but still not anything special. There are figures in this one too - something else I found - and still find - fairly difficult to get right. The foreground is still a little lacking in detail!

Then I was asked to do something specifically about Bispham and did this of the Old England pub. Some of it is pure invention but I put hours into this. And in 2004 we started to take our holidays abroad. Something we had only done once before and most of my sketches since then have been done in foreign climes. So we'll look at some of those in the next instalment.

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