Artworks, 2023

Time to catch up on what my pencil, crayons, pastels and paints have been up to this year!

We start in February this year with a pastel pencil shetch done from one of my collection of old sepia postcards from somewhere between the late 1800s to the 1930s. It depicts Ispley Mill, Redditch in Worcestershire.

Trying to do an A2 sized painting from a postcard and particularly a monochrome postcard where the contrast many not be ideal can be a bit fraught. I'd finished this and then on poring over the postcard again I realised that the gate should actually swing to enclose the roadway from the main road on the left and that the brick wall should have extended to the hedge at the side of the main road. Oh yes - I'm still rubbish at trees... Sigh...

28-29 May 2023. Britannia Pier and Promenade Tea Huts, Great Yarmouth. We had gone down for a week which turned out to be a bit blustery. First plein air sketch of the year! I did the pencil bits in situ then added the colour using pastel pencils in the hotel bar the following night. The hut on the right with the green boarding was the Shemara which has provided our morning coffees whilst on holiday in Great Yarmouth for around sixty years...

A few weeks later we were in Bridlington on the Yorkshire coast for a few days and if we thought Great Yarmouth had been blustery then we had to adjust our ideas of how much wind made it blustery...

This was June, yet the temperatures were so low that sitting in one spot for longer than 30 minutes at most was just about inviting frostbite... There was hardly anyone knocking about and I had my pick of benches. I got the basic pencil marks done in situ that once again finished off the colour work in the A4 sketch pad from the calm of the hotel bar.

Towards the end of June we took a coach holiday with Lochs & Glens to Loch Tummel in the Scottish Trossachs. As we approached our hotel in Scotland on the first evening the coach was travelling down a narrow winding road with a drop to the loch on the left and a wall and steep rise on the right.

As we approached a bend to the right I spotted a pair of brown legs disappear round the corner ahead. "There's something running up the road!" I said. When we rounded the corner it was a hare, running up the road before us until a handy gateway allowed it to nip off into a yard.

I'm not going to try to con you that I dashed this off whilst bouncing up and down and swaying as we went round corners on the coach. Once home again I found a photo I could use as reference and once the hare was drawn I sketched the surrounding scenery from memory. Hey! It still works!

The Loch Tummel Hotel had a lawn at the front leading to this wonderful view looking down the length of the loch. On the left was an old waterwheel, probably attached to an old water mill which at one time made ingredients for porridge from not-so-old grains.

I started this sketch of St John's Kirk (church) in Perth from a photograph on my phone whilst we were sitting in the lounge one night. It didn't get finished until a fair few days after we got back and is pencil crayon over pencil drawing in the A4 sketch book. Getting mixed up with all the Scottish towns beginning with 'P' that we had visited (there were two - it's a big confusing number) I labelled it Pitlochry and then had an AGH! moment and had to spend ages tring to erase the text to label it correctly...

Sunday 27 August 2023. On another coach trip we visited Sidmouth for a week. Abbotsbury Subtropical Gardens is a 20 acre garden, once a walled garden of the Earls of Lichfield who had a house here. It commenced in 1765, the house burned down in 1913, and the garden has remained whilst the earls returned to their home at Melbury House in Dorset.

There were a lot of fairly steep slopes and in the interest of staying upright and not falling over, I didn't take any photos which was a shame. The picture is a watercolour of the lily pond that I did once home. I know I'm a bit rubbish at watercolours but every now and then I feel the urge to have another go!

Monday 28 August 2023. Sidmouth donkey sanctuary was the second call of the day and the old bones were not all that enthusiastic about wandering around miles of pathways between fields that had donkeys several hundred yards away at the opposite end of the field to the path

I plonked myself on a bench and sketched this whilst Miss Franny went to look at the donkeys. I might have dropped off for a bit. Without Miss Franny at hand to nudge me I have no way of knowing. I do know that I didn't fall off the bench so that's a plus... That pig at the far side of the field on the left is definately a donkey, ok?

Tuesday 29 August 2023. I sat and sketched the view from the western end of Sidmouth's Connaught Gardens where a set of white-painted steps, known as Jacob's Ladder, reach down to the beach far below. It is a shingle beach but traces of sand can be seen just at the edge of the sea. A teenaged girl was jogging up the stairs, along past my bench and then down the cliff path to repeat her circuit. "Wow, that's really cool!" she said. Nice to know I can still impress teenaged girls at my age...

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